“The Happy Hour” with Mr. Ashish Dev Kapur

The event was greeted amongst members with a lot of excitement as members eagerly were looking forward to meeting “Asia’s Best Young Entrepreneur 2008”, Mr Ashish Dev Kapur.

As one of India’s leading niche hospitality entrepreneurs, Ashish has donned many hats. He worked for GE Capital across North America before returning to Inida to co-found Yo! China which is India’s first & largest chain of Chinese restaurants. Apart from Yo! China, Ashish is also the co-founder of Dimsum Bros, The Wine Company, Antares, Whisky Samba amongst others.

During the conversation with Ritu Agarwal (FLO GB Member) & Manisha Srivastava (Secretary FLO Kolkata), Ashish made 3 of his favourite cocktails and unleashed a tsunami of tips for members to take notes on, which would help them in making interesting drinks for their guests in the future. He spoke about the hospitality business and the path of recovery post-pandemic.

He stressed on the importance of every experience of his guest being a “60 minutes vacation” when they enter any of his restaurants and the importance he gives to every detail to ensure that the guests go back home feeling that the evening added value. His advice to the people who were wanting to enter the hospitality business in the future was to get into it only if one is passionate about this business and visualises this business as “soul” and not because of “ego”.

Being an entrepreneur himself, Ashish advises to people across all industries was to take this pandemic as a wakeup call and give hygiene top priority, not only from the guest point of view but also the staff. He spoke about the model of his business and his success formula. On a lighter note, he spoke about his passion for mixology and his creativity behind every drink that is served to his guest. He has a history of making some exotic cuisines, which otherwise were very convoluted, more accessible to the people in their truest form.

The audience too had a number of questions, which Ashish replied to very patiently. The program was brought to an end with Sunira Chamaria (FLO Chairperson 2020-21) felicitating Ashish and the vote of thanks was given by Shradha Saraf (Vice-Chairperson).