MAGAZINE
Masala Dosa to Die For
By ROLLO ROMIG
MAY 7, 2014
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Saravana Bhavan doesn’t look like a house of (open) secrets. Its dining room at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 26th Street is clean and bright and often attracts a line out front. It doesn’t advertise because it doesn’t need to; the fact that it’s one of the world’s largest chains of vegetarian restaurants — 33 in India, another 47 in a dozen other countries — is considered too obvious to its core clientele of Indian expatriates and tourists to be worth trumpeting. In a city overwhelmed with underwhelming north Indian food, Saravana Bhavan is the standard-bearer of the delicacies of the south, but it makes no effort to educate the uninitiated. If you don’t know what a dosa is or how to eat it, you’re on your own.
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The man behind the chain is an elusive 66-year-old named P. Rajagopal. Among his peers in the restaurant business in Chennai, the south Indian city where Saravana Bhavan is headquartered, Rajagopal is a legend. “He brought prestige to the vegetarian business,” said a restaurateur named Manoharan, who runs a competing chain called Murugan Idli. “He made a revolution.”
Born into a low caste in a remote province, he came to rule a field that was once the sole domain of Brahmins, cleverly updating their traditional fare in a setting that was both respectable and unpretentious, thereby catering to India’s middle class at just the moment it emerged. Today he employs more than 8,000 people in Chennai alone. His workers enjoy benefits fantastic enough for Silicon Valley (pensions, TVs, education), inspiring among them fierce loyalty to Rajagopal. Every day thousands of pilgrims come to pray at the temples he built in the village of his birth, and a hundred thousand come to eat in his restaurants.
His business model is so seemingly foolproof that the company has acquired an air of invincibility, even as its founder became sullied with scandal. As Saravana Bhavan went global, Rajagopal was charged with murder, found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Yet he served a total of only 11 months, and today he’s free to continue his expansion — next stop Hong Kong, followed by Sydney, Australia. And then, if his health holds out, building his first luxury hotel.
Saravana Bhavan specializes in the holy trinity of south Indian snacks known as tiffin: dosa, idli and vada. All are made from ground rice and lentils, with remarkably different results. Dosas are crispy golden crepes that are most deliciously served with a masala of potato and onion; vadas are deep-fried savory doughnuts; and idlis, the south’s staple food, are pure-white saucer-shaped steamed cakes. At most branches of Saravana Bhavan in Chennai, you can also find for sale a little book titled, “I Set My Heart on Victory.” First published in 1997, the book is Rajagopal’s memoir and manifesto, a curious blend of mythmaking and self-effacement.
His story begins in 1947, 10 days before India’s independence from the British, when he was born in the vast brushland in the southern state Tamil Nadu. His village, Punnaiadi, was so inconsequential that it didn’t merit a bus stop; his home was a shack with mud-and-cow-dung floors. Rajagopal writes that he quit school after seventh grade, left home alone and took a job wiping tables at a cheap restaurant in a distant resort town, where he showered in a waterfall and slept on the kitchen floor. But he was proud of his work, especially after the restaurant’s tea master inducted him into the mysteries of making a perfect chai.
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When he was a teenager, he moved to Chennai, then known as Madras, and in 1968 opened the first in a series of tiny groceries on the outskirts of the city. One day in 1979, at his grocery in a neighborhood called KK Nagar, a salesman made a casual remark: He’d have to go all the way to T Nagar for lunch because KK Nagar didn’t have any restaurants.
A century ago, there were virtually no restaurants in all of Chennai. “It’s a country that was very conservative about eating out,” said Krishnendu Ray, a food-studies professor at N.Y.U. When Rajagopal was born, the restaurant scene consisted of little more than Brahmin hotels: modest affairs catering to the traveling upper caste, whose dietary rules dictated that they couldn’t eat food cooked by any caste but their own. As a member of the Nadar caste, Rajagopal wouldn’t have been allowed to eat in most Brahmin hotels, let alone run one. But by the time he came of age, entrepreneurs from other castes had begun to meet Chennai’s increasing appetite for dining out.
There was little to suggest that Rajagopal was ready to join them. When he opened his debut restaurant in KK Nagar in 1981, his struggling shops had left him deep in debt, and he knew little about food service beyond selling groceries. He made the leap, he told me, only after an astrologer recommended that he try a line of work that involved fire. A business adviser insisted that he should use cheap ingredients and pay his staff as little as possible; food workers are vagabonds, he said, and they’ll take what they can get. “I did not like his argument at all,” Rajagopal writes in his memoir. He fired the adviser, started using coconut oil and top-quality vegetables and gave his workers surprisingly high wages. The business lost 10,000 rupees a month — a big deficit for a restaurant where most items on the menu sold for a rupee apiece.
But word spread that his food was tasty and cheap, and soon Rajagopal was turning a profit and opening new branches. He expanded his workers’ benefits, all of them unprecedented in Indian restaurants: free health care, housing stipends, a marriage fund for their daughters. Saravana Bhavan workers started calling him Annachi, a Tamil term of respect that means “elder brother.”
By the ‘90s, a Saravana Bhavan could be found in neighborhoods throughout Chennai. Locals sometimes refer to the brand as their version of McDonald’s: well lit, ubiquitous and uncannily consistent. Unlike McDonald’s, the restaurants make everything from scratch. One afternoon, a trio of bright-eyed assistants from the company’s R & D department gave me a tour of the branch in Mylapore, a Chennai neighborhood. I was surprised to find that there were no freezers, just a single walk-in cooler for vegetables that had been bought at market the day before. Even the rice flour for the dosas was ground on the premises.
When the tour was over, the assistants talked to me about Rajagopal. “He is the same as the father of a family,” one said. “Any problem I have, he addresses it.” The company pays for employees to visit Rajagopal’s home village for a few days each year, he told me, driving them down in a company bus. “When I go there, I can witness all the love and affection the village people have for Annachi.”
