Category: food

Payment systems

I had lunch today at a rather fancy Japanese restaurant here in Barcelona (I’ve forgotten if I wrote that blog post last year on how you get fantastic East Asian food of all kinds here). I didn’t pay a fancy price – this concept called “Menu del dia” (menu of the day), one of the very few good things instituted by General Francisco Franco meant that you can get cheap weekday lunches at most restaurants in Spain.

The above (Katsudon and beer), along with some noodle soup and two sushis and a cup of coffee, set me back by €13, which isn’t too bad by Barcelona standards (most weekday lunch platters at restaurants cost ~€10).

While eating I noticed that other patrons at the restaurant were walking up to the bar to pay the owner directly, rather than asking for the bill at the table.

So once I was done with eating and drinking, I went up to the bar to pay. The owner had seen me coming and had prepared my bill, which he presented to me. As I reached into my pocket, he got out the card swiping machine.

It might have been a shock to him when I presented a €20 bill instead, and he had to scramble to produce the change from somewhere inside the kitchen (the other patrons before me had all paid by card).

While this is one data point, it’s interesting how the economy here has moved to a situation where the default method of payment is through credit/debit card, rather than by cash (though my favourite bakery refuses to accept card for payments less than €5). The ease of card payments (most debit cards nowadays come enabled with NFC, though a fair number of merchants still insert the card to read the chip) combined with ubiquity of cards has meant that card usage has started trumping cash.

It will be interesting to see how the payments ecosystem will develop in India, which is still largely a cash economy. My belief (and hope) is that India will leapfrog credit/debit cards (as it has leapfrogged landline telephones and big box retail, moving directly to mobile phones and e-commerce) and take up electronic payments in a big way.

IMPS (immediate payment service) is already a fantastic protocol for bank-to-bank transfers, and the costs are extremely low. In April, the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) will be rolled out, which makes transfers to hitherto unknown people even easier! If our banks do a good job of implementation, there is a good chance it might get adopted widely (long back I’d made a case for the RBI to subsidise such payments).

Flight food and choice

The topic of outrage for the day on Twitter seems to be Air India’s decision to serve only vegetarian food on flights that last less than 90 minutes. Predictably, given the current government’s policies and track record so far, people are decrying this as some sort of a “brahminical conspiracy”. This was even quoted as  a reason to privatise Air India (while I don’t agree with this reason, I fully agree that there are several other reasons to privatise Air India).

While outragers will outrage (and they might have a pathological need to outrage), this decision of Air India actually has sound basis. I had touched upon this in an earlier  blog post about why I get irritated with Indigo’s in-flight service.

The problem is that the more the choice you give customers, the slower the overall service will be. While this may not affect people seated in rows where service begins, it can be an immense cause of frustration for passengers who are seated in rows that will be served last.

In longer duration flights, this matters less since people who are served last will have sufficient amount of time to finish their meals before the trays have to be cleared in time for the flight to land. On shorter flights, however, the time available for meal service is so short that it is possible that trays might have to be cleared barely after a section of the passengers have started eating.

Eliminating choice significantly speeds up the meal delivery process (refer to my post on Indigo’s food for more on this), and ensures that people who have been served last have sufficient time to finish their meals before trays have to be cleared. While it may not take much time for the steward to ask the customer her choice, considering the total cycle time (along with passengers asking details of the menu, etc.) and the number of passengers to be served, cutting choice is a sound decision indeed.

As for the vegetarian option, when there is no choice offered, it is natural to go with the option that satisfies the maximum number of people. Considering that Indians don’t eat much meat (while only a small proportion of Indians are vegetarian, overall meat consumption is very low), it is a rather obvious choice that only vegetarian food will be served.

This is a commendable decision by Air India and I hope they stick to it. I hope other airlines will also learn from this and cut choice in their inflight menus (Indigo, I’m looking at you) so that passengers can be served with the minimum uncertainty and minimum fuss.

Tailpiece The above linked NDTV Profit piece has a bizarre comment from an expert. Quoting:

However, according to travel industry expert Rajji Rai, the state-owned airline should have first carried out a passenger survey, which is an industry practice, before affecting any change in the menu.

“Airlines world over carry out customer surveys before taking such decisions. Unfortunately, Air India is very poor in such practices. This decision to discontinue non-vegetarian food on these non-metro flights is just one-sided,” he said.

