During a lunch meeting in 2016, the first Brik Oven restaurant was born on Bengaluru’s thriving Church Street. Anirudh Nopany and Sreeram Anvesh spoke to ET HospitalityWorld about their brand and outlook beyond the city.
A graduate of Le Cordon Bleu in London, Nopany was thinking about opening his own space at the time, and Anvesh (who has a pronounced sweet tooth), having worked in the corporate sector as a tax consultant for several years, was also interested in doing something with thick shakes—in fact, the day they had lunch was also their first Church Street location that became available, they shared.
“We started with the first outlet in 2016 – in fact, on January 23 this year, we will complete seven years of the brand,” said Anvesh.
The early days were tumultuous, Nopany remembers how he and his partner, along with their circle of friends, worked together non-stop for the two weeks that Brick Oven opened for customers.
“We entered the space and had no idea what we were doing – we knew we wanted to do pizzas and we wanted to do fat shakes at that point. We wanted a wood stove inside that little place in Church Street. It took us about eight months to get this place up and running. At that moment it was just me, (Sree)ram (Anvesh), a bunch of our friends just standing around. As soon as we turned the open sign, given that Church Street is a busy area, we got a lot of pedestrian traffic. I think for the first few days we just served them for free because we didn’t have a proper POS at that point. We were just having fun. Our friends, girlfriends, friends stood there and served. We all had a good time doing this because it was like a pizza party,” Nopany recalled.
Since its inception, the brand has also tried to control its supply chain and managed to localize it as much as possible – they even produce their own cheese.
In 2018, they started looking for locations for a central kitchen and restaurant space in Bengaluru as their second location, and found it in Indiranagar. This is currently the flagship store of the brand.
“Indiranagar served us well because we wanted to keep our central kitchen there to standardize production—regardless of how many outlets we opened in the future, we wanted to make sure it was the same product,” Avnesh said, adding that they succeeded achieve standardization.