Speciality Restaurants Ltd, India’s only listed fine dining restaurant, is actively seeking to be a licensed partner of an international quick service restaurant (QSR) chain that is keen on an Indian foray.Also, “in the next six months”, Speciality will go international: its joint-venture restaurants will open in Singapore and London. “We are also close to signing a seven-restaurant deal for our brands Mainland China and Global Grill in places like Dubai Mall Burjuman Mall,” said Anjan Chatterjee, MD of Speciality.Speciality is also foraying into outdoor catering under the brand Mobifeast.Considered more lucrative than fine dining, the QSR format already has the presence of Speciality’s peer Jubilant Foodworks which operates Domino’s Pizza and enjoys enviable valuations.Speciality’s talks with the foreign QSR chain are “at the final stage”, he said. Speciality may adopt its model or take over one of the QSRs.  “We could have done it ourselves but that would have taken time.”Unlike Jubilant, however, Speciality has so far operated only in the fine dining space with its brands like Mainland China, Oh! Calcutta and Sigree. “Going forward, we would be growing inorganically and add an interesting model of QSR in the line of pizza or burger chains which are becoming more and more popular. We’ve the benefit of some respectable amount of cash sitting in the balance sheet. So, we would rather acquire a brand,” said Chatterjee. As for catering, Speciality has been undertaking such services on a small scale for select clients after Oh! Calcutta made a name for itself as a caterer of choice for the Rastrapati Bhawan dinners.“We started understanding the catering sector and slowly built infrastructure, including a centralised back-end unit at the Sankrail food park near Howrah,” he said.Chatterjee sees huge growth in catering services as urban families stop self-cooking for domestic functions, get-togethers and festive events, and hire caterers instead.QSR and catering forays would help Speciality protect its margins which have been under stress as economic slowdown has been forcing people to cut down on discretionary spending like fine dining, he said.@SumitMoitra

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