Lulu Mall Lucknow is strategically located on NH 27, the Lucknow-Sultanpur National Highway which is a 126 km long 4-lane highway. It lies on Amar Shaheed Path, with a dedicated service road for the Mall. The Mall is about 13 km from Hazratganj, only 8 km from Gomti Nagar and 20 km from Bada Imambara. Lucknow Junction is 13 km from here. The Mall is located within Sushant Golf City. Lulu Mall Lucknow is spread over the developed area 1,85,800 sq m. The mixed-use development of Sushant Golf City has luxury housing, educational institutes, clubs, hospitals and a magnificent 18 holes golf course spread across 6.8 lakh sq. m.

The houses over 300 national and international brands and features a 6000 sq. m. Family Entertainment Centre as well as a 1600 seater Food Court, with a wide range of dining options. The parking facility of the Mall includes a highly sophisticated traffic management system and a Multi Level Car Park, which is directly connected to the Mall on all floors. The Mall has become a destination Mall for the people of Lucknow and neighboring areas.

LuLu Group International

LuLu Mall Lucknow is a venture of a multinational conglomerate company LuLu Group International headed by MA Yusuf Ali. It operates a chain of hypermarkets and retail companies. It is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. LuLu employs over 57,000 individuals of various countries.

Founder of Lulu Group International, MA Yusuf Ali

Yusuff Ali Musaliam Veettil Abdul Kader, popularly known as Yusuff Ali M. A (born 15 November 1955) is a UAE based Indian businessman and billionaire, who is the Chairman of LuLu Group International with an annual turnover of US$7.4 billions. LuLu Group International employs the largest number of Indians outside India. According to Forbes Middle East, Yusuff Ali was ranked No. 1 in Top 100 Indian business owners in the Arab World 2018.

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Asma Khan (born July 1969) is an Indian-born British chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author. She owns Darjeeling Express restaurant in London’s Covent Garden and was profiled on the sixth season of the documentary series Chef’s Table. In June 2019 Business Insider named her number 1 on their list of “100 Coolest People in Food and Drink”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asma_Khan

Early life and education

Khan was born in July 1969 and grew up in Calcutta. She has an older sister and a younger brother. Her family lamented the birth of a second daughter instead of the desired son. According to Khan “there is a deafening silence” in India about the disappointment a family feels at having a second daughter. She has said that she and her siblings were treated equally by her parents, and that she and her mother “made peace while I was still very young.” Her father is Rajput from western Uttar Pradesh. Her mother is from West Bengal and had a catering business in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Khan, her father and grandfather worked to unionize laborers in India. Khan attended La Martiniere in Calcutta.

http://www.asma-khan.com/

Khan had an arranged marriage and immediately afterward moved with her husband to Cambridge in 1991. She had never learned to cook and missed the dishes she had grown up eating. She first started learning to cook from an aunt who lived in Cambridge. After her aunt died, Khan returned to India for a visit of a few months to continue lessons with her mother and the family’s cook. She told Francis Lam that learning to cook from her mother helped their relationship.

In 1996 her husband moved to SOAS University of London to teach and Khan started studying law at King’s College London. She graduated with a PhD in British Constitutional Law in 2012.

https://www.greatbritishchefs.com/chefs/asma-khan

In 2012, after obtaining her PhD, Asma started offering a series of private supper clubs in her home for a dozen people for £35 each. Vivek Singh attended one and invited her to host a pop-up at his restaurant, The Cinnamon Club. Eventually the supper clubs grew to serving 45, and in 2015, after her family complained, she moved the supper clubs to a Soho pub, Sun and 13 Cantons, and started serving lunches instead. She struggled early on to lead her team of home cooks, mostly local immigrants working for the first time in a professional kitchen, but then a review by Fay Maschler helped bring in customers.

Simon Quayle, a regular customer and executive director of Shaftesbury, offered her the opportunity to compete for a lease in Soho. When an investor backed out, Khan’s husband gave her the money she needed, although he disapproved of the business. Khan opened Darjeeling Express, a 56-seat location offering Indian Rajput and Bengali home cooking specialties in 2017 in Soho. She named the restaurant after a train she rode as a child during summer holidays. Her team consisted of Asian immigrant women who all had full-time jobs and were never trained professionally; they worked for Asma on their days off but were able to cut back hours at their other jobs and eventually give them up altogether. Most of the all-female kitchen staff at the restaurant is second daughters. All are South Asian Food & Wine called Darjeeling Express a “smash hit”. Khan was profiled by the BBC in a short documentary.