I asked if the company had cut back on its package of benefits as it has grown. “They’ve only been increasing,” a second assistant said. The company provides them with magazine subscriptions, a cellphone and a motorbike, he said, and covers the cost of fuel. (The only benefit it discontinued was a haircut allowance.)
“And we have mechanics so that we don’t have to go outside to fix our vehicles,” the third told me.
“My friend used to joke with me, ‘The only thing you can do with your salary is put it in the bank and save it,’ ” the second assistant said. “They take care of everything.”
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In 2000, Saravana Bhavan branched out for the first time beyond India, opening a franchise in Dubai, where Indian expats vastly outnumber native-born Emiratis. According to Rajagopal’s elder son, Shiva Kumaar, the opening-day crowd was like “for a newly released movie.” They’d eventually expand to Paris, Frankfurt, London, Dallas and Doha, Qatar. The strategy is simple: open one restaurant in every city with a large expat Indian population. (One exception is Manhattan, which has two.) Prey on homesickness by importing skilled chefs to ensure that the food tastes just the way it does in Chennai. Don’t bother trying to pursue non-Indian customers.
In 2002, the year that he opened franchises in Singapore and Sunnyvale, Calif., Rajagopal was charged with murdering the husband of a woman he wanted to marry. In 2003, his restaurant expanded to Canada, Oman and Malaysia, and he went to jail for the first time. In 2004, a local Chennai court sentenced him to 10 years in prison. By the end of that year, the empire had opened 29 branches worldwide.
Eight months into his prison term, the Supreme Court suspended Rajagopal’s sentence on medical grounds while awaiting appeal, citing his diabetes. In 2009, the Madras High Court not only upheld the verdict but also upgraded the conviction from culpable homicide to murder and enhanced his sentence to life in prison. After another three-month stint, he was out on bail pending a Supreme Court hearing, which no one expects to happen anytime soon. The courts won’t give him back his passport, but otherwise he’s free to go about his life. All but one of Saravana Bhavan’s 47 foreign franchises have opened in the 12 years since the murder.
“It’s amazing how he managed it,” said Sriram V., a local historian. “I mean, our legal system is not that bad.”
Chennai’s tabloids published every lurid detail of the murder allegations, but the restaurant just kept growing. “Others in that position would have totally collapsed,” said Manoharan, of the competing chain Murugan Idli. “People thought he was finished. But there was no impact.”
It helped that Rajagopal has little interest in personal fame; he promotes the restaurant’s brand, not his own, which makes it easier for customers to compartmentalize. As one Saravana Bhavan loyalist told me: “Some of my friends used to say, How can you go and eat in his restaurant? You’re actually fattening the wallet of a murderer. And I used to tell them, Look, I don’t know with whom I do business in my day-to-day activity, whether he’s a drunk or beats his wife. I have no idea, but I do business. So as long as he’s giving me good-quality food, I go there.”
Saravana Bhavan employees have been especially faithful. M. Mahadevan, a consultant who has helped with the chain’s international expansion, told me a story to illustrate their devotion. “I was at the Saravana Bhavan down the road, drinking coffee with some friends,” Mahadevan said. “The old man” — that’s what Mahadevan calls Rajagopal — “was in prison at that time. These big hulky guys came in, eight of them — they were local rowdies. They wanted to eat without paying. One of them was bullying the waiter, saying: ‘Hey, mister, how’s your boss? Don’t act funny, I know he’s inside.’ There was a boy pouring water, and he told them: ‘You’re talking about my boss. You say anything against him, and I’ll put this jug of water into your mouth. Not on you — into your mouth.’ I was astonished. The boy was three-foot-nothing. And immediately all the waiters came and stood next to him.
“For him, the old man was a god. Period. He’s got that kind of loyalty. He takes boys from the street, from the villages, and he teaches them. He picks them up and molds them.”
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One gloomy Wednesday evening in August, I went to meet Rajagopal at Saravana Bhavan’s headquarters, passing several of his restaurants as I inched my way through the city’s eternal gridlock. Mahadevan met me in the dining room and escorted me to the boss’s office, introducing me on the way to Rajagopal’s 39-year-old son, Saravanan, who is gradually taking over the company’s domestic operations. (His elder brother, Shiva Kumaar, runs the international business.) For a while the three of us sat and stared at the walls: Every surface was covered with blown-up images of Rajagopal’s family and favorite Hindu deities. Then suddenly Mahadevan and Saravanan rose. The office door swung open, and Rajagopal entered.
He was grayer and jowlier than he was in the photographs I’d seen. He regarded the room with mild amusement, bowed politely and walked behind his desk, where he faced a portrait of a popular guru and folded his hands for a moment of prayer. With him was Ganapathi Iyer, his oldest friend, and a personal assistant and a valet. We all sat but the valet, who stood ready with a glass of water the instant his boss coughed. Nobody relaxed.
I asked Rajagopal about his origins and business philosophy. Each question was answered with a cascade of replies: Rajagopal would answer in Tamil, then Saravanan or Mahadevan or Iyer or all three would jump in to elaborate or clarify in English, a language Rajagopal doesn’t understand. It was a dynamic that sometimes clearly frustrated the boss.
When I asked about the murder, everyone started talking at once, until Rajagopal cut impatiently through the chatter. “I’m not responsible for anyone’s death,” he said. “I used to pray to my god, why was I punished for someone else’s mistake?” There was a reason, he decided: “God wanted to give an opportunity for my son Saravanan to learn business.” Saravanan smiled faintly.
Photo
P. Rajagopal, founder of Saravana Bhavan restaurants, with his assistant, Suresh.<span class="credit" i