Mumbai’s funnest restaurant group is dead serious about food

“Never be afraid to try new flavours. There is so much more in your meal when you cook with an open heart.” These words are one of the first things you may notice when you walk into Mumbai’s The Bombay Canteen (TBC) in Lower Parel. Painted in gold onto an old door that has been retained after a renovation, the words of late chef Floyd Cardoz, one of the founding partners of restaurant group Hunger Inc, who tragically passed in 2020, serve both as a reminder and a North Star.

It’s no secret that Cardoz remains an inspiration not just to partners Sameer Seth and Yash Bhanage, but also the rest of the team. For those who had the pleasure of meeting the multi-talented and mischievous Cardoz, lovingly called Papaji by his team, it was clear from the get-go that for him food was not simply flavour and balance. It was also love and joy. Now, a decade on, it’s these emotions that the group has become most synonymous with as it has grown from one India-inspired restaurant to a family of brands—O Pedro, Bombay Sweet Shop, Veronica’s, and Papa’s—that are uniquely distinct and yet share the same soul.

Founded in 2015 by Seth and Bhanage, Hunger Inc started with the aim to celebrate Indian food. “The version of modern Indian cuisine that was floating around when we were conceptualising TBC was all smoke and mirrors: in the name of molecular gastronomy, there was a tonne of liquid nitrogen being thrown around for no reason,” explains Seth. “India is known for its exceptional hospitality, and we wanted to build on that idea to create a new age of Indian hospitality.” Over brainstorming sessions and cooking trials, Seth, Bhanage, and Cardoz realised they all had a similar purpose: to bring joy to people’s lives through food.

When TBC opened in Mumbai 10 years ago, the city sat up and took notice. Mumbai’s restaurant scene at the time was all about greasy, all-you-can-eat pan-Asian feasts and fusion Indian, which resulted in bizarre, Frankenstein-like creations such as a pav bhaji bunny chow. TBC was a breath of fresh air that continues to endure. Among those in the know, there is a unanimous agreement that anything the restaurant group touches turns to gold even while it unabashedly embraces Indian food culture, quirks intact.

Fun house

While joy, wit, and a sense of humour manifested across the food, service, and design at TBC, it was the very foundation for the group’s next restaurant, O Pedro, which launched in 2017. Nestled in the corporate, glass-building neighbourhood that is BKC in Mumbai, O Pedro was envisioned as that spot of sunshine after a bad day at work. Few know that the founders first toyed with the idea of a Mexican restaurant but soon realised that, for India, Goa is that place where people went to cut loose, drink beer on the beach, and imbibe a very specific state of mind. Goa’s carefree attitude translated into a vibrant, colourful space with a menu that included mushroom ceviche and Pedro’s World Famous Buff Burger, which took creative leaps with Goan cuisine. A delightful touch of whimsy was the automated IVRS for phone reservations that was recorded to sound like a disgruntled Goan uncle. Soon enough, the O Pedro lines were ringing off the hook just for patrons to get a giggle. “It was just a random idea that we had and decided to do; we never thought it would take off the way it did. I think it’s a good example of how we could take something boring and humdrum and put our very own Hunger Inc spin on it,” explains Seth.

A few years later, in early 2020, while launching Bombay Sweet Shop (BSS), the company looked at Indian mithai and the tradition of gifting sweets through a new lens. Chef Girish Nayak, the Chief Mithaiwala at BSS, scoured India to gather knowledge and recipes and imbibe techniques from the masters to create a line of Indian mithai and snacks that playfully interpreted our sweet traditions. On their menu, the tiramisu gets a desi twist with the addition of a coffee-soaked rasgulla. At their physical stores, which draw inspiration from Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, customers can enjoy piping-hot (and highly addictive) gulab jamun churros and pick from pistachio white chocolate, spicy Malabar pepper chocolate, and vanilla cream as dipping sauces.

With its brightly coloured, tasteful festive packaging, BSS launched a few months before COVID-19 took over our lives. And their goodies travelled across the city as care packages, becoming synonymous with edible souvenirs from Mumbai. At the moment, BSS contributes to roughly 40 per cent of the group’s business, a percentage that Seth and Bhanage are aiming to grow drastically in the years to come. 

Table manners

While joy can be a beautiful thing, it is also an abstract concept to work with when scaling a business. It’s often at odds with the daily routine of a restaurant if you are anything like Carmy from The Bear. “One of our biggest challenges is how to continuously bring that joy. How do you create the balance between being accountable and bringing the right amount of joy to your daily work?” asks Bhanage. A problem they recently identified came from the bar.

At Hunger Inc, the bartenders have been specifically trained to make conversation with guests to ensure they’re comfortable. This proved to be a challenge when bartenders needed to exit conversations to go make drinks. “We’re currently doing trainings just for them on how to exit conversations in a fun way,” explains Bhanage. While this may seem insignificant, it’s a testament to the attention to detail the group pays to service and customer experience.