In 2018 her cookbook, Asma’s Indian Kitchen was published by Pavilion Books. The San Francisco Chronicle called it a “stellar debut”. It was shortlisted for the 2018 World Gourmand award for Best Indian Cookbook.

Khan was approached by Brian McGinn, producer of Chef’s Table, to be the first British chef profiled on the series. Filming started in London and India in July 2018 with Zia Mandviwalla directing. Khan recalls Mandviwalla, who was born in Mumbai and lives in New Zealand, “did not ask me pointless questions about my husband and marriage, I did not need to explain what my mother meant to me, she got it.” The program first aired in February 2019. Asma is the first British chef to be featured. The series’ sixth season’s theme is “the journey home”. The season, which included Khan’s episode, was nominated for an Emmy in the outstanding documentary section. According to Bloomberg it became difficult to get a reservation at Darjeeling Express after the series aired.

Business Insider named her number 1 on their 2019 list of “100 Coolest People in Food and Drink”. Danny DeVito offered to invest in an expansion.

Khan closed the restaurant in March 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. By the end of the year she had reopened in Covent Garden in a 120-seat space serving tasting menus.

Philanthropy

On Sundays, when Darjeeling Express is closed, Asma Khan offers free use of the premises to women who are aspiring chefs and restaurateurs who would like to host supper clubs. When Khan gave up the Soho space, she arranged with her landlord to allow Imad Alarnab, a Syrian refugee who had been running a pop-up restaurant, to use the space for the remainder of the lease

Asma Khan’s restaurants support a non-profit, Second Daughters Fund, which encourages families in India to celebrate the births of second daughters by sending packages of sweet treats to be shared with neighbors.

In July 2019, to mark her 50th birthday, Khan traveled to Northern Iraq to open an all-women cafe for survivors of ISIS at the Essyan refugee camp.

Personal life

Khan is married to Mushtaq, an academic. According to Khan, he is not a fan of her food, preferring simple dishes and finding hers too complex. The couple has two sons. She is Muslim.

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Sirajuddin Qureshi has scripted his own success story

This is the rags-to-riches success story of a little boy who made it big in life. Even while attending a neighbourhood madarsa, followed by a municipal school, he started selling odd goods from a roadside stall. But Sirajuddin Qureshi wasn’t one of those who was to accept misery as his destiny. He was to write his own fate; so he has, that too in golden letters.
Sirajuddin Qureshi, as a young boy, would buy small goods from the market and sell them from roadside stalls. His weekends were spent selling cooked c hholey or shahi tukda (sweetened bread) which would earn him only a small sum to bear the expenses of his education. He admits, “The little sum which I used to earn from street vending did make me very happy, but not to the extent of quenching my total thirst. In fact, it motivated me to pursue studies further and make a mark of my own.”
Financial constraints failed to deter him from pursuing further education. He graduated from Delhi University and then pursued a degree in Law, which qualified him for several job positions on offer. But Qureshi had entrepreneurial yearnings. He got his first order worth Rs.17,000 for meat export to Dubai, and there has been no looking back since. He went ahead with scripting a brilliant success story and established his own business.
What followed is history. In 1988, Qureshi became the Chairman-cum-Managing Director of the Hind group of industries and established the first meat processing plant near Delhi in 1989. Hind group of industries, with interests ranging from meat processing to fast food to aviation, Sirajuddin Qureshi says, “is a name trusted in 50 countries, with interests in agro-processing, abattoirs, livestock development, engineering, education, hospitality and power.” His early street retail business has stood him in good stead.