Surveys are overrated in my opinion, and there is no reason Air India should have conducted a survey before making this decision – for they have access to significant amounts of actual customer preferences over a large number of schedules. The value of a survey in this case is at best marginal

vaDe for meat and tithi ooTas

The story goes that the humble medu vaDe was invented a couple of millennia back when Brahmins went veggie (to compete with Buddhism and Jainism), and needed a source of protein to replace meat. The vaDe, packed with urad dal and deep fried, can perhaps be described as the perfect keto snack, especially considering that it’s eaten with coconut chutney.

So the humble vaDe is a fixture at lunch during death ceremonies. A standard feature of Kannadiga Brahmin death ceremonies is the “feeding of the brahmins”. These are no ordinary brahmins – they are special brahmins who are part of the ceremony where one represents God and the other represents the deceased in whose name the death ceremony (colloquially called ‘tithi’) is being performed.

Given that these brahmins have fasted before the meal and will fast the rest of the day (this is all in theory, of course), they need to be fed nutritious meals, and what is a better source of long-lasting nutrition than the humble vaDe? The vaDe has become so synonymous with tithis that in Karnataka it is symbolic of death ceremonies, and not prepared on auspicious occasions. The phrase “I’ll eat vaDe in your name” can be considered as a mild death threat, for example.

Right from childhood I’ve always wanted some crunchy stuff to eat with my rice. Back then, my parents would ensure that our house was well-stocked with crunchies such as Congress peanuts, nippaT, mixture, etc., which I would eat along with my rice. Occasionally my mother would make happaLa (fried paapaD). Back when was at IITM, I would make the decision on whether to eat chapati or rice for lunch based on the availability of happaLa – I’m such a sucker for crunchies with rice.

Death ceremonies being solemn occasions, however, crunchies aren’t made. It’s taboo to serve happaLa during these kind of ceremonies (despite the protein that packs, too). The occasional lunch can be eaten without crunchies, but if you have to eat tithi ooTa on a regular basis, some “adjustment” has to be made?

The epiphany happened on the 13th of April 2007, at Paschimavaahini near Mysore. My father had passed away two days earlier after a prolonged illness, and after having cremated his remains, we had gone to Paschimavaahini to dunk his ashes in the Kaveri. This was my first exposure to performing death ceremonies, and I found it so unpleasant that I only performed a limited subset of them when my mother passed away in 2009, and gave up altogether on performing my parents’ annual death ceremonies in 2012 after a series of unpleasant experiences.

That day in 2007, however, was when I discovered the utility of the vaDe as the crunchy during tithi ooTas (ooTa is Kannada for meal). Chutney had also been served, and some vaDes were served at the beginning of the meal along with the rice. You break off a piece of vaDe, dip it in the chutney, and then pick it up with a morsel of huLianna (sambar rice) or saaranna (rasam rice), and you get both crunchies and enhanced taste. And that has formed my template for tithi ooTas (which I’m forced to occasionally attend, though I don’t perform tithis myself) ever since.

Yet another epiphany happened last month, when I was at one such tithi ooTa (in memory of my cousin’s grandmother). Sometime between the initial epiphany and this, I had started eating meat, and this was a key component going into this epiphany.

As I was polishing off huLianna with vaDe and chutney at my cousin’s grandmother’s tithi, the process seemed rather familiar. Considering that I don’t eat too many tithi ooTas, this was surprising. And then it struck me that the way I was eating was exactly the same as the way one eats meat with rice (while eating with fingers in South Indian style). You break off the piece of meat, and pick it up with a morsel of rice (mixed with whatever), and put them together into your mouth.

That was when I got reminded of the vaDe replacing meat in the Brahmin diet. It all seemed to fit in now. Even the way it is traditionally consumed (nothing gets more traditional than a tithi ooTa) is the same!

Tailpiece: Speaking of tithi ooTas, there’s a saying that goes “tie up the cat and perform the tithi”. So I was quite amused when I saw a cat polish off a rather large mound of rice outside a “tithi hotel” yesterday. The rice had been put out on a plantain leaf, evidently deliberately for the cat. From getting tied up during tithis to getting mounds of rice, the cat has come a long way.

Coffee, sugar and cream

A couple of weeks back, my wife and I had a long discussion on the operations of the coffee counter at Maiya’s in Jayanagar. It was an interesting discussion since while I was extremely familiar with the operations there (having gone there almost every other day for the last year), the wife was seeing them for the first time.

