Opinion The flavour of nostalgia: How Nirula’s changed the way Delhi eats

Lakshmi Chand Nirula and Madan Nirula started Hotel India in CP with 12 rooms in 1934 to compete with bigger hotels like The Maidens Hotel and The Imperial. When the hotel started doing well, the brothers decided to open a new restaurant called Nirula’s Corner House in 1942. It had bands playing live music, cabaret, magic shows, and flamenco dancers. After Partition, however, it was replaced with a more casual brasserie, which in turn became the first modern cafeteria in 1950. Chef Li Wo Po ran the first Indian-owned Chinese restaurant, The Chinese Room, which opened in the same year. In the 1960s, an Indian restaurant called Gufa and an Austro-Hungarian restaurant called La Boheme followed. At a time when such a thing might not have been heard of or known in the country, the Nirula brothers started three “speciality” restaurants.

Their success and popularity led to the opening of the popular Snack Bar in 1972, Hot Shoppe in 1977, an ice cream parlour in 1978, and Potpourri in 1979. Deepak Nirula introduced pizzas, burgers, hotdogs, and a salad bar that he had tried in the US to Potpourri. This new menu was soon the talk of the town, and Deepak Narula’s desire to try something new grew. He opened his next fast-food place in Chanakyapuri, near the Chanakya Cinema.

Connaught Place was different in the 1980s and early 1990s: Sitting in Potpourri, a restaurant on the ground floor of the Hotel India, watching Ambassadors and Fiats drive by on the almost-empty streets, the ordinary Indian could get a brief sense of belonging to the elite class. Every customer was treated with the same enthusiasm by the manager and his crew: You might be a monarch or a peasant, but you had to go to the counter and place your order.

Affection for the brand runs deep in Delhi. While reliving memories of Nirula’s, former journalist Ashok Mathur, a fifth-generation Old Delhi resident described the restaurant to me as “an emotion”, not only because it served dishes that people like him would never have been able to sample otherwise, but also because it put aspirational foods like burger, pizza, or ice cream within reach of the middle class.
Or take what Maneesh Baheti, founder of the South Asian Association for Gastronomy, says. He was in his teens when he started going to Chanakya Cinema to watch Hollywood movies and try HCF, mutton burgers, or grilled sandwiches. According to him, Nirula’s democratised how Indians ate outside their homes and redefined their eating habits. By the time other fast-food joints, whether McDonald’s, KFC, or Domino’s Pizza arrived, Delhiites had built a relationship with the Nirula’s. It was the first place that allowed them to taste ice cream, and then decide what to order; it was the first to serve banana split in Delhi and introduce combo offers.

Nirula’s attracted foodies from outside Delhi too: Sonali, Baheti’s wife, grew up in Meerut but would drive down to Delhi with her friends to get her hands on the ice cream and other delicacies that were not available in her hometown. They would travel early in the morning, grab a meal and ice cream, and then go back.

Nostalgia has its own unique flavour, so the love for Nirula’s may be limited to older generations and youngsters today might not understand everything that changed because of Deepak Nirula and his family in Delhi. Often, we don’t care about an iconic brand because we don’t know its legacy, but Nirula’s is a brand that gave people choices when they didn’t have any. By bringing people together and seating them in the same room, it helped blur the lines of social status and class. Deepak Nirula has left a legacy behind for us to enjoy.

The writer is a chef and author