Exclusive or mass appeal?

referring to the time of maximum sales, Barot shares that the best time of the day is lunch in the beginning of the month, and the winter months are the maximum sales periods. Complete meals sell the most. However at Evergreen, weekends are the rush time apart from festivals like Holi, Diwali and Rakhi. Sharma says, “We prepare special food for Navratra period and they are very popular. We have them delivered at home without any extra charge in any place within Delhi. We specialise in service orientation and value addition.”

Restaurants in hotels

Restaurants are one of the main drivers of growth for the hospitality sector. Though increasing demand of wide variety of cuisines and ever evolving tastes of Indian food lovers have helped hospitality to bring in specialty cuisine restaurants, but a hotel restaurant is always benefited by its loyal customers. The category surely does not fall under community eating, since not everybody goes to hotels for eating often, especially considering the cost factor involved.

It is an elite group that forms the main clientele of a five-star hotel in any part of the world. “There is a huge demand of specialty cuisine restaurants from the guests who stay at our hotels. Our Chinese cuisine restaurant, ‘Ano Tai’ at Jaypee Vasant Continental has become a special favourite for our regular guests and Indian Specialty restaurant ‘Paatra’ offering cuisines from Amritsar to Lahore, has became a hot favourite among guests staying at the property and also for walking-in guests. We totally believe that it entirely depends upon the quality of food and a restaurant’s servicing capabilities to make it a success,” avers Manju.

Thus, we see that both community and niche eating have their distinct set of target consumers and offerings; there is no implication of competition as such in the current times. However, in the times to come, niche eating is set to grow as a category and thus competition can certainly prevail.

Some inputs provided by S Aadeetya