Journey

Introduction - Our new Venture - Gourmet Indian Cuisine

About 5 months back my son Robin and I started a brand new venture - introducing gourmet Indian food to the U.S. I have owned a software consulting company for the past 25 years. I know a thing or two about software. I know a lot about cooking great Indian food, but very little about the food business.

In the past six months we have come a long way, but we have a long road ahead of us. Since I have been an entrepreneur for a long time, it is very common for young people, who have a dream of starting their own businesses, to seek me out for advise. I always welcome those opportunities to share my life experience and whatever wisdom I have to anyone wanting learn from it.

Just recently it ocurred to me that the trials and tribulations of starting our Gourmet Indian Food business can be a valuable learning tool for someone wanting to learn about how does a business come into existence. So here it is. We are going to share with all of you the trials and tribulations of starting our new venture and I hope this helps those of you in your own venture of starting a new business.

History of our Indian Cuisine Venture to date

If I had thought of creating this BLOG when the idea of starting the food venture occurred to me then we would not need this section. However we have already been in the process of creating this business for 6 months now. So I need to bring to current from the inception of the idea. I'll spend the first few postings bringing you up to date from the inception and from that point on you all can take this entrepreneural ride with me.

History Part 1

Where did it all start: This is a (very) short version.

I grew up in Calcutta, West Bengal, India where in the Bengali tradition (to this day) cooking a feast for the family is the most heartfelt way for family and friends to express love and caring for each other. Having grown up in such an environment where food was such an important part of life I developed early on in life an appreciation for good food. This was particularly because my mother was an exceptional cook that she passed on to her daughters. All of my sisters are exceptional cooks as well.

However, where I grew up in Calcutta, in typical Bengali household, men did not cook. Either you had a cook or your mom or sisters did the cooking. Our household was a typical one. I did not have much of an idea about cooking until I arrived in the US for Graduate School, where I had to learn to cook the basics for mere survival from bad dorm food.

For whatever reason (that I have no explanation for) I took a keen interest in cooking primarily for entertaining friends and family. In the early years in the US, I felt I had a pretty good skill for cooking good food, but nothing exceptional. My cooking skill really took off in the mid 1980’s when all of my sisters came to visit me in California and during their weeks long stay they taught me the finer arts of Bengali style cooking.

In this effort my former wife, Barbara played a significant role in our recipe development since she also learned to be an exceptional cook of Indian cuisine. For a period of 30 plus years that we were married, we took our culinary expertise to a great height.

History Part 2

Engineering discipline applied to cooking:

The keys to my cooking are my recipes which have evolved over a twenty five year period. By applying an engineering discipline to the process of incremental improvement, I documented the changes as is made from iteration to iteration of making a particular item. Most Indian cooks or chefs would vouch that this is highly unorthodox. Almost all cooking on a small or large scale is done by feeling and by precise recipes. In the early years, what used to drive me crazy was I would be making the same dish twice (by feel) and they would never taste the same. As a result, when we would invite someone and would cook some dishes, I would not know which version would show up that night. I started developing precise recipes to solve this problem. This was particularly true for someone in our shoes, who did not cook Indian meals every day, for our own daily consumption, but mostly cooking for special occasions such as parties or cooking for a community event. I wanted to have a system where I would cook something and it will taste exactly the same each time. This was the motivation and the impetus for developing precise recipes.

Finally - the reason for our Basu's Gourmet Indian Cuisine:

I take extraordinary pride in my family’s tradition of excellence in their culinary skill. I am also proud to have extended that skill in a way that was never part of my mother's or sister’s way of cooking, yet maintaining the excellence they had in their cooking none the less. Over the years, I had thought about opening a restaurant to channel my passion for food and cooking and the joy I derive by entertaining friends and family, but sighed away from the idea because there are many aspects of running a restaurant that simply does not appeal to me. Now I have figured out how to channel my passion for food, cooking, and most importantly our Bengali hospitality in entertaining our guests into being able to share all this with the whole world as a whole.

(to be continued)