My hypothesis was that it was the structure of the coffee+tiffin combo and not accounting for multiple orders in one ticket that caused the congestion. The wife’s diagnosis was rather different – she recognised the sugar counter as the bottleneck.

Most South Indian restaurants have ready two kinds of boiling milk – one with sugar and one without, and your choice of milk (or a linear combination) can be added to decoction to make coffee of the required sweetness for you. Maiya’s does it differently. They only have unsweetened milk, and you need to add the sugar yourself.

So there is sugar placed in a bowl beyond the coffee counter where you add the sugar, get yourself a spoon (inconveniently placed before the coffee counter which means you stretch across) and go on while stirring the coffee. For non-regular customers (my untested hypothesis is that most Maiya’s customers are regulars), this is a novelty and leads to inefficiency of the full queue.

The wife argued that if Maiya’s were to keep both sweetened and unsweetened milk (like other restaurants), sugar could come pre-mixed in the coffee and the bottleneck could be eliminated. Since the barista doesn’t multitask (he fills exactly one cup at a time), there is no problem in miscommunication, etc.

The problem is that turnover of the unsweetened milk in other establishments is not high enough to maintain quality. The thing with the milk is that it needs to be constantly stirred, or at least poured from, for cream to not form in it (such cream can make the coffee gross). When the demand for a particular kind of milk (usually unsweetened) is low, it is not stirred enough, and cream forms. And then when you ask for coffee without sugar (or “less sugar” – remember linear combinations of the milks are possible) you end up with cream in your coffee.

This happened to me twice in the last three days. On Saturday I was having coffee at Hatti (opposite Maiya’s), asked for “strong, less sugar”, which meant I got some of the unsweetened milk, which means there was cream in my coffee. I had to spit out some to make it palatable. And the story repeated itself at the Vasudev Adigas in Jayanagar 8th Block on Sunday. Nice tasting coffee made gross by the cream.

It is to solve this problem that Maiya’s perhaps has only one kind of milk – it is constantly boiling away and being poured from, and there is no cream. And you get superior quality coffee. For which I’m willing to pay a premium.

No dosa on Saturdays and Sundays

Back when I was a student at IIM Bangalore a decade ago, I had tried to run this series on this blog (its predecessor, to be precise) on “delivery mechanisms in South Indian Fast Food restaurants”. I had half a mind to do a project on that, too, but then worse sense prevailed, and I did some random shyte on post offices.

Anyway, given that I’ve been living alone for a year now, I tend to frequent South Indian Fast Food Restaurants fairly often for breakfast (and tiffin, sometimes), and thought I should resume this series.

So this morning I went to “duplicate Brahmin’s” for breakfast. This is a place in Jayanagar 4th Block (next to the 560041 post office) and should not be confused with the “original Brahmin’s” in Shankarpuram. I don’t know if this Brahmins has anything to do with that Brahmins, though I’m pretty sure people would have outraged about a restaurant with a (upper) casteist name in these times. Some hypotheses go that this restaurant was started by disgruntled employees of the “original” Brahmins. Anyway, it doesn’t matter since the food here is pretty good (though not as good as at the original Brahmins).

This restaurant has aped a large number of features from the “original” Brahmins. The first is a limited menu – there are only some five or six items made daily. This is usually a good feature of fast food restaurants since it results in aggregation of demand and lower wastage, resulting in lower costs. It also results in significantly quicker service since there are only so many “lines” that need to be maintained in the kitchen.

The other feature this has aped from the “original Brahmin’s” is that there is no sambar. While this might shock Tamilians and North Indians, it’s a fairly normal thing in Bangalore. In fact, Sambar with breakfast is not normal for Bangalore, and most “traditional” restaurants only serve chutney. The advantage of this is (as Pavan pointed) that people can hold their plates in their hands (chutney is cold, unlike hot sambar), so you don’t need that much table space!

There are normally six items on the menu in the duplicate Brahmin’s (apart from beverages) – idli, vada, kesribhath, kharabhath, “ricebhath” (a redundant term like Avenue Road, I know; and this is only served during lunch. It’s a catchall term encompassing “tomato bhath”, “veg pulao”, puLiyOgare, chitrAnna, etc.) and masala dosa. And the odd man out is the last one for the rest are “made to stock”. Masala dosa is usually “made to order” since its quality “decays” quite quickly after it’s made.

