The same hands, year after year
Most of the people who cook and serve your lunch have been with Apni Rasoi since the beginning. Some of them from before it existed.
When we hire someone, it is meant to be for the long term, not a short stint. I want the people who join us to feel this is their own work, their own kitchen, not a job. So we keep the team like family. Their problems, whether money or leave or anything else, come to me first.
Several of the team worked alongside Mukesh long before Apni Rasoi existed, in his years as an employee at his previous organisation, where they worked together and lived together. They are still here.
THE KITCHEN
Chef Rajan runs the entire operation. He came up through institutional canteens, NIB and NIOS among them, and through several hotels. There is little about cooking at volume he has not already seen.
Ordering is his. So is keeping wastage and spoilage down to nothing. So is the team: knowing when to keep them light, and when to pull them up. The responsibility sits with him, and so, most days, does the credit.
Moradabad turns out cooks who understand food, and he is one of them. Complaints about taste are close to unheard of. His portioning is exact: order for 400 and 400 is what comes out, nothing left over and nothing short.
The request comes back the same every time: whoever made last week’s chicken, we want him again. He keeps his kitchen spotless and his team calm. Tell him once that a client wants the food spicier, and it stays that way.
Vidya leads the ladies who make every roti by hand on the tawa. Midnight, two in the morning, whenever the job needs finishing, she is already there doing it.
ON THE GROUND
Call them supervisors, managers or owners. It makes no difference to how they work. They drive, they deliver, they run the counter, they talk to clients, and when a new client walks in, they close the deal themselves.
You tell them once. You never have to go back and check whether it was done.
AT THE TUCK SHOPS
All of them arrived as freshers and learned the work here. What sets the counter apart is the competition among themselves: each one wants their shop selling more than the other, and each one wants to run it leaner. Guests notice.
Poonam and Raju have both been with us five to six years. Vijay, Chacha to everyone, is a master of the tuck shop and of the kitchen alike. Eat his chhole-puri once and you will understand.
IN THE OFFICE
Julie runs the office end to end: paperwork, records, coordination. Everything that has to be in order before a single meal leaves the kitchen.
Himanshu is the one you will always find smiling. Scold him as much as you like, it makes no difference at all.
A small team, and largely the same one every day. Every one of them is working to the same idea: do it better than last time.