Summary:Rollo Romig's 'Masala Dosa to Die For', New York Times
Saravana Bhavan commands a huge club of loyalists. The vegetarian food chain is one of the 'world’s largest chains of vegetarian restaurants — 33 in India, another 47 in a dozen other countries', as observed by Rollo Romig in his article 'Masala Dosa to Die For', published in The New York Times on May 7, 2014. Romig profiles the journey of the food-chain specializing in South Indian dishes, and its controversial founder P. Rajagopal.
A screengrab of Rollo Romig's 'Masala Dosa to Die For' on the NYT website Rajagopal was born in a low-caste Chennai family . He quit his school after seventh grade. Later in life he started with a menial job in a 'cheap restaurant in a distant resort town, where he showered in a waterfall and slept on the kitchen floor'. With the rise of the middle class, Rajagopal started his own restaurant breaking the monopoly of the upper-class Brahmin restaurants. He kept a strict control on quality and prices, and received a positive response. The chain expanded to other countries as well, wherever there was a sizable Indian population. Around the time of these business developments, in 2004, Rajagopal was sentenced to ten years in jail for the murder of a man, whose wife he wanted to marry. ‘All but one of Saravana Bhavan’s 47 foreign franchises have opened in the 12 years since the murder,’ notes the writer in the story. Romig has cleverly interspersed the journey of the restaurant and Rajagopal’s in a single flowing narrative, which also takes in bytes of historians, Saravana Bhavan employees, and others.
Rajagopal was out on bail after three months, citing health reasons. There’s no shadow of the controversy and accusations, either on his personal image of that of the restaurant. His business competitors too have high regard for him, for ‘bringing prestige to the vegetarian business’.“He’s like a living god to us,” one of his employees has been quoted as saying in the story. A customer of Sarvana Bhavan said, “Some of my friends used to say, How can you go and eat in his restaurant? You’re actually fattening the wallet of a murderer. And I used to tell them, Look...as long as he’s giving me good-quality food, I go there.” As Romig points out in the first line, ‘Saravana Bhavan doesn’t look like a house of secrets.’