Ankur Gupta studied fashion design at Central St Martin, London, and worked with designers such as J.J. Valaya before branching out into brand designing. It was a project at Hyatt Regency that got Ankur interested in restaurants and it so happened that The China Kitchen, the five-star hotel’s signature eatery, happened to be the favourite of Dabur Chairman Amit Burman, who was then planning to launch Lite Bite Foods.
They met—and Burman asked him to do the branding for his company. The rest, as they say, is history. Ankur today is the most sought-after designer of restaurant brands—his clients extending from Varun Tuli (Yum Yum Cha and Noshi) to Zorawar Kalra (Farzi Cafe) and Avantika Sinha (Kampai). With so many restaurants happening in his life, it was bound to happen one day. Ankur was planning to launch his own restaurant at Khan Market, but lockdown happened, and even after restaurants have opened up, the food and beverage business has seen only a 30-40 per cent recovery.
“People not only fear the virus striking at them in closed spaces, but also are reluctant to spend—the pandemic has taught us all to be careful with our money,” Ankur points out. With a new restaurant not being viable for some time, Ankur and his wife Aparajita have teamed up, with professional advice from the master of cloud kitchens, Raminder Bakshi, to launch Sloppy Sticks, a home delivery service based out of an 800-square-foot facility in Kalkaji with a footprint extending from Delhi to Noida and Sector 56, Gurgaon. The food is well-made, the portions are generous and the orders are trickling in steadily. With minimum overheads and a staff of eight needed to run the place, the Guptas have good reasons to shelve the idea of running a standalone restaurant—and to start planning their second cloud kitchen.