Obama‘s invitation!
The latest feather in Qureshi’s cap was the U.S. President Barack Obama’s invitation for an entrepreneurial summit in Washington in April this year. He was one of the few businessmen from places like Africa, West Asia, Southeast Asia and the U.S. The summit fell in line with Obama’s policy on strengthening ties with business leaders from Muslim communities across the world and the U.S. Describing it as just another altitude attained in his career, but not the pinnacle, Qureshi says, “There’s a long way to go.”
Obama, Qureshi says, was very appreciative of India, the country’s varied culture and economic talent, and has expressed his desire to strengthen the relationship with India, considering it an emerging world power and one of the special countries for the U.S.
Qureshi also took the opportunity to invite Obama to visit the India Islamic Cultural Centre (IICC) in New Delhi and address the centre designed to be a “platform to promote peace and brotherhood” when he visits India later this year.
Spreading the light of education
Giving a glimpse into his past, Qureshi says, “My father wanted me to go to the best school in the city but he did not have the means. But that couldn’t stop me from pursuing my further education.” Now, well aware of the importance of education in life and career, Sirajuddin is helping scores of youngsters, especially from the minority sections of the society. Under the aegis of the Noble Education Foundation at the IICC, of which Sirajuddin is president, thousands of economically challenged youth are being prepared and supported to pursue higher professional education. Qureshi bears the entire education expenses spent on them.
In Delhi alone, at IICC on Lodi Road, hundreds of students, including housewives, school and college students and professionals, are benefiting from a free personality training and communication skill development programme. “These courses equip the youngsters to be competition-ready,” says Sirajuddin Sirajuddin Qureshi.

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       Bagh Print associated with the community of Muslims Khatri, converts to Islam on the basis of preaching of the Islamic Mystics is a traditional hand block print, which utilizes natural colors. It is an Indian Handicraft named after a village Bagh in the District Dhar of Madhya Pradesh at the banks of the river Bagh. Bagh print fabric with replicated geometric and floral compositions with vegetable colors of red and black over a white background is a popular Textile printing product.

The present form of the Bagh Print was started by the   Muslim Khatris in 1962 when they migrated from Manawar to Bagh. Their ancestry is traced to Larkana in Sindh now in Pakistan, from where they moved to Marwar in Rajasthan and then to Manawar, a town also in Dhar. The printing technique prevalent in Sindh which they practiced is known as Ajrak prints. They came with their traditional art form of the block printing process and continued at their new place of settlement but with innovations to meet the local trends and practices in the region, which came to be known as Bagh printing. In this printing technique the cloth used is cotton and silk cloth which are subject to treatment of a blend of corroded iron fillings, alum and Alizarin. The designs are patterned by skilled artisans. On completion of the printing process, the printed fabric is subject to repeated washing in the flowing waters of the river and then dried in the sun for a specific period to obtain the fine luster. Weaving and hand block printing process with the geometric designs, imaginative use of red and black natural colors and taking advantage of the chemical properties of the river and effective use of colors results in Bagh Prints in a unique art form. The process involves pre-printing, printing and post printing.

Technique

Raw materials

The materials used to make the printed fabric, depending on the orders received for the finished product, are a wide range of cloth such as cotton Maheshwari dress material, Kosa silk, bamboo chicks, cotton rugs, chiffon, crepe, georgette tissue, and mulberry silk. Printing blocks made of wood with the required patterns to create the prints on the fabric are procured from Pethapur, Gandhinagar and Jaipur. The specification for the cotton fabrics consist of fine cotton (Mulmul) with 100x120s count and 92×80 picks for making saris, dupattas and salwar suits; cotton cambric of 40x40s count and 92×80 picks for dress material; and yardage fabric of 20x20s count for bed sheets or covers. Other materials required are Cenchura or raw salt, aarandikatel or castor oil, grounded excreta of goat, fitkari or alum, hirakasish or iron sulphate, jaggery, outer skin of pomegranate, and leaves of indigo, lime, Sajji, leaves of Dhavdi, mengni, iron sulphate, chiyan or tamarind seed powder, dhavdakaphool (flower) for polishing and fixing, and alizarine (non-red dyes) to fix colours.

Some of the old blocks used for printing are known by particular names as: Aabotchabutta, Ahmedabadisaaj, Attha, Chaukada, Nandana, Khedekabodh, Indoriaddya, Indoribodh, Indorisaaj, Jawareya, Jodhpuri, Laheriya, Makhi, Molya border,Molyabodh, Mungphali, Nandanakabutta, Nandanakimirache, Nareyal, Palliwalizanjira, Teekoni, Thuddi and Zanjiri.

Pre-printing process

In the pre-printing process the fabric consisting of 100 single sheets is subjected to cleaning with water and by beating on stones in the river to remove all starch. It is then kept soaked in the river water for about 2 hours and then dried.

