With new and attractive restaurants, cafés, and bars constantly mushrooming in every corner of the city, Bengaluru’s F&B space fuels the tastes of a young crowd always looking for something new. In this spirit of innovation, several young restaurateurs are using online and offline drops as a way to test out new culinary experiments before putting it on their menu or even to build a customer base before launching an outlet.
The premise is simple – a limited number of pieces or plates of an item are announced through online channels and interested customers sign up. This exclusive group of people either come pick up the food or meet at a temporary location to enjoy it. “Bengaluru, especially, has a very experimental food audience. They’re tired of going to the same restaurants and love limited edition things where you don’t get to experience something again after this,” is how AB Gupta, the co-founder of The Pizza Bakery and Paris Panini explains the popularity of drops. He recently opened Smash Guys, a burger after building a customer base partly through regular drops and vlogging the journey.
At their core, supper clubs, pop ups and drops, which are all popular in the city, share the same appeal – the promise of exclusive access and a unique experience. Gupta parses the difference between these, saying, “Drops are way more casual – you could drop a single product in a relaxed atmosphere with just a counter where people can pick up their food and have some nice music playing. It’s a quick thing.” He adds, “Supper clubs are more formal usually involving multiple courses while pop ups are somewhere in between, they could go on for multiple days.”
Kavan Kuttappa, the founder of Naru Noodle Bar, now one of the hardest restaurants to get reservations at, started off by doing drops in the pandemic. He traces the origin to that period and people’s existing familiarity with exclusive sneaker drops by big labels. “The terminology is also something that a lot of the crowd resonates with,stemming from Nike and other big brands dropping shoes like Jordans. It was ingrained in people’s heads and it caught on in the pandemic with people dropping all kinds of things – like food and ingredient kits you can cook at home.” Since the Pandemic, drops have evolved from being just a thing of necessity. “After Covid, it’s become very popular and you see people doing drops to try and figure out feasibility of the business later – to have a ‘proof of concept’,” he adds.
This was the case with The Sando Club, a trendy new gourmet sandwich venture by Jassil Jamaludhin and Carl Pinto who held a combination of pop ups and drops for around a year before recently launching a restaurant.
“Especially if you have a unique kind of food, it really helps to test it out at a pop up or drop just to get different perspectives. We could fine tune the recipe, figure out how much ingredients to buy, what sells and what doesn’t, which helps a lot before you start a restaurant,” says Jamaludhin. Gupta adds, “Customers are way more forgiving with drops because they understand that you’re experimenting.”
However, Kuttappa cautions against the risk of hopping on the trend for the sake of it, saying, “If drops are done mindlessly without any real substance or creativity, you might just be doing it for the noise of it. I don’t think it gets the desired effect,” says Kuttappa who recently collaborated with sneaker brand The Comet Universe for a drop that combined sneakers with ramen and saw a huge turnout an social media buzz.