It was pleasantly surprising to see a board saying “no masala dosa on Saturdays and Sundays” when I went to duplicate Brahmin’s this morning. The restaurant was already fairly crowded when I went, and there was a queue about five people long at the cash counter. The restaurant is designed in a way that there is this one not-so-large counter across which everything (coupons, food, beverages) is served, and there was a crowd today at every part of the counter (only the cash counter had a queue, at the rest of the places people just crowded around).

That’s where the “no masala dosa on weekends” board makes sense. With the dosa being made to order, people have to linger around the  counter once they’ve handed in their order until they have received their dosa. And given the rather small size of the counter and the weekend crowds, this simply leads to unnecessary crowding and shoving. It also seems like the demand for Masala Dosa at duplicate Brahmin’s is not high or predictable enough to warrant making it to stock. And hence, it’s a rational decision to ration the supply of dosas (to zero) on weekends.

The question is why the restaurant makes dosas at all (on weekdays), given that the original Brahmin’s doesn’t. The answer to this lies in a cost-benefit analysis. On weekdays, the supply chain is not tight and there are no people crowding at the counter. This means that the strain imposed on the system by people waiting around for their dosas is not too high.

Studying fast food restaurants can be a fascinating exercise.

 

Ramzan walking in Jakarta

Ever since I stopped being vegetarian in 2011, I’ve started indulging in the so-called “Ramzan walks”. The concept is as it states – basically a bunch of you go to this Muslim dominated area where special stalls are set up so that people breaking the fast can indulge. Food at such stalls is generally of a very high quality, so you have a large number of non-fasters, which includes a large number of non-Muslims also indulging.

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I somehow missed going on one such last year, but have done so in 2011 and 2012 (in Bangalore, in Frazer Town) and 2013 in Mumbai (Mohammed Ali Road), and generally enjoyed them.

And this time was going to be different, and special, since this is the first time ever I’m in a Muslim-majority country during Ramzan. Though I’m basically stuck in this hotel with access to little else but two adjacent malls, I got lucky in that one of these two malls decided to have a food festival to celebrate Ramzan. I wasn’t able to go the last two days since I was meeting people for dinner (one of the said dinner counterparties was vegetarian and the other(s) demanded a more formal setting), but made amends today.

So the open courtyard of this mall called La Piazza (in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta) has a large number of stalls set up. You have these cash counters where you pay up and get a prepaid smart card. Once this is obtained you can walk up to any counter and buy food from there upon swiping the said card. An excellent and efficient system to ensure fast processing, keep track of revenues (from the point of view of the organisers) and offer a hassle-free experience for customers.

The big challenge, of course, was the lack of knowledge of the language. While Bahasa uses the Roman script (because of which you are able to “read” stuff), almost no one here speaks any English, so trying to figure out what was what, and what to eat was a huge challenge.

We started with the safe option of the Chicken Satay (I had figured out through Rosetta stoning over the last few days that Ayam is Chicken), which is something we were already aware of. It was absolutely excellent. Next we decided to get a “rice item”. I saw someone at the adjacent table eating something and decided to hunt for that specific thing. I finally found it – “Nasi Bebek Madura” (Nasi is rice; Bebek is duck and Madura is an island off Java). It was extremely spicy but the leftover Satay sauce tempered matters.

We followed this up with a meat-based “kaDubu” equivalent, which was excellent once again, and rounded things off with a local dessert (a lot of random things poured over crushed ice), which was quite nice, too.

This food festival goes on for another week, so if you’re going to be near Kelapa Gading, you should surely attend. The organisation is top-notch. I already mentioned about the simplified payment dynamics. Apart from this, sufficient tables have been set up (both sitting and standing types) all over the place, and there are people cleaning the tables and floors at regular intervals. The variety in food is astounding and just the atmosphere itself is something worth taking in!

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Now I’m jealous of the wife since she has an opportunity to continue experiencing this for a few days more!

Mumbai breakfasts

Mumbai does breakfast like nobody else in India, or so my limited data points tell me. No, I’m not talking about the vada pav places here. I’m not even talking about the “Udipis” (sic, for that is how Mumbaikars spell and pronounce “Udupi”). I’m talking about the kind of places where you get poached eggs with yoghurt. Yes, really, that is a thing, and the number of such breakfast places in Mumbai is not funny.

I’d been to Cafe Zoe in Parel once before, a couple of years back when I met a friend for drinks and dinner there. I remember it as this “happening” place in the middle of this old mill complex, with loud dhinchak music and a rather youngish crowd. So when it was suggested that we begin our series of meetings with breakfast at Zoe, I wasn’t sure it was a great idea.