Bhatti process

The washed fabric is particular type of cloth called “Vichliya” is then subject to boiling process in the workshop in a bhatti or open boiler filled with a mixture of Aal (Alizarin), roots of Dhawdi flowers and water. This boiling process is done for 4 hours to ensure that the cloth is adequately dyed. After removing the cloth from the bhatti it is subject to cleaning process with water. Thereafter in the next process, called the Tapai fabrics like cotton, tussar, crepe, and silk are soaked in the bhatti through the night, and then subject to drying after washing in the flowing river water. Then a mixture of excrement of goats, raw salt known locally as sanchura, castor oil and water is prepared in a cement bucket, and the fabric is immersed in it and stomped. In the next process cloth is subject to drying in layers on an inclined ground surface. The dried fabric is rinsed thoroughly in water, and prepared for printing.

The printing process is done in a wooden tray known locally as paliya, which is fabricated with bamboo lattice and coated with paste of black or red color. Then the wet cloth is placed in the tray in layers and allowed to soak. The soaked fabric is taken out and spread over a stone slab covered with seven layers of jute, and then printing is done on the stretched cloth. After completion of printing the fabric, say a sari, is subject to drying for a period of eight days. At the penultimate stage of processing the cloth is rinsed in the flowing water of the Bagh River and dried. In the final process the fabric is immersed in a solution of dhawadi flowers (woodfordia fruticosa) and Ailzarin (root of Morinda Tinctoria). Tapai and drying follow. And finally, the Bagh print textile is ready.

Making of a printed silk fabric needs double the time than a fabric of cotton.

Application

Initially, Mohammed Yusuf Khatri, Mohammed Bilal Khatri, Mohammed Kazeem Khatri and their family made traditional dresses to meet the needs of various caste groups residing in the tribal region of Bagh; these dresses of the people of different castes and families had different dresses with specific identification tags of the tribal Bhil and Bhilala community. Some of the Kahtris, developed designs to meet urban taste in the later part of 1980s; these designs covered sarees, Shalwar kameez, covers for cushion and tables, block printed silk saree, tusser silk, silk stoll, scarf and so forth. Some of the family members also did innovative wooden blocks and colors which were accepted in the National and International market for their long life; these included craft such as block printing on bamboo chik or mats, leather, jute and other material, besides cloth. It is said that Bagh Print on bamboo mats with natural colors was the first successful experiment in the world.

(Reference: Wikipedia and others)

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The Moorish Mosque in Kapurthal is a replica of the Grand Mosque of Morocco, which was built by a French architect, Monsieur M Manteaux. Its construction was commissioned by the last ruler of Kapurthala, Maharaja Jagjit Singh and took 13 years to complete between 1917 and 1930. It was then consecrated in the presence of the late Nawab of Bhawalpur. The Mosque’s inner dome contains decorations by the artists of the Mayo School of Art, Lahore. The Mosque is a National Monument under the Archaeological Survey of India. It was one of the monumental creations in the State during the premiership of late Diwan Sir Abdul Hamid Kt., CIE, OBE. It was his keen interest with Maharaja’s blessings that the mosque was completed. Its wooden model lay at the entrance of the Lahore Museum.

When Lancashire brothers Mohsin and Zuber Issa purchased a run-down Bury garage back in 2001, little did they know they were sowing the seeds of a billion pound empire.

To those passing, the Brandlesholme Road petrol station may have just seemed like an ordinary garage, but its new owners had something different – a vision.

And now, nearly 20 years on, the Issa brothers have just secured a £6.8bn deal with Walmart to takeover supermarket giant Asda, placing the supermarket back into British ownership for the first time over two decades.

The pair, from Blackburn, are now worth more than £3bn, yet despite their vast wealth, the story of their remarkable rise to being one of the UK’s richest families is not particularly well-known.

This is the story of Mohsin and Zuber Issa.

Childhood

Born to an Indian mother and father, who moved to Britain with little to their name in the 1960s, Mohsin and Zuber’s childhood was a modest one, reports the MEN.

Mohsin and Zuber grew up in a terraced house in Blackburn while their father worked in one of the town’s mills.

