What ails the restaurant business in Bengaluru?

Will more restaurants, pubs and bars shut shop in future?

You have restaurants in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Hyderabad besides Bengaluru. Has Bengaluru become the most difficult city to do business in?

Today, Bengaluru’s image of being this cool, cosmopolitan city is partly also because of the active food scene. Would you say the clamp downs may be silently killing a profitable industry?

As NRAI Bengaluru’s chapter head, has anyone from the government, over the years, sat down and spoken to all of you about what you all want?

Today, as we speak, what is the ideal situation that you wish to see?

BENGALURU: Over the past two years quality eateries and pubs have been shutting down in the city. After The Smoke Co, Bflat Bar and Restaurant and The Humming Tree, the latest is Monkey Bar, Indiranagar, which will wind up on November 24.“Monkey Bar had become an iconic brand. But the constant over-policing means you cannot run a business no matter how compliant you are,” says Manu Chandra, its chef-partner and the Bengaluru Chapter Head, National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI). Excerpts from an interview:Bengaluru has gone towards the worst in the last two years. Somewhere along the line some agendas were at play, and you have legislation and legalities and paperwork constantly thrown at you. The authorities started digging through all kinds of rules and made knee-jerk reactions. When the Mumbai fire incident happened, for instance, they suddenly wanted every restaurant in Bengaluru to have a no objection certificate (NOC) from the fire department. The requirements are so stringent that you essentially have to break down an entire building and build it again to bring a fire NOC into play. And then all kinds of clampdown started. Forget ease of business, doing business itself became impossible. Then, the Public Entertainment License (PEL) issue came into play. You suddenly needed an occupancy certificate, which 92% of Bengaluru’s buildings don’t have. Today, if you don't have an occupancy certificate, you can’t apply for a PEL, which means you can't play music. We were suffering tremendous business losses.I think the government wants it this way. The way they behave with us, they are neither supportive nor helpful. They don’t try to help us solve the issue in whatever way they can. They are just throwing us from one department to another.Yes. Hands down.The principal reason why the excise revenues were driven was because of the city’s many restaurants, bars and pubs. The excise almost contributes 27% of the state’s exchequer. The F&B industry brought a whole bunch of people into the tax bracket. We are all GST-compliant even though GST hit us very hard with no input tax credit. And then, there’s the employment generation and the subsidiary employment generation - in terms of the supply chain, logistics etc- which grew because of this active scene. All that now, has basically been thrown to shit because there’s no political will or no forward thinking. Today, it has become more about ‘Oh, it’s okay, it does not impact anyone’, while the fact of the matter is that the hospitality business is the third or fourth largest employer in the country. Loose and poorly structured laws ensure that we are always at the receiving end, which is entirely counter-productive.We have approached them. But they have never done anything, they just don’t care. The F&B industry employs lakhs of people but the Karnataka government doesn't care about us, and I am very happy to put that in the statement that they have never made any positive moves. All they keep saying is, ‘Oh, there is no music ban, we only need compliance’. But think about it: These are lakhs of people being employed, there's 1000s of crores worth of revenue being generated, for excise, for taxes, for labour, but you are not giving us the due. It is terribly unfair.The first thing the police commissioner should do is make an amendment to the rule and allow pre-recorded music. We can't even play that today. If he allowed pre-recorded music, we’d all atleast be able to play pipe music. It helps add some ambience. Without it, people are walking into a dead space. He should try and remedy the situation and not make it worse.