Folks who have figured it out - Rajdhani

In my assessment, there are a few restaurant concepts/businesses in India, who have figured out a scalable model (i.e. create a chain of restaurants), have got their basics right, have executed well and are on the path to becoming a really large and successful restaurant company. I will talk about one such business in each posting under this title.

Rajdhani - A single product offering (A Gujarati/Rajasthani Thali) served in a comfortable ambience - they seem to have made a decision to try and open all their new units primarily in malls. 

Why I like their model:

1) In general have a strong liking/bias for single product models - It makes the operations very easy to manage, customers exactly know what I will try and explain this in a separate post.

2) Whenever a customer walks into their restaurant, the APC is given (Rs. 325 to Rs. 400). From a customer's perspective, it is unlikely that he/she will go unsatisfied after the meal, simply because of the variety of food on offer and the great desserts. Feels like an Indian wedding lunch.

3) From an operational perspective, the local chef has some flexibility to choose which dishes to make based on the cost of the ingredients/vegetables in season. Plus there is no order taking - so saves a lot of time and confusion in the kitchen, but helps them rotate the seats in the restaurant a few times without the customer feeling rushed.

4) All Veg model - Attracts a lot of customers who simply won't visit a restaurant that also serves non-vegetarian food.

I believe that their concept can be tweaked to make it a very successful international brand. 

Challenge: Their service levels need to be kept in check as with their aggressive growth, they seem to be focusing less on training heir front-line staff to be polite to their customers.

Rajdhani is experimenting with a premium version of their offering "Rasovara". The early reads of this is that the same Rajdhani food is served in a slightly more elaborate manner and in courses. The service levels, the ambience and food quality differences are very minimal. In my assessment, additional effort needs to be put into their premium brand to allow customers to clearly understand the additional value they are getting from the premium brand.