After leaving his job at the mill, Mohsin and Zuber’s father bought his own garage and the young brothers would help out by selling petrol and refreshments.

Although the family later sold the business, it sparked an idea that would make the brothers wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.

Mohsin and Zuber decided to branch out on their own, first renting a petrol station for two years, then in 2001 buying their first forecourt in Brandlesholme Road, in Bury. The derelict site cost £150,000.

From there, Euro Garages was born.

Situated on a busy road linking Bury and Ramsbottom, and surrounded by housing estates, there was no shortage of drivers running low on gas.

Yet the Issa brothers dreamed of something far bigger than a filling station.

Mohsin and Zuber set about making the most of the site’s retail potential and soon added a newsagents and a grocers.

Secret of success

It became such a success that they rapidly expanded into Lancashire, snapping up ailing garages where they replicated the model that had worked so well in Bury.

Speaking about the secret of their success, Zuber told the Financial Times in 2018: “Fuel sales were declining.

“We wanted to create a destination where you could get fuel, food-to-go and shopping.

“This is the formula and it works.

“We were fortunate that the big players were leaving the market just as we were growing.”

A key part of the Issa brothers’ plan to attract motorists was to secure partnerships with big brands.

Among the early adopters were Spar and Subway, both of which have become common sights at Euro Garages sites up and down the country.

Worldwide presence

Their empire, the EG Group, now has almost 6,000 sites across 10 countries, from the UK to the US and Australia.

It runs outlets for Greggs, Starbucks and KFC, and employs 44,000 people.

In 2017, it bought 77 Little Chef roadside restaurants.

Zuber, 48, said: “We grew (EG) from nothing.

“We’ve been on the pumps, we’ve been stocking the shelves, cleaning the toilets. You do everything.

“And once you do the foundation work, it’s no different wherever you go in the world. It’s a petrol station; you’re selling fuel, you’re selling coffee, you’re selling convenience.”

Mohsin, 49, said the company “makes more money selling a cup of coffee than we would do on an average tank fill-up”.

According to this year’s The Times Rich List, the tycoons are worth £3.56 billion.

Remarkably, they enjoyed a £2.36bn increase in their wealth on 2019 with only James Dyson, who was named the richest person in Britain, experiencing a greater annual increase.

Lancashire and proud

While their wealth has opened up a world of luxury, they remain fiercely proud of their Lancashire roots.

Despite splashing out £25m on a mansion in Knightsbridge in Central London, the low-profile pair have retained a strong connection to their hometown.

They still live in Blackburn and are building five mansions for them and their relatives just ten minutes’ drive from where they grew up.

Meanwhile, Euro Garages’ new £35m headquarters has recently opened in Blackburn and the brothers have invested £100million in a new business estate, which includes a Hampton by Hilton hotel and aims to bring 2,000 jobs to the town.

Chef Hussain Shahzad encouraged by his mother to pursue his passion for cooking had joined the Welcomgroup Graduate School of Hotel Administration at Manipal, Karnataka, in 2005.  After graduating, he worked with the Oberoi Group of Hotels as a Senior Kitchen Executive at Frangipani, Mumbai, before moving to New York in 2014. He spent a year at Eleven Madison Park, the famed New York restaurant. 

Despite several years abroad, Hussain Shahzad had a deep yearning to return to India and be a part of the changing food scene in the country. In 2015 Hussain Shahzad returned to India and joined The Bombay Canteen as Souse Chef and 2 years later, the Executive Chef of O Pedro.

Hussain Shahzad’s food philosophy is simple – showcase local produce using contemporary culinary techniques that inspire the future generation of chefs to cook smarter. It is Hussain Shahzad’s dream to see every diner excited about the food they eat and he and his team are committed to continuously create and innovate – making food the hero of the restaurant experience. 

Hussain Shahzad narrates about his Bohri family in Chennai and how did the two distinct culinary cultures – one of the community and the other of the city come together to influence him:

My mom was from Patna, my dad was from Bombay and I was born in Chennai. My growing years were shaped by a mishmash of cultures. In school, I was trying to learn Tamil, and at home, I would be learning Hindi, Urdu and Arabic from my parents and grandparents.

