Tiffin answering the question, 'How many calories in curry?'
Owner Munish Narula had two main reasons for commissioning a nutritional assessment of his menu. One is personal. At 45, he said, "when my friends and I get together, the topic of conversation comes around to, 'what diet are you on?' We're all taking stock of what we eat."
Restaurant nutrition info should provide little shock value nowadays, six years after many chains were ordered to list calorie counts on menus.
Big Macs at McDonald's, apple crunch muffins at Panera, the petite filet at Ruth's Chris all are out there on display under Food and Drug Administration guidelines designed to help people make informed choices about the food they eat.
But how about biryani with chicken, korma with paneer, or tikka masala with shrimp?
Nutritional information has seldom if ever been offered by an Indian restaurant chain in the United States.
This week, Tiffin, the Indian restaurant chain that has grown to nine locations from a storefront on Girard Avenue,will begin posting complete nutritional information for more than 100 menu items, from biryani, curry pots, and other entrees to breads and even the sides of chutney.
Owner Munish Narula had two main reasons for commissioning a nutritional assessment of his menu. One is personal.
At 45, he said, "when my friends and I get together, the topic of conversation comes around to, 'what diet are you on?' We're all taking stock of what we eat."
Another reflects the reality of business. Narula is beginning to franchise Tiffin. Most Indian restaurants are mom-and-pop operations with at most three or four locations.
A federal labeling law that will go into effect May 5, 2017, will require any chain of 20 units or more that sells ready-to-eat or prepared foods - including restaurants, movie theaters, and convenience stores - to show calories on their menus. They also must post information about sodium, fat, carbohydrates, and the like.
Narula hired Marianne Kelly, whose company OrganizeNation helps businesses organize and complete varied projects. (Among Tiffin's other in-house projects is a centralized call center based at the Girard Avenue location - and not, as you might cheekily assume, outsourced to India.)
For months, Kelly was embedded in Tiffin's kitchen, breaking down each recipe. She then fed her notes on each dish into a computer program called Menu ProfitPro. Available to customers of the food-service distributor US Foods, MPP allows restaurateurs to calculate nutritional information and costs of recipes. Many but not all Tiffin ingredients were included in Menu ProfitPro's database. Kelly had to research some.
Narula said there were few surprises in the nutritional breakdown, though "we had to run the numbers for naan four times. It's really common sense."
Tiffin provides the nutritional information per order, not per portion. Few customers will eat an entire order of an entree, Narula said.
Narula said Tiffin would not tinker with recipes, but planned to introduce a series of portioned combination meals under a certain calorie threshold, such as 600 or 700 calories.