But the place inside was different (I have very hazy memories of my first visit there, thanks to the quality of its alcohol, I guess!). The skylight meant that it was rather well lit, and the music was soft and of the pleasing variety. The tables had been sparsely occupied (it’s a large place), but among those that were there, it seemed like people were working there. Laptops were out, though it was hard to find a single one not made by Apple. The place had a leisurely unhurried feel to it, and I could wait for a while without being hassled to place my order.

And the menu card told me that the place opens at seven thirty! Seven thirty! Nothing save the Darshinis are open in Bangalore at that hour. Even the Egg Factory, that wonderful set of breakfast places here, opens only at eight. And thinking back, Zoe is hardly alone. I’ve been to at least two or three similar places in Bandra that serve “hipster breakfast” well-at-a-leisurely-pace. It seems like such breakfast places are more like the norm in Mumbai.

And it is not hard to reason why – simple revenue management explains it. Real estate in Mumbai is so prohibitively expensive that rents form a huge part of restaurants’ costs. And given that it is a fixed cost (you pay the same rent irrespective of how many customers you serve), a good strategy is to “amortise” it – across a larger number of customers. Other costs of running a restaurant, like labour and cost of food, pale when compared to the cost of rent.

In a situation with high fixed costs, it makes no sense to utilise your resource only part of the time. Whether your restaurant is open for four hours a day (as some are) or for all the time local regulations permit you to be, the rent you pay is the same. And in the latter case, you are making much greater use of the fixed-cost resource at hand, which is a prudent strategy!

Opening for breakfast probably means adding an extra shift (or half a shift) for staff. It means running the restaurant at a time when there is no chance it is going to be full. It means keeping the kitchen open all the time, and “normal” principles of restaurant management probably suggest it’s not a good idea. But when your fixed costs are as high as they are in Mumbai, it makes sense to marginally increase the fixed costs (by paying for additional staff cost) in exchange for making significantly superior revenues.  And that is what the likes of Cafe Zoe do!

Utilisation at non-peak (non-lunch, non-dinner) hours is never high (except maybe on Sundays), but what matters is it being strictly positive. Low utilisation means it gives a leisurely feel to the place, and customers can be allowed to linger. People use the place as a meeting spot (coffee is very reasonably priced there, and you can get beer to fuel your meetings!). From the looks of it, some others use it as a workplace. And all this results in revenues for the restaurant, valuable when real estate costs are so high!

Surely other cities, such as Bangalore, can do with such places. In Bangalore, for example, there is a severe paucity of places to do breakfast meetings at. Traditional South Indian places are too hurried, and buffets are never a great place to do meetings (five star buffets have turned out to become a kind of “standard” place for breakfast meetings). There is the egg factory, of course, but there is none else! We could surely do with some of our “lunch restaurants” opening up for breakfast. Just that real estate costs here don’t offer as compelling a reason as they do in Mumbai!

And for the record, the poached eggs with yoghurt was absolutely outstanding. At least I hope the Egg Factory manages to replicate that here!

Coffee Pricing Dynamics

I had alluded to this coffee price war once before, but I believe it deserves fuller treatment, hence this other post. This is to do with the two coffee shops facing each other at the concurrence of 7th Main, 30th Cross and the “Diagonal Road” in Jayanagar – Maiya’s and Hatti Kaapi.

So Maiya’s opened for business sometime in 2008-09 (this was the period I was out of Bangalore, and it was there by the time I returned). On the ground floor, one the side, they opened a counter where they sold coffee. It was an efficient operation – you line up, buy the token and then move over to a window where you get unsweetened coffee in a ceramic cup, to which you add sugar as per requirement and move on. The coffee was generally excellent and pricing was always premium. In August 2014, when I started patronising it on a regular basis, a cup of coffee cost Rs. 18 and ten minutes of waiting (in line).

A month or two later came Hatti Kaapi, right across the road and facing Maiya’s. Hatti priced their coffee at Rs. 10 per cup, served in a glass tumbler. Sugar was pre-mixed into the milk, though you could ask for your desired level (no sugar, “less sugar” or “normal sugar”), which would be produced as a linear combination of sweetened and unsweetened milk. Hatti Kaapi served snacks also, and presently expanded its line selling cold coffee, juices and the like. Hatti has a larger customer-facing window than Maiya’s so the operations are rather smooth.