We were a very unorthodox Bohri family. When my mom would cook Bohri food, it would obviously be influenced by what was available locally. So, curry leaves found their way into the Bohri cuisine at my home, and dosas became a part of my diet early on. I grew up with different versions of dosa that had egg and meat floss (called Gustavo). Even today, dosa is as Bohri to me as dal chawal palita. When I moved to Bombay and ate Bohri food at a friend’s place, it was nothing like what I had eaten over the years. That intrigued me. For example, in the dal chawal palita in Mumbai, they add kokum because it is such an integral ingredient on this coast. But in my house, they used to add tamarind and curry leaves because souring agents are different on different coasts. Only on some occasions would my mom add kokum because the recipes from my dad’s side of the family called for it, but mostly, it was tamarind.

This mishmash reasserted something to me: there are no rules to cooking. If it tastes delicious, it belongs. Eventually that was it. Our food came with a lot of love, there was a lot of heart in it. No one could say this was authentic and this wasn’t. Authenticity just became a word to me.

Hussain Shahzad told about his becoming of a chef:

One of my earliest childhood memories is watching my grandmom roll rotis. We Bohris have something called patla – a small sitting stool an inch or two from the ground. She sat on it and rolled rotis with chakli-belan, cooking them on a small kerosene stove on the side. I would eat the chapatis with ghee and jaggery.

When I was in class 8, my parents got divorced, and my brother and I lived with my mom. By this time, I was already inclined towards cooking – not actually cooking, but the magic around it. When we would come back from school, my mom would be there with food. Slowly, just to support herself, she started working. And that meant we would come back home to no food and no mom. Things started changing in our lives and my brother and I realized we needed to fend for ourselves. We were ordering food every day and that was not an ideal situation, financially and health-wise. I started making small things in the kitchen, like bread-omelette, sandwiches and things that you could cook in a microwave. That’s when it all started. It was also a function of watching my mother, right from childhood, put food on the table. The confidence I had to prepare that first egg and bread sandwich was from watching my mother cook.

Hussain Shahzad‘s journey to Eleven Madison Park and his experiences there:

That was a turning point in my culinary journey. When I was working with hotels in India, I felt I wasn’t doing anything relevant with food. It was quite boring, honestly. I hadn’t paid my dues as a cook and I felt that doing it over a long time wasn’t going to benefit me. I decided to leave everything and walk away from it, to New York in 2014.

What I saw there changed my life forever. My perspective on food evolved. I learned technique. I learned how to be a precise cook. I also learned to have the right attitude towards work: waking up and putting your A-game on every single day. In those days, Eleven Madison Park was scaling the ladder from No. 4 to No. 1 in the world. To get any restaurant to make that steep climb requires determination, perseverance and an amazing leader at the helm. We were blindly following his [Chef Daniel Humm’s] passion. We loved him, respected his ideology and valued his experience.

The leadership traits that you learn while looking up to someone who can lead with that kind of efficiency is today, in my current role, a mandate. You must be a good leader and not just a preacher. Everybody can do the talking, but there are few who can walk the talk as well. When we hire today at O Pedro, I don’t just look for skills in my cook, I look for the right attitude. They should be willing to wake up in the morning and crush it and respect the team around them and work towards the common goal.

As personal chef to Roger Federer:

It was luck, I’ll be honest. I was about to give up my job at Eleven Madison Park – in the year or so I was there, I had risen the ranks from being a commis chef to manning the meat roast. The next step was to become a sous chef, and I had made clear to my chefs at the time of joining that I did not want to be a sous chef. I was there to learn and there would be a point when I would want to go back to my country to do with food what I want to. I was ready to put in my papers when Chef Daniel asked me my plans. I told him I wanted to travel and gain some perspective. He asked, “What if you got paid to travel?” I said, “Sure, I could do with the dollars.” So he told me to go work with his friend in California. He didn’t tell me who it was, just that he was doing the ATP World Tour. It was only when emails went back and forth and tickets came in that I saw the name Mirka Federer [Roger Federer’s wife] for the first time. I was like, “Holy sh*t, are you serious?”

A few days later, I found myself on a flight to Indian Wells [in California] where Federer was playing. He had an entourage of 24 people. There were two personal chefs – Daniel and me. At the end of it, he asked me if I wanted to move to Switzerland, but I realized personal cheffing was not for me. It was fun while it lasted – I had never met such high-profile people and they were amazing and humble. They respected you, your work, and they spoke to you like equals. I saw true luxury and enjoyed it, but I knew I didn’t want to do it for long. Being tied to someone and serving them what they wanted day in and out made no sense to me – I wanted to do something more meaningful with food and that’s why I came back.

