Philly's Indian-box-lunch king plots world expansion
Backed by a little Chestnut Hill bank, Tiffin owner Munish Narula has big ambitions
Munish Narula earned an MBA from Penn's Wharton School and went to work on Wall Street. But it didn't last: "I was an investment banker for a couple of years, at Credit Suisse First Boston. A lot of money. No fun."
So he quit and went into the food business. Narula earned modest local fame over the past four years as he built his India lunch-takeout idea, Tiffin (a British-Indian word that means lunch, also takeout trays), into a small chain of popular Philadelphia-area restaurants (top seller: Chicken Tikka Masala, in creamy tomato gravy, $12.)
Indian food has penetrated corporate Philadelphia "thanks to the Sidhus and Guptas who have exposed people to the food," says Narula, a New Delhi native. (That would be local bosses like Jay Sidhu, head of Customers Bank and formerly of Sovereign Bank, and Raj Gupta, head of chemical maker Avantor Performance Materials Holdings, and formerly of Rohm and Haas.)
How'd he pay for expansion in the middle of the slump? "We have no investors. Valley Green Bank has been our partner." Narula met Valley Green founder Jay Goldstein at City Hall last year when the Merchant Fund and the city gave Tiffin $50,000 to fix up the storefront of its second restaurant, on Girard Ave. "Larger banks were very reluctant to lend. So we moved our banking relationships from PNC and Wachovia to Valley Green. They were more than willing to work with us."
Now Narula is preparing a larger, higher-priced, as-yet unnamed flagship restaurant for developer Carl Dranoff's 777 South Broad Street apartments: "Carl is a visionary. He says we have to do something big."
He just won a contest sponsored by food supplier Sysco Corp., beating 170 competing restaurants to win "America's Next Top Restaurant Franchise", which grants him free legal and advisory services to spread his Indian lunches to other parts of the US.
And he's thinking bigger than that. Narula tells me he's been watching South Philly sandwich shop Tony Luke's expand, with new stores from the Jersey Shore to the Arab island nation of Bahrain, by partnering with Swededesboro-based mass-market butcher and side-dish specialist Rastelli Brothers.
Now, Narula says, he's negotiating with potential partners to take Tiffin and the Indian boxed-lunch concept worldwide.