Purple Greene

Vikramaditya Sharma worked with Nandan Nilekani in UID. As far as beginnings go, it is quite a remarkable start to a restaurant career, wouldn't you say? From working on the Aadhar to owning a restaurant! As it happened, Sharma was one among 200 employees in the UID office and rather curiously, all of them were vegetarian. Come 5.00 pm and each and every colleague would begin talking about food and where to eat it. Sharma himself would be wound up with hunger and with anticipation after food conversations, but the restaurants in the vicinity of the office were hardly memorable. That's when the idea took hold of him.

Purple Greene is a venture that serves the food of a wide swathe of the world, but every last dish is vegetarian. Some of the food is served in bowls, like Buddha Bless with avocado and chickpeas or Five Grain Risotto with barley, jowar and ragi among others. Red Pumpkin and Ricotta Cannelloni and African Spicy Vegetable Stew are both packed with so much flavour that you don't realise that there is no meat in either of them. That, says Sharma, is precisely what he is aiming for: the customer who wants tasty food rather than one who is specifically looking for vegetarian food. It is a novel approach to cuisine, but he and his brilliant restaurant consultant, Chef Arun Tyagi, have managed to inveigle visitors to the mall with good food, cooked consistently well, and attractive pricing. That there is no meat is merely incidental.

The name, by the way, is the intertwining of royal (purple) with vegetarian (green).