Vijay Mallya’s short-lived kingdom of pizzas

Vijay Mallya and L block Connaught Place in New Delhi make for an unlikely combination. After all, what could the erstwhile King of Good Times, now going through a somewhat bad time on the shores of Blighty, have to do with a place that’s merely a stopover for shoppers?

Plenty, actually, because L-9 Connaught Place (CP) is an address with a history. The corner store in the dead centre of the capital’s retail heartland has a strange and rather mysterious tryst with cafes. Poised on the intersection of CP’s outer circle and Janpath, visible from four directions, it is where young people have congregated for decades either to pick up a book from the pavement stall or to have a quick bite at one of the many outlets that have appeared and disappeared over the years.

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Its current occupant is the cafe chain Sandoz, and judging by the average 45 minutes of waiting time before you get a table, it is obviously doing brisk business.

The troubled history

Why then should such a coveted spot have seen a series of high-profile chains come and go over the years? In the past, Wimpy, Domino's, and Dunkin' Donuts have all come and gone, none surviving long enough to create a lasting impression.

But it was the rapid entry and equally sudden exit of Pizza King some 40 years ago that makes for the best yarn of them all. 

India’s first real pizza chain, it was opened by Mallya’s McDowell sometime in 1983 and was an instant hit. In its rather brief lifetime, it served some of the best pizzas in town, along with grilled sandwiches, and complemented by shakes and a salad bar. The ambience was elegant, and the service was pleasant and brisk. Very quickly, it became the place for the capital’s swish young set to go out on a date. 

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In this, it was different from Nirula's, the food behemoth that lorded over CP in those days. With its dal makhani, burgers, and ice creams, Nirulas was the choice of families and not a place to linger in. Pizza King, by contrast, was where you could sit for hours over a lemonade served in tall glasses that gave you the feeling you were imbibing something stronger. To be fair, it had the typical Mallya hallmark of style and sophistication, which would later be replicated and magnified in his gold-plated airline Kingfisher.

Unfortunately, the Delhi of the era was a city run by petty bureaucrats who were no respecters of Mallya’s pedigree or his tastes. Citing one municipal law or the other there was constant harassment, not all of it unjustified given Mallya’s financial shenanigans. Fed up with the constant irritants, one fine day, Mallya called the chief executive of the unit and told him, “bund kar do sale ko” (shut the damn thing down). 

This was when the chain was beginning to grow with outlets in Delhi and Mumbai and plans for more in other cities. The eventual goal was to have 100 outlets nationwide in the next few years. A series of Pizza King Express outlets, serving pizzas on the go, were also in the works. It was a good time to be in the business since young India was beginning to go out to eat. Businessmen like Anil Nanda and Ramesh Chauhan had sensed the nascent demand for quick and fun foods and were launching ventures to cash in.

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Sadly, just five years after Pizza King opened, the curtains came down on it. It was one of the many businesses that Mallya would exit after the initial fanfare.

The location, though, was attractive enough for a quick replacement, and the UK-based businessman Kanwaljit Singh Siddhu, who had brought Wimpy to Delhi in 1982, seized upon it to set up what would go on to become an extremely popular quick-service restaurant for the next 20 years till it shut down in 2009. By then, the franchise was going through its own set of problems. 

Equally, CP was once again at the mercy of multiple municipal agencies, which were digging it up ahead of the expected rush of visitors from abroad for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. In the event, the visitors failed to arrive but the disruption led to the closure of many of signature stores, including the Wimpy outlet.

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After a short hiatus, another set of international chains, Domino's Pizza and Dunkin' Donuts moved into the space only to shut down some years later as part of a cost restructuring exercise.

Sandoz, named after its legendary founder Jagir Singh’s passion for bodybuilding, is the latest inhabitant of the corner spot. Hopefully, it can beat the curse that stymied previous efforts.