While people might have expected Maiya’s to drop their price in view of this newfound competition, they didn’t, though the cost of a cup of coffee for customers came down – from Rs. 18 and 10 minutes of waiting time, it came down to Rs. 18 and 5 minutes of waiting time. While several erstwhile regular customers crossed the road to the cheaper Hatti, based on anecdata (length of queue every time I go for a coffee, which is about once a day), it is unlikely that Maiya’s lost customers. The presence of two quality coffee shops close together possibly expanded the market and all seemed good.

However, it seems like Maiya’s decided that Hatti had got a competitive advantage by way of serving snacks along with their coffee and decided to replicate the strategy (note that Maiya’s has a full service restaurant upstairs, but this is about the “quick-coffee-and-snacks” market). So they started giving combo offers, where you would get a hot fried snack (choice of bajji, bOnDa, samosa and the likes) with coffee for Rs. 25. The snack would be served out of the same tiny window that served coffee, on paper plates with plastic spoons.

I must confess I’ve never purchased the combo (despite the attractive pricing; the snacks don’t look attractive enough to me), but I’m not sure about the impact that it’s been having on Maiya’s overall sales. I go back to anecdata (for I have no other data; and in my defence I have a large number of data points), and it seems like the average queue length at my arrival has remained the same from the time before Maiya’s started serving snacks (and after Hatti opened). However, I find that the total time taken in queue is now significantly higher – closer to the ten minutes from the time before Hatti’s setting up than the five minutes in the intergennum where Hatti was open but Maiya was not serving snacks.

And from my observations there, this is because the snacks have now messed up Maiya’s operations. Earlier, it was simple and linear. It’s a small passage where the Queue goes in a U-shape (unfortunately I haven’t taken pictures, and can’t find any online). At the base of the U is the cash counter and then you move to the side to get your coffee. A nice linear queue.

Now, snacks are served from the same window as the coffee, and since not everyone buys them, the ordering is broken. Also, it is the same token in which people have to get snacks and coffee at the same time, and that disrupts the queue further. Then, there are people who come back for their coffee later having taken the snacks earlier, and thus go straight to the coffee counter without going to the cash counter, messing up people’s expected wait times and leading to further chaos. In other words, thanks to serving snacks, the service time at Maiya’s has gone up, while the utilisation of the barista has gone down.

Hatti, on the other hand, makes full use of its corner location such that snack service doesn’t disrupt coffee service at all.

So the coffee at Maiya’s has effectively become more expensive again (Rs. 18 and 10 minutes), and with declining utilisation, my sense is that they are making significantly less money from their coffee counter now (including snacks) than they were before they started selling snacks. I really hope they will be able to simplify the operations of their coffee and snacks counters, else they risk losing more customers to Hatti. But then it seems like the snacks have become especially popular with Maiya’s regulars, so undoing the snacks service is also not an option.

Finally, here is a piece by the New Indian Express on this price war. As for me, I still prefer Maiya’s – the difference in quality of coffee does it for me. But if they don’t improve their operations soon enough, I might make the switch across the road.

Brewsky needs a webcam

When I moved from Rajajinagar 2nd Stage to Jayanagar 3rd Block around this time last year, one thing I missed in this part of town was a watering hole like Rajajinagar 2nd Stage’s 1522. It’s a brilliant pub. Not too expensive. Great atmosphere and decor. Great food. And after expansion, not too hard to get a table on weekdays.

Jayanagar missed such a place. You either had “shady bars” or places like Eden Park in 36th Cross which is ok (and has great paneer) but nothing spectacular, or downright teenager hangouts like Gandhi Bazaar’s SoHo. There was no “nice, clean, good to hang out” place like 1522 here.

And then Brewsky happened. It’s a microbrewery, though they didn’t get their brewing license for a long time (the Excise department was apparently having an issue in pricing the licenses). There’s a terrace with great views, and an indoor place (where you go iff there is no room on the terrace), and they make their own beer. And the beer is very good.

The only problem with Brewsky is that their beer menu is not consistent. They experiment frequently with new kinds of beers – which is frankly not a problem, but sometimes the choice can be severely limited. Like when I went there last Wednesday, there were only two kinds of beer available. Four days before that, however, there was the full complement of six. There have been other times in the past when I’ve been there only to find my choice of beer not being available.