Not all their problems have easy solutions. The group’s core values are experimentation and curiosity, which, when paired together, can result in joy. But often, experimentation and joy sit on opposite sides of the ring. A particularly painful experiment Seth and Bhanage recall is a cocktail that was priced ₹5 on the TBC menu. Taking a poke at the molecular gastronomy that was all the rage in 2016, the team put together a “unique cocktail”, their version of a practical joke. Seth adds, “We used to go to the table with this cocktail, which had a cloche on it. Under the cloche was just ice, the oldest molecule in the world. I don’t think anyone laughed apart from us.” Thankfully, the teams have since learned to weed out the good ideas from the great.

At their one-year-old 12-seater chef’s-counter restaurant, Papa’s Bombay, this translates into colouring books, magic tricks, and tabletop fidget spinners to help take the edge off a three-hour long, 12-course fine dining meal. Below, at Veronica’s, the much beloved Bandra hotspot that’s frequented by Gen Z, the same idea manifests itself in the whimsically named custom coffee roasts—Buzzy Billy and Nosy Lucy, for example—and a relatable wine menu. Instead of classifying wine by colour, vintage or region, their classification is split into: “The Whole Bottle, Please: Easy on the pocket, easier to polish off; Watchlist: Young, new labels that will make us all proud; Judge a Bottle by its Label: Labels so funky, you’ll want to taste the wine; and Pour Gibberish to Me: Hard to pronounce, so just point your finger.” These small but significant touches are signs of a customer-first approach, where the extra mile is taken to make diners feel at ease, listened to, and cared for.

Chef Hussain Shahzad, Hunger Inc’s wildly innovative executive chef, explains how this idea is part of his creative process: “As a young chef, one tends to be a bit of a show-off. You want to educate the consumer, but often you come off as prescriptive. I quickly realised that it was no fun. At the end of the day, food is about making people happy.”

His team uses a form and flavour barometer to assess if a dish should make it to the final menu or not. “If you’re playing with the form of a dish, its taste shouldn’t veer too far away from the original dish it’s inspired by. And if you’re playing with the flavour of the dish, it shouldn’t be too far away from how the dish originally looks.” A good example of this technique is the Thayir Sadam at Papa’s. Shahzad takes the traditional dish from a Tamil household—a nod to his childhood in Chennai—and zhuzhes it up with sushi rice, a lime pickle emulsion, Spanish goat cheese, and a shisho leaf tempura on the side to mimic an appalam. Having tried this dish more than once, I can vouch for its ingenuity, thoughtfulness and flavour.

“The other barometer for whether something needs to be on our menu or not is relevance. A dish can’t exist without context. For it to resonate with someone else, it has to be rooted in time and space. That’s how we can create that moment of delight when you put something into your mouth and it tastes familiar—joy comes with meaning.”

Family meals

Since its launch, the group has seen its fair share of employee exits. Still, its contribution to India’s restaurant industry has been invaluable in terms of helping train and mentor a new wave of food folks. Among their famous alumni are Thomas Zacharias, who now runs Locavore, an impact-driven local-food movement; Maska Bakery’s Heena Punwani, who used to be their pastry chef; and Kartik Vasudeva and Agrini Satyarthi of Goa’s Grumps, their former general manager and marketing design coordinator, respectively. And with them, the group has created a unique batch of storytellers who have seen success by weaving joy and delight into their endeavours in fresh ways.

Order from Punwani’s Maska Bakery and the food comes packaged in its signature deep-blue branding that’s embellished with a sticker of the bakery’s cute little mascot, Joy Mukherjee. At Goa’s Grumps, a sprawling lilac mascot can be found on everything—from stickers to their chopstick holder to the wall murals. Grumps’s Vasudeva routinely brings his Asian-style tapas menu to other restaurants across India for takeover nights, including his alma mater O Pedro.

Back at TBC, hospitality students and young food professionals congregated earlier this February. As part of the restaurant’s 10-year celebrations, the team closed regular operations for a day to organise  an “Open House” event, offering a day of “Canteen Classes”, insightful talks with hospitality professionals, workshops, and one-on-one catchups with experts for those interested in the hospitality industry. The best part? It was completely free of charge. “When I came back from university, I had no one to turn to in the industry as a mentor. People were unwilling to share best-case practices and techniques and it was very demoralising. That’s where the idea for our canteen classes came about,” explains Bhanage. “We wanted to help share not just the knowledge but also spread the joy that comes from helping others and create new connections.” Over the course of nine hours on a single day, 1,200 people showed up, including top chefs like Americano’s Alex Sanchez,  Bandra Born’s Gresham Fernandes, and mixologists like Countertop India’s Pankaj Balachandran, to share their experiences on turning failures into stepping stones.

It was a reminder that in the world of hospitality, success isn’t just about recipes and techniques; it’s also about building community, sharing passion, and illuminating the path for the next generation. Hunger Inc’s magic isn’t just in the dishes they serve; it’s also in the heart and sunshine they bring to the people around them.

Art Director: Harry, Multimedia Designer: Mehak Jindal