Have you ever been to the cool, trendy restaurant (not a bar) in town where the music is so loud you can’t taste the food, let alone talk to your friends sitting next to you? After saying “what”, “what”, “what” several times, you just give up on conversation and wait for the evening to end. What do you remember about that meal? Not the food, not the company, not the ambience, I assume. Just the ENT’s bill the next day.
If your food is good, customers will come. But apart from food being good, it’s the little details that enrich the entire experience. It’s how the customers feel when they leave the space. It’s the vibe that you create which makes them come back to you again and again. That’s the secret to building a successful restaurant business. The worst thing your customers can say is, ”The food was good, but…”
When we were working on the interiors of PLENTY, we thought about our dining experiences at the restaurants we frequented the most, and made a list of do’s and don’ts:
Don’t want our customers to have to visit a bone-setter after a visit to our bathrooms (which tends to happen when the bathroom walls are fortified around the ‘throne’ by the tiniest of inches).
Since we want to retain the few friends that we have, we would prefer if we could hear them talk instead of our dinners resembling a group class of neck yoga.
Good food (this should always the main focus, not just an ancillary detail to trendy interiors).
A clean bathroom. It’s not much to ask for, but it’s an absolute essential. You don’t need to cultivate the tulip gardens of Amsterdam in your back quarters, but a pleasant smell and sparkling surfaces are a must.
Good lighting, where you can see your food and not just guess the tandoori roti from the naan. Otherwise by the time the naan reaches your plate, at least three pairs of hands have had to touch them, to try and guess what it was. Contrary to popular belief, eating in darkness doesn’t enhance our taste sensors, it just irritates the life out of us.
Keeping these points in mind, at the very least we knew what not to do.
As far as the bathroom was concerned, it was a no-brainer. We were very clear it should not look like a generic restaurant bathroom. No Kimberley Clark tissue and soap dispensers (ugh), no black tiles, no zero watt bulbs that made you stumble in and wonder which direction to head in.
As proud as we were about our food, we were equally proud of our little bathroom. Wooden floor tiles and a wooden door, a beautiful antique mirror and lights from chor bazaar, a cute Mario Miranda print in one corner (move over Mondys), a cane tissue box, a gorgeous vase from Fab India. We also had beautiful handicraft animal figurines from boutique antique shops in Mumbai. Unfortunately someone else apparently loved them as much as we did, and they suddenly disappeared from our shelves one day. On another day, our very pretty fake flowers also found their way into someone’s bag. Not much we could do about that anyway.
Our music. Now that was a playlist of my dreams. It was painstakingly made after hours of listening to each song, hunched over the computer, writing down titles and artists, adding to the Plenty playlist till I could hear ABBA and Boney M echoing in my dreams, watching Billy Joel order our Fondue Kejriwal while the Beatles snacked on our Avo Toast.
That’s how good it was. Almost every customer would compliment us on the choice of songs. The ones that didn’t were presumed tone deaf like my husband. (His claim to knowledge of music is literally only one song, Don’t Stop Believing by Journey). Since he was the face of PLENTY, they would automatically tell him how good the music was and ask him the name of some song. He would pretend to know the name of each song till he was finally outed one day.
Yellow Brick Road by Elton John was playing and a customer asked my husband who the singer was. He told the customer it was by the Beatles! I looked at him horrified! “No, no, this is Yellow Brick Road, not Yellow Submarine!” Sheepishly, he apologized. And after that day, he left all the music related answers to me.
Retro classics playing in the background, beautiful ambience, hot tea or coffee on a rainy day. That’s hard to beat, right? One day I noticed one of our regular customers who used to sit on the table next to our desk so that he could chat with us, take a table in the far corner of the restaurant. He said very candidly, “today I just want to listen to your music, I don’t want to chat.” Ok then.
We even got a majestic gramophone record player from Chor Bazar thinking that we would be one of the first ones to play records on it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work well and we gave up on the idea when every record we played sounded like a donkey braying in your nightmares. But it looked stunning on the counter and we left it there just for the ~aesthetics~.
We are happy to have reignited memories of emulating Travolta dancing to Saturday Night Fever at college socials, of New Year parties with ‘Funky Town’ on loop, of days of courting girlfriends and boyfriends with Julio Iglesias, Engelbert and Air Supply, of hanging out with friends listening to James Taylor and Dire Straits, of long drives to Lonavala with Madonna, Cindi Lauper and Don McLean crooning in the car. At the risk of repeatedly banging on the drums of nostalgia, those were really the days!
We like to think that these simple but thoughtful touches made the entire experience of eating at PLENTY more fulfilling and enjoyable for our customers. That’s why we saw so many of you again and again and again.
It’s not about grand gestures, but it’s very much about the little details.
Love ❤
Bring Plenty back!!! ❤️