Chef Ajit Bangera, a senior chef with over 4 decades of culinary expertise, has joined hands with Ashish Thadani, founder of Ciclo Cafe, to launch Firo, a modern Indian restaurant in Chennai’s RA Puram neighbourhood, which they feel has the potential to go places.
“Both of us are passionate about food. That’s what made us think of combining our expertise together to launch Firo,” said Chef Ajit Bangera, who served ITC Grand Chola Chennai and ITC Ratnadipa, Colombo as executive chef, and set up an award winning restaurant brand ‘Avartana’ after retiring from ITC Hotels, setting the context to the conversation on the partnership with Ashish Thadani, a successful restaurateur behind brand Ciclo Cafe, to launch Firo.
“The idea has been to create something different in the Indian culinary space. We felt that it’s a space not occupied by any one so far,” said Chef Bangera.
As there was scope for Firo food to be compared with his highly successful restaurant brand Avartana, which carved a place in the best 30 restaurant list already, Chef Bangera allayed the speculations unequivocally.
“A lot of planning and preparations have gone into the designing of Firo. We made sure that nothing is repeated in Firo. It was not a big deal for me,” said Chef Bangera, who worked behind reimagining and updating menu at many restaurants of ITC Hotels in the past. While Avartana is primarily a modern South Indian speciality restaurant, Firo is a reimagined pan-Indian restaurant. “We have taken a while new approach. At Firo, we are in a totally new space,” he said.
As a chef coming from a mainstream hotel background to a standalone space, Chef Bangera said that the standalone food space in India is “rapidly evolving” and catching up with the rest of the world for people like him to get involved and disrupt with creative ideas.
He said that established organisational set up and expertise of restaurateurs like Ashish Thadani was a great support and motivation in his journey.
Talking about the concept behind Firo and its relevance in a market like Chennai, Thadani said that the concept was “truly global” and Chennai market is “ready for it”. “Chennai market has changed a lot in the last 2 years. People are well travelled and they are ready to receive new and innovative concepts,” he said, explaining the rationale of launching the new brand from their “home turf” – Chennai.
When asked about expansion plans considering the prodiluct was designed for a “global palate”, Thadani said that the plan was to “settle down” first before thinking of the next step. “The goal is to put the product out, make sure that it is received well. Everything will fall in place eventually,” he informed.
