There are who talk and those who do. Rahul Dua and Kainaz Contractor fall firmly into the second category. Politely bemused that we want more pictures of them than their food, they promise to send what they can, but not to expect “professionally shot profile images.” Pictures of their food and restaurants? No problem. It’s also why when you ask them which of them fulfils what role in their restaurant business, there’s a slight pause followed by laughter.
“We find it best not to get in each other’s way because then there’ll be conflict. So we do everything together, from menu conception and testing to operations,” says Rahul, with Kainaz agreeing, to at least this, chuckling, “Dividing work is something we have never been successful at.” The 32-year-old hotel management grads met at the Taj Management Training Program.
A couple years later, while Kainaz was working in BBC Good Food, “I needed someone to write an article on wine for me, and I remember Rahul is amazing at that stuff. That’s how we reconnected.” Soon, in 2013, after Rahul returned from Dubai where he had been a sommelier at Gordon Ramsay’s Verre, the pair started dating and Rahul took over the kitchen at Café Lota, while Kainaz was still at Good Food.
As the pair wound up their stints at their places of work, they decided to open up a Parsi restaurant together, a shared dream of theirs, given Kainaz’s Parsi background and Rahul’s long fascination with the cuisine. In 2015, they opened Rustom’s Parsi Bhonu in Adchini, which quickly became a palpable hit with the populace, Parsi and otherwise. Their clearly winning combination also encouraged cafes Blue Tokai and Dori to ask the pair to design their respective food menus.
Through Rustom’s, they took over the management of the Delhi Parsi Anjuman’s restaurant in 2018, run by for decades Dhun Bagli, an institution in her own right, with the Adchini outpost having closed shutters. “We didn’t mean to move to the Parsi Anjuman lock, stock, and barrel and thought it would be a second outlet,” notes Kainaz, but burgeoning problems with parking and road constructions, led them to close down in Adchini.
“We also decided we didn’t want it to become a chain anyway, and we’d rather focus all our energy and attention on one project at a time. Kainaz and I have very similar tastes, we believe in dining, we want everything to be prepared in the restaurant, and for people to come eat a fresh meal,” elaborates Rahul. Indeed, it’s this attention to detail and focus on getting things right that has ensured the success of their ventures, the latest of which is Bhawan, originally meant to be a restaurant, but has pivoted to a cloud kitchen. “Because we worked so closely with our staff for the first year or so of any of our projects, they became self-sufficient enough to subsequently run it without supervision.
That’s why we don’t need to go into Rustom’s everyday, and can concentrate on getting Bhawan just right,” explains Kainaz. Bhawan is a collective of street foods, chaat, and sweets from around the country (watch this space for more), which Rahul and Kainaz thoroughly researched by travelling the country over the last year.
“We have always enjoyed travelling together and even for Bhawan we went to various parts of the country to taste as well as document the regional snacks and mithai,” reminisces Kainaz. “Over the years, we have realised that this nostalgia thing can get dangerous and make people pretty partisan. You may be very happy serving all these old classic dishes, but everyone has their own treasured memories of having it in a particular way, and if they don’t get exactly that, they have no problem calling up the next morning and telling us just how we got it wrong. So we are still learning everyday,” laughs Rahul. Given their record so far, for all the nostalgia Kainaz and Rahul dish out, they always manage to keep it fresh.
New joint venture
Bhawan is a collective of street foods, chaat, and sweets from around India, which Rahul and
Kainaz researched by travelling the country over the last year. “We have always enjoyed travelling together and even for Bhawan we went to various parts of the country to taste and document the regional snacks and mithai,” reminisces Kainaz.