On the face of it, keeping a just-launched restaurant open for business only 30 hours a week, especially when customers clearly want more, seems reckless. It makes no sense to turn so many paying customers down and have reservation lines open for just four hours. But Mallyeka Watsa and Sanchez, who founded Otra, won’t have it any other way.
Yes, chef
For the duo, it’s all about thoughtfulness. Being closed on Mondays and Tuesdays is a policy they adopted at Americano (their hit restaurant also in Kala Ghoda) post the pandemic, and found that it works better at every level for their brand of hospitality and business. “You can’t really expect people to understand hospitality, or to embody it, if you’re not hospitable towards them,” says Sanchez. He’s not talking about guests, but about his teams at Otra and Americano.
Having worked at Michelin-starred restaurants like Manresa, Restaurant La Folie, and Eleven Madison Park, Sanchez knows a thing or two about the notoriously ruthless food industry. Like The Bear’s masterful depiction of the chaos and stress of a professional kitchen, the dark side of kitchen culture is no different in India. In fact, Mumbai’s restaurant industry is especially brutal, with its high rents, slim margins, intense competition, bureaucratic roadblocks, and flighty customers.
Sanchez also knows that the success of a restaurant is not just the genius of the chef, but the work of a team of line cooks, servers, dishwashers, runners, and bartenders. For Watsa and Sanchez, company culture is about quality over quantity. “We have two days off every week,” he says. “People who are new to the company, who have worked in the old system, they see it. It’s a night-and-day difference. It’s such a wonderful thing to be able to count on those days and for the team to know why they get them.” Choosing work-life balance over a balance sheet, Sanchez has made his team more productive and excited to be at work, and eventually, better at welcoming, feeding, serving, and handling guests.
In a profession where battling burnout and toxic work culture are seen as a badge of honour, Sanchez and Watsa are rewriting the recipe of success with their five-day work week. “At a time, my team puts in 14 hours a day,” she says, “What we realised in a six-day week is that when we went home, we had one day to sleep, and then the cycle started again. By the third or fourth day, you can just see the exhaustion on people’s faces.”