Reflecting on Three Years at Kolkata Chai Co.

It is hard to process events when running a business that is rapidly changing so I’m trying to write more, even if poorly at first, to better understand the decisions I’ve made, the business I’ve built and the man I’ve become.

Kolkata Chai Co opened its doors in 2019 to a line around the block with no press, no expensive publicist & no famous chef. I had no experience cooking at a professional level and had never worked a day in service. I was 27 years old, a disgruntled digital marketer and failing musician, wide-eyed with a dream to be the most thoughtful, conscious business owner the world had ever seen. My cafe was going to be my world - my ability to recreate the values instilled in me by my parents with a product I held dear to my heart. Over the last few years, some of the values have been crushed, whether it be by the unforgivingly harsh city in which we chose to plant the KCC flag, a raging global pandemic and the subsequent economic consequences, or the general nature of a commodity-driven corporate food & restaurant industry that is built on ragingly cheap goods and exploited labor. Three years later in the game, finally out of survival mode (for now), I feel more lucid about my abilities to get my company closer to where I first imagined it and beyond.

Here are some disparate thoughts on the journey thus far:

Full-Time

Making major changes to the life I'm living
I had no choice, I had to prove I made the right decision
That was back in the days, Acura days
I was a cold dude, I'm getting back to my ways

-Drake - Under Ground Kings

One of the first struggles of entrepreneurship was going “full-time”. We live in a culture of people working jobs that they hate for eternities alongside their “side-hustles”. How do you make a side-hustle your main thing? This was the question I asked myself profusely from the day I graduated college to about 2017. Being a first generation South Asian, all my parents ever wanted for me was to have a stable, high-paying “good job”. While I dreamt about being a musician all day, any and all jobs were anathema to me (even though in hindsight I’m not sure that they were really that bad). My brother laid it out simply — work on building your entrepreneurship revenue on the side until it can supplant the wages you earn working that job you hate so much. While we were running our digital marketing agency, we took $4,000 and bought some pots, induction burners, got a logo and set up an Instagram. I spent my Sundays that summer renting a U-haul, driving to a commercial kitchen and then lugging 10 gallons of freshly-made chai to the Farmer’s Market. We made only about $200 a week but people started asking us to have chai at their events and it felt like something was clicking. We maybe broke even that season but the larger picture was in front of us. We got to test the market, see how our brand and product was positioned and learned more about our customers and what they want. Taking our pop-up experiment to a permanent cafe was a whole different scenario — it required pro-forma business plans, leases & capital. So this “supplanting income theory” worked up to a point. When making a big decision in entrepreneurship, there will always be a point where you’ll have to make a leap of faith. Opening a cafe was like that. It won’t make complete sense but you’ll need to do it anyways.

-Jay-Z - Decoded

Pain

My name mean a lot to me, pain mean a lot to me

Fame means nothing, but the game means a lot to me

Juelz Santana, Why

Food is physical. That’s why I like it. It was so different than working behind a desk all day. It relies on precision and it is as exacting as it is punishing. You work your mind and body together, thinking about the customer, the order, the chai in front of you, the paratha burning on the other burner. Flip, move. Take order. Smile. Turn burner off. One mistake and it all falls apart. But that shit will catch up with you quickly. I haven’t really spoken too much about this because I don’t know, maybe it exposes my low pain tolerance, but working at the cafe 60-80 hours a week physically broke me. Often, my fingers would rip open, my eczema exacerbated by the obsessive hand and dishwashing, and I’d frequently have to tape them up in order to get through the day. After that or during, I used to have carpal tunnel syndrome in both of my hands making them numb and unresponsive. My colleague Juan gave me many remedies including sleeping with both my hands in Velcro cages but nothing really helped until I finally just stopped working so many days straight in a week.

Pain is powerful though. With that pain, I can proudly say I’ve worked every job in the cafe and when training others, I’m aware of what’s needed to succeed in each position. I’ve used that pain, I find strength in it and these days I even find myself missing it. Sometimes I’ll go to the cafe and just stay late prepping because there was a time when the only question of whether or not my business was going to succeed was how hard I worked in the cafe. And I wasn’t about to let something silly like hard work beat me.

