40-YO Left Job To Deliver Homemade Food, Now Owns 11 Restaurants!

There could be a new restaurant opening every other day in every other city in our country India. And we Indians always look forward to trying food at all the restaurants, old and new. Such is the love for food amongst Indians. They dream food every single day. This is precisely why these days we can see the most famous food chains in the world looking at India as one of their biggest markets and have begun opening their restaurants here.

But come what may, we Indians, without any exception will forever nurture our love for home-cooked food a.k.a ghar ka khana, isn’t it? Especially in metropolitan cities where people come in search of work leaving their family behind, they crave for authentic home food! And this love and need for home food was something Jayanti Kathale understood well. She built her food dream around home-cooked food, chased it, and now is a successful restaurateur. She is the founder of Purnabrahma, a distinctive restaurant that specializes in Maharashtrian cuisine which she now wants to turn into a global brand someday. Let’s read Jayanthi’s story together.

How It All Started

Jayanti grew up in a family where every festival saw a gathering of at least 30 people at her home. Everybody would together prepare all the sweets and festive delicacies and gorge on it together. Cooking was like a carnival to her. Eating out was never an option for her family because they considered that home-cooked food has most nutrition. Jayanti picked up the passion for cooking from her mother and ajji (grandmother) and soon became very proficient at home-style Marathi cuisine.

In 2006, after her marriage, she shifted to Australia. The dearth of desi food over there hit her real hard. To help others and herself, she opened an account on Orkut and posted asking to take up home-made modak orders. This post of her’s garnered an overwhelming response. She recalls that as her first stint at serving home-made food to people.

After two years, when she returned to Bengaluru and joined a cushy job as Product Manager at Infosys, she still continued her passion of serving home-cooked food by taking orders for festival sweets and other special occasions. The turning point in her life came on one of the Diwali occasion when an old man came to her doorstep to collect his order of laddus. He had ordered the sweets for his ailing wife. His children lived abroad and he wanted to gift the sweets to his wife to remind her of the good old days and fill up the emotional void. This incident made Jayanti scale up her work. She began researching more about her home cuisine, the Maharashtrian cuisine. And this is when she opened her first branch of Purnabrahma at HSR layout in the year 2012.

Purnabrahma’s Journey

Today, Purnabrahma has 6 outlets and more in India. It’s also on its way to open doors internationally in Melbourne, Toronto, Chicago, and London. And over the past few years, Jayanti has successfully amassed a loyal customer base. There are a lot of factors that makes Purnabrahma stand out from the rest of the restaurants in our country:

• Nearly seventy percent of the workforce at Purnabrahma are women. Also, the franchise is mostly give to women only. Jayanti says that it’s her way of creating better work opportunities for fellow women.
• The restaurant offers the usual table seating. It also offers a special ground seating facility for those who want to enjoy a traditional eating experience.
• Maharashtra in itself boasts of diverse regions and each of them has their own unique cuisine. Therefore, every week, one day gets dedicated to one of the regions of Maharshtra and a regional thali is made. For example, the Shiv Thali from Konkan region, Mahalakshmi Thali from Kolhapur region.
• The restaurant has specially curated thalis for everybody right from a pregnant lady to small children.
• The work culture at the restaurant too is unique. All the chefs are self-trained by Jayanti and the cooks work together along with some soothing music that’s played against the backdrop.
• Jayanti has also inculcated the habit of no food wastage at her restaurant. In fact, she offers a five percent discount for those customers who don’t leave behind any leftovers. And she charges a two percent charge for those who leave behind leftovers.

Jayanti Says That Her Journey Has Merely Begun

We consider Jayanti to be this ultimate domestic goddess for she not just dreams but wants to make sure that she provides the ghar ka khana to every Indian who craves for it. What’s her ultimate dream? To open five thousand outlets ASAP across the globe.

It’s incredible how an independent woman is able to create such a huge impact on our society. We only hope that many more women like Jayanti realize their dreams and come out with a want to fulfill it with full of love and positivity. We’re already drooling over Purnabrahma’s menu. Our team wishes you more success and we hope that you fill many more people’s emotional void through your food this Diwali dear Jayanti. Happy Diwali!

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