JOIN USQueen's makes a comeback
Since downing its shutters in 2017 on Church Street, where it started as an eatery selling home-style Punjabi food in 1974, Bengaluru’s iconic restaurant Queen’s has reopened in RMV Extension off New BEL Road.
The new outlet is bigger. It sports a cafe-like look different from its previous dhaba avatar of mud walls and dim lighting. Additional items like pav bhaji, beer and ginger ale feature on the menu alongside their signature paneer jalfrezi, methi dal tadka, chicken tikka masala, baigan bharta, gajar ka halwa, and arbi fry. It is targeted at the college crowd in the neighbourhood.
The former venue was run by Punjabi couple Soneelam and Anil Kumar Chodha. Now in their 70s, they have passed on the baton of the second innings to their architect son Anshul.
Comeback chapter
It was Anshul’s idea to revive the brand because how could one let go of four decades of hard work and a massive following just like that, he asks. Cricketers like Gautam Gambhir, Ishant Sharma and Parthiv Patel had dined at the old outlet as youngsters, we were told. Also that ‘Master Blaster’ Sachin Tendulkar would get his kesari kheer via catering. Food parcels would go out for the cast and crew of films shooting close by, Bollywood icon Zeenat Aman included. Politicians would eat sitting in their cars parked outside.
His parents okayed the comeback but on one condition: The new outlet should be in walking distance from home. They didn’t want to commute up and down multiple times a day during their retirement. Gladly, the new outlet is four minutes walk from their home in Dollars Colony. Queen’s reopened in August last year with two customers-turned-investors on board. It helped that three of their old-time core staff (head chef, head waiter and manager) were around.
Online customers came by much easier than the walk-ins initially, and old patrons are slowly discovering them through word-of-mouth and social media. “Your food is the only time I feel there is some good left in the world (sic),” Soneelam reads out a message she received on WhatsApp during our interview, feeling proud of her family recipes.
The old days
Soneelam moved from Kolkata to Bangalore in the 70s after marriage. Anil was engaged in a food and liquor business while she was a homemaker, whose cooking skills were much loved. Her father encouraged her to start a restaurant. Things fell into place quickly.
Her father offered to send cooks from Calcutta. A cousin directed her to vacant space at the famous Shrungar Shopping Complex, which folded up in 2017, also why Queen’s shut. Anil’s friends helped in procuring the restaurant license but gave them just a day’s notice to finalise a name. It was Soneelam’s father who chose Queen’s, naming it after the queen in his life, his daughter.
It started as a small kitchen with four tables and expanded later by acquiring two shops. Still, there would be queues outside as she recalls “Jiggs Kalra (the ‘Czar of Indian Cuisine’) returned without dining two times because he could not get a table.”
It became a crowd-puller for many reasons. There were not many F&B outlets on Church Street back in the day. “When Bluefox (a pub, now shut) would refuse customers post 11.30 pm, they would come to us,” Anil chuckles. For north Indians, it was their fill of home food. “A boy asked me to make baigan bharta and we put it on the menu after that… We were the first to start tawa phulkas in the city,” Soneelam says. For south Indian diners, it was a novelty. “Punjabis make the stuffed capsicum masala dry but for south Indians, we tweaked the recipe as semi-gravy,” she adds.
“During Diwali, we would sleep for two hours,” she looks back at their golden run, which was interrupted by digging work on Church Street and the competitive F&B scene after 2010. A restaurant on the Street poached their head chef, she recalls the major threat.
Anshul was one-year-old when Queen’s had opened. Now 48 years old, he wants to take the legacy forward by opening multiple branches in the city and even globally.