By Sourish Bhattacharyya
MUMBAI’S celebrated restaurateur Rahul Akerkar has quit Degustibus Hospitality, the company he set up in 1996 to operate his hospitality ventures Indigo, Indigo Deli, Tote, Neel and Moveable Feast, and sold his minority stake to one of the two major investors he had brought on board in 2009.
Akerkar, who’s known for his benchmark-setting inventive cooking style, said the decision felt like seeing your child grow up and leave home. A terse official statement issued from his side said: ’Rahul Akerkar is no longer involved in the day-to-day management or running of the company. He has transferred his shares to one of the majority investor shareholders.’
When contacted by BW Hotelier, Akerkar, who has stirred his restaurant to the World’s Top 100 in 2007 and Asia Top 50 in 2013, refused to delve into the background to what industry insiders describe as a bitter parting that had resulted from simmering differences for over a year with the other investor shareholders. All that he was prepared to do was look forward.
’I am not sitting idle. I plan to travel a bit, eat a bit. I am working on ideas, exploring options,’ Akerkar said. He scotched market rumours that he was opening a restaurant in Goa with his wife, Malini, who has been pillar of strength and fount of ideas ever since he returned home from America with the dream of launching his own restaurant.
Akerkar admitted it took him a while to reconcile with the idea of quitting the company he had created and led for nearly 20 years. But he kept telling himself: ’Indigo is a brand I have created. I’ll go out and create another.’
The restaurateur had brought investors on board ’ namely, Naresh Chander Oberoi, the patriarch of Powerica, the leading manufacturer of Cummins generators, and three members of his extended family, travel services operator Sanjay Ramesh Sanghvi, and realtor/mine owner Yezdi Kekhasru Bhagwagar ’ when Tote, a fashionable banqueting space in the Mahalaxmi Race Course, Mumbai, was struggling for financial survival, which coincided with Indigo being hit by the slump in the restaurant business following the 26/11 terror attacks on Mumbai.
Industry insiders say that financial matters were at the core of Akerkar’s friction with his investor shareholders. He sought creative freedom to raise the bar for the restaurants he had launched, but the investor shareholders were not ready to look beyond the P&L. Akerkar, it is said, was also made to go along with decisions, despite his opposition to them, such as opening the Andheri outlet of Neel, the high-end North Indian fine-dining restaurant at Tote. The outlet had to be shut down within a year.
At the end of it, it turned out to be yet another instance of the pigeonholed artist rebelling against the moneybags. But it is impossible to bench Akerkar. Be prepared to see more of him in the days ahead.
Sourish Bhattacharyya is Consulting Editor, BW Hotelier.
MUMBAI’S celebrated restaurateur Rahul Akerkar has quit Degustibus Hospitality, the company he set up in 1996 to operate his hospitality ventures Indigo, Indigo Deli, Tote, Neel and Moveable Feast, and sold his minority stake to one of the two major investors he had brought on board in 2009._20241226171439_original_image_50.webp)
