Big Chat: Rola Wala

I was working in London at an ad agency, when myself and my partner at the time travelled to India for a 6 week break.

I was blown away by the assault of flavours served by street food vendors – an explosion of colour, aroma, texture, and spice. It lit my fire, I spent some time cooking while I was there while staying with local Indian families which set me on a mission, to bring this incredible experience back to the UK for everybody to enjoy.

When I arrived back in London, I set about learning in my home kitchen. I had no restaurant or cooking experience, but I wanted to recreate what I’d found in India…I lived above a street food market at the time and after the first week of effort trialling different recipes I had so much food, I just thought there must be a way to sell it, so thats what I did. On my first day I made £35 and I thought I’d struck the jackpot.

Weeks later, my first real market was Europe’s biggest Indian Food festival, Alchemy Fest in Southbank, London. I took 2000 portions that a friend who had a professional kitchen helped me prepare (along with a very patient partner!). I’d expected to sell half the food over two days. I ran out on the first day, I had more cash in my hands than a drug dealer, and I knew that I had an idea with legs.

I never set out to have a restaurant brand, I just loved the food we were making and I was looking for ways to share it. Since our early markets we’ve built our brand by focussing on core values common to any good restaurant – great food and service, but it’s our focus on fresh spice-fuelled flavour that sets us apart. Typically, food in the UK is considered savoury, or sweet, or in the case of Chinese sweet and sour. Real Indian food is great because it combines up to all five tastes in every bite – sweet, savoury, sour, bitter, umami.

Once you fall in love with the diversity of flavours resulting from the combination of spices, and ingredients it’s a never-ending journey…What we are seeking to do at Rola Wala is make these flavours fast, fresh, and good for you.

I think it’s becoming more and more obvious that the nature of our business has changed. For years, people have complained about working for ‘the man’, restaurants in particular often have such a divide between senior management and restaurant staff that it creates tension, as senior management want uniformity and control and the best restaurant staff want training, expression, autonomy, and growth… it’s very often a glass ceiling and hard for them to grow into a role outside of the restaurant as they have to wait for a role to come available, progression can take years.

Covid comes along and staff are rightly considering other options that involve less intensive, inflexible work hours, and greater progression…The challenge in adapting is that it’s not just a people problem, the restaurant business model is changing too – restaurants of the future are not going to be hiring unskilled staff on minimum wage, but well trained, motivated, ambitious people who are looking for an opportunity to grow a career that provides a degree of flexibility and autonomy. Technology will replace a lot of the basic roles.

Having grown the company and downsized again, we are back in start-up mode and it’s incredibly exciting because we can offer people the ability to grow as our company does, we are incredibly ambitious and we want to offer fast progression to people that have the nouse to drive forwards in their career, on the top of this it’s my stated mission to make our company so attractive to work for that pay is a secondary consideration. It’s philosophical, but the reality is that we can create a system for our people that affords them the flexibility, and rewards they want, and a career where they can grow, so we are going to focus on that, which is what I see as our responsibility to our people and customers – make our people happy and our customers will be too.