Step Out Of Khyber, Into The Red Light!

Restaurateur Sudheer Bahl�s Khyber is Bombay�s best-known restaurant for Indian fine dining still... but the entrepreneur in him has gone places, like to the Red Light next door! MARK MANUEL reports...

Inside Khyber at Kalaghoda, which is Bombay�s heritage business district, restaurateur Sudheer Bahl is going through the sauces and marinades for the day and tasting selected signature dishes from the menu. I watch as he calls for Baked Red Snapper, Mutton Pasanda, Paneer Khorma, Pomfret fried in Green Masala, Chenna Tikka, Mirch Ka Salan, and the renowned Khyber Raan from Chef Amol Patil�s kitchen. From a bread basket that a waiter is going past with, Bahl plucks out a Cocktail Kulcha and a Malai Paratha which he pinches into small morsels and pops into his mouth absentmindedly. He is perfectly at home doing that. But then he is home. Khyber is his restaurant. And it is everybody�s restaurant in Bombay who is fond of Indian food. Mine too.

I watch Bahl nod his approval to the chef who is standing and watching him intently. He is a handsome and distinguished man, this Bahl, almost leonine in his looks. A tall, strapping Punjab da puttar as they say in the Hindi films. And recognising this in him, Bollywood has tried somewhat unsuccessfully to get Bahl to act in films. He did one 10-minute role for which he spent 10 days on location. Realising that Khyber required him more, he turned down subsequent offers.

But Bahl models. He has appeared in campaigns for Arvind Mills, Binnys, Vimal and Toyota, he�s done some 30 campaigns since he was 18. Clothing ads suit him best because he is a savvy dresser. Actually, he looks good in anything. Now he wipes his fingers on the sides of his jeans and settles down to tell me about Khyber.

There is no doubt about it, the restaurant is a landmark in Bombay for Indian food. The Bahls, Sudheer and father Om Prakash, one of Bombay�s pioneering restaurateurs, realised this only after March 31, 1985, though the restaurant has been in business since 1958. �What�s significant about the date,� I ask. He pauses to reflect, giving his salt-and-pepper moustache a twirl, then says, �It is the day Khyber burned down.� That is a story all of Bombay knows. �It was completely destroyed in a blaze at 6 a.m. Nobody knows what happened or how it happened. But we were 50 per cent under-insured. And after the place was gutted, my father�s partners didn�t think it worthwhile to carry on.�

Not Om Prakash Bahl, however. He was a stubborn and gutsy sort of fellow. A building contractor in Calcutta after Partition, he had chucked up his job because he didn�t like it and shifted to Delhi to work with cousins (hotelier Ravi Ghai�s family) in the Gaylord restaurant in 1954. �This was his calling, as he was fond of food,� says Bahl of his father. But two years of Delhi and Gaylord, and Om Prakash thought, enough was enough: the time had come to be his own boss. �He came to Bombay and his friend, Ram Batra, helped him locate this place in Kalaghoda for Khyber,� recalls Bahl. �It was 800 square feet and after 6 p.m., the area was unsafe, it was taken over by pickpockets and drug addicts. But father was desperate, he took it for a pagdi of Rs. 100 a month. That was his starting point. He took on a few partners as a safety measure. And then began the task of buying out the landlord.�

The landlord, in this case, was the Tatas. And they owned the four buildings around which Khyber is located. Unknown to most of Bombay still, the restaurant and its subsidiaries, Yashab and Red Light, are spread out over four buildings that are of ancient construction and which all share a common wall. Om Prakash and his partners bought out the other tenants of the buildings and slowly expanded Khyber from 800 square feet to 7,000. Then came the fire. While his partners lost heart and gave up, Om Prakash, now joined by a young and hungry Sudheer Bahl, took over Khyber. �That�s when we realised that Khyber was part of people�s eating out lifestyle. It had always been taken for granted. People wanted an Indian meal, Khyber was always there. After it burned down, so many people came to us and said, �Where do we go for Indian food now?� That was quite a tribute for Khyber,� Bahl says.

So he and his father went about giving Khyber a new avatar. Hafeez Contractor looked at the building and Parmeshwar Godrej the interiors, and the Khyber they opened for the Bahls in 1988, is the Khyber that today Bryan Adams and Sir Paul McCartney, Demi Moore and Goldie Hawn, the cricketing teams of the world, heads of state, visiting royalty, spiritual leaders, and the Bombay man swears by when it comes to having an Indian meal. Bahl is not star-struck. �I don�t push for a meeting with diners,� he says. �I give them space and only if an opportunity presents itself, do I go up and say hello and ask if their meal is fine.� The new Khyber got repositioned from being a volume-and-low-price business to a swanky, contemporary Indian restaurant for new age cuisine.

�The product was the same, the spirit the same, only the body was different, it was a great marketing exercise,� says Bahl. Bombay loved it. The New York Times� food critic, who wanted an Indian experience when in Bombay, put Khyber on his agenda and later wrote: �What an exquisite experience!� Since the time in opened in 1988, till today, Khyber has acquired Casbar (1991), a party room, Yashab (1993), a bigger party room, and last year, Red Light, which is the old Casbar renovated into a youth-oriented bar that is quite a contradiction to the strong Indian brandname of Khyber. It is young and funky. �We gave Red Light a different identity and distanced it from Khyber. We had a hard time telling people where it was. Nobody recognised 145, M. G. Road, opposite Jehangir Art Gallery, as the address. They asked, �Is that your place,�� says Bahl.

But there is a lot more to Khyber than Red Light. There is Rashmi, Bahl�s attractive and homely wife, who is hands-on in the business. She is an awesome cook of ghar ka Punjabi food, he says. And there are times she slips into the kitchen to show the chef how a new dish the Bahls tasted somewhere out should be reproduced. He himself cannot cook, but his sense of taste is supreme, he argues that it is more important to know what works in a restaurant. �Or all chefs would make great restaurateurs,� Bahl says. �I tell my chef, first I must like what you cook, I need to be convinced. That�s the singlemost important role I play at Khyber. If we get our tastes right, and we get it good, it goes down well with the diners.� And he enjoys his job. When I was leaving, he was looking at the plates the waiters were bringing back. �Why has this food come back,� Sudheer Bahl was saying. �Has the diner asked for it to be packed? No! Didn�t he like it? Here, let me taste it and see what�s wrong?�

Khyber, 145, M. G. Road
Kalaghoda, Bombay 400 001.
Tel: 2267 3227.