Sagar kinare

I was kind of intrigued when I came here to Bangalore to see so many idli-vada restaurants. There are of course many things to observe when a person from the 'bhaiya' part of India travels down south. Interestingly this is one thing you might not get to see if you are a traveler.

These restaurants known as Shanti Sagar, Sukh Sagar, x sagar, y sagar have a beautiful business model. Here are a few points that I could observe about them and the reverse of the adage strikes me : "If the time has come, the idea has to"

Standard menu:
These all sagars have a standard menu of around 10-20 items. You get idli, dosa vada, chow-chow* bath** etc etc. And if I had enough memory to remember my phone number I could have written down all the 10 of them. Now this must be helping in having standard equipment, learn how to set up a sagar and get the equipment to make all these items, that's all. Also the know how of making these 10 dishes with best efficiency is by now mastered to the extent that idli is almost as good as mass produced at these sagars.

Money Honey:
Its damn cheap. Idli plate for 6 rs. Yes. To a northi this is a culture shock if not financial. People in Noida line up outside Sagar Ratna (Again sagar) and are ready to pay 25 rs for a plate of idli which I can bet is half as good as those you get here. So if you used to have the same stuff at home after a lot of effort, why not just shell out 6 or 10 rs a day and get away with all the hassles. In a way these sagars have created a market for themselves.

Efficiency and low running costs:
With ages of making the same stuff the efficiency and the cost per item must be dead sea low. I was observing one person making dosas and he could make 8 dosas on a same plate at a same time. I remember how much effort used to go in making idly for my mother, ferment a day earlier (and I don't know the rest of it) etc. Here its like a cycle in which everything is so ready that it hardly takes any time/money for them to churn out hot steaming dosas for a dosen people in 5 mins.

Mass popularity & flooding:
How many breakfast joints do you find there up north. I have traveled most of UP and Delhi but you hardly find people having at these kinds of fast food breakfast. If at all we have we have the faster food category of "bund-makkhan", juice, peti*** kinds of joints. The limit is aalu paratha joints and those too are hard to find and never thronged in such numbers on any day. If you have to see the crowd, its only during dinner and lunches. So the point I was making was that, there is a huge market here down south of people who can eat fast on the way to their office. Also there is a sagar in every corner. Its like every society should have a milk vendor and so a sagar too.

If this blog was read like Dilbert's blog then I would have definitely run a poll on whether you prefer eating at a sagar and how frequently in the same fashion Scott Adams does quite often. In my case I guess I can even call those who are going to read the post and collate info. However besides job/boss/'shadi kab karoge' we hardly discuss anything so you can also leave your opinion here itself mentioning [yes/no] and [2 days/week]


* Initially I used to even think its a Chinese dish until I discovered its half part upma and half part kesri bath.
** Bath is one thing which used to make me feel that they are going to give you enough so that you could drown yourself in it. Later I discovered that all amits became amith and sita's became sithas. All in good humor, this used to be a common teasing point for all my south Indian friends here.
*** This is the way our juice corner waala on modinagar road used to call. I mean its western UP lingo. As if you are asking one lakh rupees and that too hot and "sos ger ke" (to an uninitiated it might look after spilling the sauce somewhere)