Management

With this pain, I learned early that I couldn’t do everything myself. Asking for help meant hiring people who could bring value to my organization. It meant finding ways to inspire people, build a team and manage them or better yet, teach them to manage up & manage you. I’ve been blessed to have good managers and good bosses so I modeled my philosophy on what I saw them do. Being thankful, being kind and having a good attitude and energy — even when things are collapsing around you — goes a long way to building a team that exhibits those qualities. Centering your team around ideas of “servant leadership” means that you as the owner set the tone for the work being done. We no longer live in a world where food businesses can get away with punitive and draconian work cultures from brigade-era cooking. At Kolkata Chai Co, we strive to build a work culture that prides itself upon freedom & responsibility, not a strict top-down hierarchy.

Like Chef Brooks from Superiority Burger says, “we all cook, we all clean”.

And I grew through the years, shedding blood, sweat and tears
Getting love and the respect to my peers

- Blu & Exile - I Am

Numbers on the Board

I hated math as a kid. The pressure to excel in math as a brown kid with a math-centered father was HEAVY. I still remember sobbing at the dining room table while my dad smacked me on the back of my head and repeated “math is not a guessing game!”

Nowadays, we spend a significant amount of time & money on having accurate financial models & meticulous books, but to be honest it’s still not mine or Ani’s favorite part of running a business. When we were starting out, we had a strong sense of conversion rates and return-on-investment (ROI) from our digital marketing experience and we applied that to everything we did on the food side. For example, if you’re looking to do an event and they’re charging you $500 for a booth fee — how many cups of chai do you have to sell to break even on rent? Ok — but you need to hire someone to serve chai and you don’t have a car yet so the U-haul cost is already going to be $120 so that’s already looking like a lot of cups of chai. If you don’t break even on this event — is the exposure worth it? Will it lead to future business?

This back-of-hand math (or Saugata Math as we we call it after our rapidly calculating uncle) got us pretty far and looking around, some other businesses could definitely use more math. Even as the business evolves and develops complexity, you are still always tied to the numbers you’re able to generate based on assumptions you had. If your numbers don’t make sense, you might be able to ride out your concept for a while, but it won’t ever become a sustainable, growing business. The axe always falls.

Sign deals only if the math is real

Prodigy, Keep it Thoro

The Power of Food

My favorite travel writer Rick Steves once said “globetrotting destroys ethnocentricity”. I’d argue that food, done right, does the same. Humans are silly and whether we like it or not, we come into this world with certain pre-conceptions about other races, religions and cultures — and with that comes a varying sense of self-importance. Chai has taught me that the world is a lot more complicated and beautiful than I’ll ever know. It is a drink steeped in the history and culture of South Asia and beyond. It’s powerful and personal. Kolkata Chai Co was crafted carefully and deliberately to be inclusive but nuanced. Hearing people’s chai stories at the cafe has expanded my depth and knowledge of the South Asian diaspora more than I ever thought. A father showing his sons the clay cups (bhaar or kulhar depending on where you’re from) that our tea is traditionally served in and reminiscing about his past life in India that his sons may never have known. An inter-racial couple having a moment of nostalgia as they look through our early 2000’s Bollywood tapes and laugh about Parle-Gs. A Desi auntie telling me how she’d make chai for her mother every day when she was going through a chronic illness. Stories from the families that worked at the tea gardens I visited. Stories from the families that owned the tea gardens. Stories from my grandfather about his summer trips to Darjeeling. Stories from Karachi, Allahabad, Kerala, Chittagong and Bihar — all happening in a 100 sq ft cafe in the East Village of Manhattan called Kolkata Chai Co. Wild!

I don’t think my parent’s generations had the privilege to develop a pluralistic world view about South Asia. They still hold the scars of partition and even in this country, most kept to their own communities. But we’re different. We’re multi-cultural, third culture kids. We have the opportunity to create more understanding in the world — and what better way to do it than through chai?

Thank you to everyone who has supported us in anyway so far. I don’t take it for granted. If you liked this piece — subscribe and I’ll write more often!

- Ayan