Labour of love pays off for curry restaurant founder

Deputy Business Editor

Saturday 31 March 2012

IT is testament to the sunny outlook Monir Mohammed has on life that he can look back on his formative working experiences and laugh.

RIGHT RECIPE: Restaurant owner Monir Mohammed has had success with his Mother India premises and Wee Curry Shops but is not planning to expand further. Picture: Colin Mearns

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At the time, the groups of people piling out of the pubs and into the restaurant where he worked used to cause him to shake with fear.

The founder of Mother India said: "I was 16 and it was a terrifying experience of serving all these people coming in not for the food but for drink.

"So there would be orders for two curries, two rice and four pints. They didn't care what they were eating."Luckily that era has finished but when I was there I thought there was no way I would be serving for the rest of my life. "At the time it was quite harrowing but it shaped me. "It meant I wanted to serve nice people, nice food and not have to work to the early hours of the morning."Dreams of becoming an architect began to go downhill when Mr Mohammed started working weekends in restaurants at 14.By 16, having failed his O-levels, he was working full-time as a kitchen porter and waiter.His first attempt at running a restaurant was a "disaster" and he lost his savings in the venture in Whitburn, West Lothian.Returning to his native Glasgow, he targeted a job in a burgeoning business which he thought was going places.There is genuine affection when Mr Mohammed talks about Ashoka founder Balbir Singh Sumal. He said: "That was the first time I had seen someone who was a professional restaurateur. He was doing things from the heart rather than from a monetary point. "It was a eureka moment. Balbir was enjoying what he was doing and there was no negativity."Mr Mohammed progressed steadily from waiter to manager and even began to fill in on days when the chef was off. But he still wanted to be his own boss. "Nobody has the ambition to be a waiter all their life." However, his next attempt in Ayrshire "ran out of money very fast". That led to a different menu philosophy with more traditional dishes and fresh ingredients when the first Mother India opened in 1990.Even then there were difficult days, with the business moving premises twice before settling on Westminster Terrace in 1993, where it still remains. "Around 1996, we started doing really well. We had savings to push the business, redecorate and build on it. Luckily the reputation was spreading and it grew stronger and stronger."A potential problem over a lease led to an expansion of the business. Mr Mohammed said: "I'm not sure if I'm entrepreneurial. Sometimes things just kind of happened rather than being planned."There was uncertainty over whether we were going to stay at Westminister Terrace. "So in 1997, we took the premises in Buccleuch Street as the Wee Curry Shop. "That was really just in case things did not work out. I needed to have something as a back-up. "I was so scared of the past when things failed and could not go back to that situation of being totally skint."I thought with the Wee Curry Shop, if the worst came to the worst, I could operate it myself."Other Wee Curry Shops have since opened on Ashton Lane and Byres Road. Nine years ago, the site of the first Mother India's Cafe across from Kelvingrove came up."It was a big turning point as that got busy very quickly."Since then, there has been the opening of an Edinburgh restaurant and two delicatessens."We used to have a deli counter in Mother India in the mid- 1990s. It was a big fridge in the restaurant which was good but it was taking up too much space. "It wasn't busy enough to have it sitting there but we always thought one day we would open a chilled food section."While current trading is "steady" there are no plans to expand further, especially as funding is not easy to acquire."I'm not intending to open anything else. Bank managers don't want to know about restaurants, even if you have been doing it a long time and your accounts are in order. "So it is all about making sure you better what you have got. You never sit here and think it can't get any better as every restaurant has got faults."With one teenage son at university studying structural engineering and a younger boy with autism, Mr Mohammed, 48, is candid enough to admit selling up one day may be an option."We don't know in the future about how long I can keep doing this and whether anyone else would take over, but I wouldn't force anybody to do something they didn't want to."Whatever happens, I would always like to keep one place to run it for fun rather than it being the be all and end all."I'm very lucky. It is tiring and sometimes you do question why you do it but there's nothing else I want to do."

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Labour of love pays off for curry restaurant founder

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