Coming back to India:

I had reached out to Thomas [Zacharias, now the Chef-Partner at The Bombay Canteen] when I was travelling in India. We had studied together in college and Thomas put me in touch with Chef Floyd, who started digging into this Indian guy who wanted to leave Eleven Madison Park. He made a few calls and figured out who I was. He phoned me and asked me to meet him at his restaurant White Street. I remember we got together on a winter morning and had a conversation about where I saw myself.

He had a clear vision of what he wanted to do with Indian food and how he wanted his restaurants to grow. It was not just about recipes and looking at Indian food through the same old lens. It was about looking at it with a perspective of ignorance – breaking it down without emotions. That appealed to me because I had no professional background in cooking Indian food. I had always cooked European food and that doesn’t work when you cook Indian food – you get branded as non-authentic, as someone just playing around. Nevertheless, when he offered me a position [at The Bombay Canteen], I said no. There wasn’t enough money in it and I went for the Federer thing instead. Even when I came back, he tried to convince me. I said no again because it just wasn’t working out. He said, “Fine, till our paths cross again,” and I agreed.

I was back at home in Chennai in 2015 when I got a call from Sameer [Seth], one of the partners at The Bombay Canteen. He said, “I know you have said no, but come have a meal at the restaurant.” At first, I said no because I was in Chennai, but then – I don’t know if the stars aligned or what – my friend was having a birthday party at Amby Valley and I had to travel to Maharashtra. When I went to the restaurant, Chef Floyd was there. They press-ganged me into an interview I knew nothing about. It turned out to be a fun chat – the restaurant was blooming in line with their vision and the food was amazing. Sam told me he had figured out a way to make this work for me and I replied, “Okay, let’s do this.” Chef Floyd looked at me and said, “I had to convince you three times, honestly?” I remember the last time he was here, he told me he would never forgive me for this.

Hussain Shahzad‘s experiences on food by journey to Goa and Portugal:

We all know Goa partially. Chef Floyd was Catholic and he knew the Roman Catholic food well. But Goa has many religions, castes and denominations: there are Gaud Saraswat Brahmins, Goan Muslims, East Indians and so on. I researched Goan cuisine for eight months straight: living in Goa, visiting people’s homes, asking them to show me how dishes are made.

Visiting poee bakers and learning how to make poee from them was among the biggest challenges for me. I was trying to understand a culture and lifestyle behind the food, the history, music, everything. It was not just about recreating recipes. I crack this joke that I am more Goan than any Goan now.

That sparked another idea in me: if Portuguese colonisation had such an effect on Goa, why don’t we go to Portugal and see what they took from this. We went there and I started working at taverns. I met this amazing dude who turned out to be a chef and a food historian. He would serve classic tavern-style food in the morning and avant garde food in the evening. I also worked with two Michelin star chef Jose Avillez, who is doing great things with Portuguese food: he has taken tavern food and elevated it to a whole new level of relatable food but in a wow format. The cross-cultural references were revelatory: I learned the difference between a chorizo and a choriz and a vindaloo and a vinha d’alhos.

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Hyderabadi Biryani prepared with mouthwatering flavors from the Nawabi state is what is delivered at Biryani Blues. The authentic ‘dum’ cooking process not only enhances the taste but also ensures the aroma to hit the senses.

“There is no sincere love than the love of food- George Bernard Shaw” which is a drive behind the processing of a complete meal that is Biryani. Great pain is taken to maintain quality of the Hyderabadi Biryani and that can be felt in each bite of it. The care with which each handi is packed is enough to lock the freshness of the food in it. To spice it up, the earthen pots used for packaging makes it a delight for the customer.

The value for money factor is the quantity of the products which is enough to please a hungry person. In a country like India, where food is like an additional dimension it becomes a challenge to leave an impression. But Biryani Blues, has successfully carved out its name on the hearts of people creating connect with the taste buds. The menu is designed carefully by incorporating together different forms of biryanis. The QSR chain with a menu that delights thousands of people regularly, Biryani Blues is worth tasting.

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