Kozhikode is a tiny coastal town in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where the winds blow from the Arabian Sea and strains of Sufi music fill the evening air. The rickety roadside stalls selling sticky sweetmeat, savories and newspapers for a pedestrian public during the day take on a different character by night.
As dusk wears on, swarthy cooks pour ladlefuls of fermented rice batter on to the large red-hot flat pans in open kitchens that are lit up by kerosene lanterns strung on the palm leaf-thatched roofs of these makeshift shops. The pans rasp as groups of ravenous diners perched on shaky stools await their turn to be served the delicious, crisp, wafer-thin dosa – a type of rice pancake that is southern India’s most famous culinary export.
Dosa Hut chef, Vineesh Karvnakaran.
On one such night nearly ten years ago, Judy Joseph, a 24-year-old college dropout and dosa-lover, boarded a flight out of this coastal town, with dreams to make it big – not in the Middle East, as scores of his friends had done before him – but in South Africa.
Today, it’s not the curry coast of Kozhikode, but Fordsburg – the cosmopolitan suburb of Johannesburg dubbed ‘Little India’ with its profusion of street-side eateries – that Joseph lords over.
Dosa Hut, his unpretentious restaurant on the cluttered Central Road in Fordsburg, is favored for its dosas by the thriving Indian community working in the city’s CBD. On Fridays, Joseph’s clientele consists of white South Africans and tourists. On weekends, Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani bachelors and families – with their shopping bags and baby-strollers – jostle for tables.
To recreate the same modest ambience as his Kerala hometown, the décor is deliberately downplayed – no fancy linen or cutlery. Joseph’s customers don’t want the frills; they come here for his piping-hot dosas. His cooks – recruited from Kerala – disappear behind clouds of steam as they relentlessly rustle up 14 varieties of dosas, priced from R20 ($2) to R55 ($5), in the open kitchen by the entrance. On any given Saturday, they make as many as 600 of these, rolled up and served on steel plates with spicy coconut chutney, tomato pickle and yellow lentils, and washed down with masala tea.
Today, Joseph has two other business partners, Abhilash Raveendran and Areeza Nizar, and with them owns five Indian restaurants across Johannesburg totaling a net worth of R6 million ($567,000). They are well on their way to rolling out the Dosa Hut concept in Durban in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, as well as in Angola and Madagascar, places Joseph attests have a sizeable Indian population.
Joseph hadn’t expected to be this successful when he landed in Johannesburg that fateful day in 2005. He had $500 in his pocket and the Nigerian agent who had promised to pick him up at the airport didn’t show up.
“I waited five hours. I couldn’t speak English, but fortunately, I met a man from Nepal who helped me get a room for $15 a night,” says Joseph.
Until then, the only business experience he had was selling tea powders, sourced from his family’s tea gardens in the Nilgiris in South India, to his college mates. His family also had a small jewelry business in Wayanad in Kerala and they wanted him to complete his MBA – but he was on the plane to Johannesburg before that could happen.
Determined to prove himself, Joseph dabbled in a variety of odd businesses to survive in Johannesburg. He found a family friend who lent him $1,600, and he ran a tuck shop for three months selling cigarettes, samosas (fried Indian savory) and vetkoek (traditional Afrikaaner pastry). That didn’t work, so he tried selling cars, importing them from Japan, driving them to Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and flying them to Kinshasa before selling them for a tidy profit. He also sold copper ore in the DRC. All this while the few good friends in Johannesburg would rave about his flair for South Indian cooking.
“They goaded me to open a restaurant, which I did with one of my friends,” says Joseph.
His first venture in 2008, with a capital of R250,000 ($32,200), was Spiceburg in Greenside. He rented the premises from an American who previously ran an Italian eatery there.
“Back then, there were no South Indian restaurants in Johannesburg. We wanted to spice up Joburg, so we called it Spiceburg.”
Joseph brought 15 cooks from Kerala and introduced the dosa at R65 ($8) a piece, along with an assortment of South Indian curries. Spiceburg became profitable within three months of opening.
“The food was a hit. About 95 percent of our customers were South Africans, and they knew what they were getting was authentic,” says Joseph.
The food was even traditionally served on plantain leaves brought from Polokwane.
By then, 30-year-old Raveendran, Joseph’s college friend, joined him from Kerala to take the business further. In 2010, they set up Dosa Hut, a budget restaurant in Fordsburg, located in a 120-year-old building, which now also includes India Coffee House, yet another restaurant in their portfolio. The restaurants in Fordsburg are halal, don’t sell alcohol and cater to a wider audience.
“My dream was to make our food affordable to everyone,” says Joseph.
Raveendran is the face of the business, says Joseph.
“I am the shy one. He works his charm to bring in the clients. People ask for him at all our restaurants.”
Besides catering for big Indian weddings and corporate functions, the two are busy with plans to start a bakery selling homemade Indian sweets and savories, and a catering college in Randburg in Johannesburg.
“We want to start a centralized kitchen and to start with, train 10 South Africans in Indian cooking. They will study for free and work at our restaurants for six months. They make the curries better and learn faster than our own Indian cooks, so we don’t need to bring them all the way from Kerala,” says Raveendran.
Today, there are many other restaurants in Fordsburg that offer dosas on the menu; even the neighborhood grocers stock readymade dosa mix packets imported from India.
“But no one can make dosas like we do,” says Raveendran.
“Our unique selling point is the price and the fact that our dosas are served quick and hot. We bring South India to South Africa.”