What Brewsky needs is a Webcam. Basically the webcam was invented (as the story goes) to check if there was enough coffee in the communal coffee pot – for if you emptied the pot you were also responsible for refilling it. And so people could remotely track how much coffee was there in the pot and make their decision to have coffee based on the level.

What Brewsky needs, similarly, is a public board where they announce what they have on brew on that particular day. Their website sucks big time, but if they revamp that, it is a good place to put that information. So if I know that there are only two beers available, I’ll probably not go. If I want to have their India Pale Ale (which is generally very good) but it is not listed, then I’ll plan on going another day. And so forth.

The question that arises, however, is if Brewsky themselves have an incentive to put this information out. If their stocks are generally not on high, then indicating that there isn’t much variety available might push away customers and lead to low revenues on their fixed cost of real estate and waiters for that particular day. And they might just get overwhelmed with people on days when they have their full complement of beers.

But then if customers are consistently disappointed with their lack of choice, then in the long run they’ll lose such customers permanently. And that is not a good thing. Except for the fact that there is no comparable place in the Jayanagar-JP Nagar area.

Ganesha, wine and vodka

I know the wife has been intending to blog about this for a while now, but in this big bad blogosphere, intent counts for nothing, and given that she hasn’t written so far, I should go ahead and write this blog post. The basic funda is that Ganesha idols in “traditional” Indian culture, wine in European culture and smirnoff plain vodka in “modren” (sic) Indian culture are all similar.

So two days back I got invited to a “bring your own liquor” party. Now, there were other attendees who mentioned they were bringing stuff that I knew I was interested in drinking, like Desmondji Agave and Amrut Two Indies Rum. From that perspective, I knew that I wouldn’t be drinking whatever I carried. Yet, not carrying anything would make me look like a cheap guy, and this is one circle where I want to preserve my reputation. So what did I do? I picked up a bottle of Smirnoff plain vodka, simply because it is the most “fungible” drink. I’ll explain later.

Similarly, when you go for a function in India and don’t know what to gift, and are “too traditional” to gift gift cards, and think it’s not appropriate to give cash, you give a Ganesha idol. So for example after our wedding we had tonnes of Ganesha idols at home (similarly after our housewarming last year). Why did people gift Ganeshas? Because it is the most “fungible”. Again I’ll expect later.

And the wife reliably informs me that in Spain, when you have to go for a party but don’t know what to take, you take a bottle of wine. I don’t know about the fungibility of wine, but the fact that it is universally drunk, can be shared widely and is seen as a classy symbol makes it a popular choice of gift. So what connects these three?

So what connects? Fungibility of course. Economists have long argued that the best gift is cash, for the recipient can utilise that cash to buy the item that gives her maximum utility. Any non-cash gift decreases utility from the maximum that can be achieved by giving cash. This is a different discussion and I’ll not touch upon that now.

When you are going to a party, you can’t take along cash, so since the top choice is not available you take the “second best” option. What is the “second best” option in this case? Something that is close to cash, or something whose general utility is so high that the recipient values it as much as she would value the equivalent amount of cash. Of course you don’t assume that the recipient will sell your gift for cash, so you gift something that is a “safe option”, that you think they will have the least chance of rejecting.

So why did I take vodka? It is a universally popular, colourless odourless tasteless liquid, and I estimated that there was a good probability that the demand for that is going to be high. So even if I don’t drink what I carried, I posited, someone else will, and that will help me deliver maximal utility to the party.

With wine in Spain, you know everyone drinks and appreciates it, and there is a chance that it might be opened at the party itself. Even if it isn’t, wine in a sealed bottle doesn’t “depreciate”, and the host can then pass on some of the unused bottles at a party  that she attends! And soon there will be the virtuous wine circle. So essentially wine doesn’t disappoint, and is put to good use.

And it is exactly the same story with Ganesha idols. Like wine, it has intrinsic value. Who doesn’t like idols of a cute elephant-headed God? Maybe people who already have too many such idols? But then Ganesha idols don’t depreciate either, so all you need to do is to keep it in a safe place and pull it out the next time you’re going to a function! And thus the virtuous circle of Ganeshas will continue!

As it happened, at the end of Tuesday’s party, the bottles of Desmondji and Amrut Two Indies were empty. The Smirnoff I took remained unopened, as did another similar bottle which was possibly brought by another safe player. But I’m not concerned. I’m sure the hosts will consume it in due course, and even if they don’t, it will come of good use when they go to a party next!