Swati and Sardar

Last month in April 2023, one of the most viral memes was the meeting of Madhuri Dixit and Tim Cook.?

Through the board behind and the seating bench design, I realised like some of my friends, that the joint was Swati Snacks.?(Gujaratis write snacks only not snakes).?Vada Pav hogged the limelight but the other two dishes on the table are uncommon dishes available at very few places:?Veg DhanShak & Pankhi.?Veg Dhanshak will be sin for Parsis but for Jains like me, the only option nearest to the famous Parsi dish. Pankhi is difficult to make at home and available at very few food joints.

Vada pav is a dish which will get 4/5 score at many places in Mumbai and Maharashtra.?Ashok Vada Pav near Kirti is 5/5 in my book.?Have not had the Rs 100 costing Vada Pav at Swati Snacks and will never have. NRI types have street food at Swati in hygienic conditions. Madhuri Dixit become one, once Nene got added to her name.

My childhood was spent between Swati Snacks and Sardar Pavbhaji, 100-150 meters from both.?At that time if someone would have told us that the CEO of the largest company in the world will have food at Swati, we would call him mad.?Sardar was far more famous then.?Relatives from Gujarat came to have Pav Bhaji out there.?It used to sell and still sells butter with little bhaji and pav with it.?When per capita incomes were low there was a lot of appetite for that butter with bhaji toppings.?Now, of course, incomes are higher and bellies even bigger, so butter is a sin.?Now Sardar is more visited by blue-collar workers irrespective of their belly size.?Swati was then just a food joint started by women of the family running Swati Diamonds.?It was based out of two shops, with one having an open kitchen and and the other the seating place.?There were no doors.?The shutters would literally go up when the restaurant opened.?Today a few more shops are added and all are air-conditioned.

Sardar had an opposite start.?Started on a wheeled cart, from there to one shop and now a third one.?It still has an open kitchen with a cart still being there.?

The similarities were limited then, more so now. How Swati created a niche for itself in an overcrowded dine-out market with a proposition: Hygienic street food and become a choice for NRIs and rich SoBo Vegetarians (cannot get richer than Mukesh Ambani) versus how Sardar stuck to its tried and tested (or tasted?) butter plus something dish is a case for case Studies in business schools.??Swati today finds itself on top of the Veg Cuisine lists, Sardar does not.?But still Sardar has its niche.?The only thing common between the two now is the queues outside both on weekends.

Both still thrive, but when Kumarmangalam Birla went with his friends to have Butter Bhaji at Sardaar and his family was a bit aghast (from Men of Steel: India's Business leaders in candid conversation by Vir Sanghvi).??No one was aghast when Tim Cook visited Swati Snacks.?

#sardarpavbhaji #swatisnacks #swati #snacks #TimCook #madhuridixit