I realized that I am in the food business. I help people in choosing the right restaurant, the good cooks, etc. Some people pay me fees for choosing the restaurant, and in come cases the restaurant pays me for sending patrons to them.

What all should I look for in a food place?

1. Good quality of cooks: cooks who learn from their past mistakes, cooks who are consistent in their cooking, cooks who will not mix veg and non veg (I love places where the kitchens are separate, but that is a luxury)
2. Good ambience: the food should be cooked well and served in a good place and the people serving it should be good.
3. Cost: In that order. If the cook and ambience are good, then I am willing to pay a slightly higher price.

What I really look for is consistency. I talk to some of the cooks – and tell them that they should do the labeling right. If they say ‘Kolhapuri’ – it should be spicy, and if they say ‘bland’ it should be bland. I like it when they choose the ingredients from a nice pre-approved list. Many of them have an amazing set of buyers who keep scouring the markets for good ingredients. Most of them are good quality buyers, but some suppliers tell me that some of the buyers take some of the stuff home. Sometimes they take it to the cooks homes too, but that is just a conjecture. I do not have enough evidence. When I have evidence, I do not go to that restaurant.

In some eating places the cooks are good, but the ambience is not so good. That does not bother me so much. Unless of course the buyers and some others providing the infrastructure behave very badly with the clients or with the people referring the clients.

In some eating places the people providing the service treat the sales people very badly telling them “look we have awesome cooks and you guys do not matter”. In some cases this is true, but the arrogance sucks. I live with some arrogance for some time, and then start looking for other places with reasonable cooks and reasonable ambience.

In some cases the managers who run the eating place do not know what the owners of the place do. Such places are riskier than those places where the owner does not understand the business much, or stays abroad and lets the manager run the eating place.

There is an eating regulator (you read about his circular a few days ago) who decides how many sweet dishes, how many savories, how many calories, design of the menu card, etc. This is tough because he uses only What’s app (email takes too much time) and he (she) expects results very fast. Sometimes when people are eating, the dish is changed halfway. Tough, but we have to live with the regulator. I am worried about the kind of people whom the regulator uses too. Many of these ‘advisers’ and the salaried regulator himself eat from the Government’s awesome kitchen where they are given free food – for the rest of their lives. Some of them are pure vegetarian tea-totallers. However they preside over the non veg kitchen and the bar. I have met the regulator long ago, and nowadays I am afraid to meet him/her.

Any resemblance to any other industry is because of your bloody imagination. Damn you.