BENGALURU: At the start of the 2010s, a fresh-faced 20-year-old from Udupi district on coastal Karnataka arrived in Bengaluru to try his luck in Gandhinagar. Through years of effort, he quickly established himself as a household name through the success of his roles in several popular TV serials such as Meera Madhava and Lakshmi Baramma. But his goal of making a name for himself in the cinema industry still remained out of reach.
In 2017, the then 26-year-old Shine Shetty decided to risk it all and quit a lucrative career in television and focus entirely on cinema. But despite his best efforts, the projects that he had hoped would give the break in cinema failed to take off. Facing a financial crunch and refusing to go back to television as a potential failure, he decided to use his entrepreneurial skills and open a food truck business.
“Galli Kitchen was only a matter of survival. I originally intended to continue in the kitchen until I could get a break in the cinema and then stop. I had no intention of building it as a brand. But wherever I am today, including winning Bigg Boss (Kannada) is all due to Galli Kitchen,” Shetty shares. “I had no clear source of income after quitting television, but I still had to keep up appearances. That meant I was in quite a bit of debt. I went from eating out every day without a second thought to doing grocery shopping and learning to cook at home. Once I got the hang of cooking, I wondered if I could use it to get myself a steady source of income, while pursuing my career in acting.”
Started in 2019 with a modest investment from a close friend, a beaten-down auto rickshaw and his recently-acquired cooking skills, Galli Kitchen soon became popular beyond anything that Shetty could have imagined. Serving an attractive menu filled with a mix of dishes from coastal and South Karnataka, including neer dose kai bella, sabbaki idly, goli baje and Mangalore buns at affordable prices, the food truck soon became a popular destination for foodies in South Bengaluru.
Now, after nearly four years, a few disruptions from the pandemic, Shetty has expanded Galli Kitchen with a permanent location in Rajarajeshwari Nagar, which was recently inaugurated by Ashwini Puneeth Rajkumar. But, the decision to start the endeavour was anything but smooth. Having come from a family of restaurateurs, Shetty was adamant that he would be successful, despite pessimism from his own family.
“My father was the first person to discourage me. He told me to go back to TV serials, as I had plenty of offers. But I didn’t want to go back without having done anything in cinema. It would be a failure and I couldn’t accept that,” he says, adding that once the food truck started to do well, however, his family started to help him with the day-to-day running of the business.