These could be scenes from any restaurant in India's Silicon Valley, except that Gupta, Peter and several others of their ilk are techies who, bitten by a (fast-spreading) entrepreneurial bug, have metamorphosed into restaurateurs.

While these two prefer to focus on familiar cuisines, others such as Roomali With A View (specialty Kashmiri, Rajasthani, Awadhi and Punjabi) and Shiok (authentic far eastern) prefer to trod the road less travelled. "We serve the best of the north down south," declares Ashutosh Kapoor, Deputy gm (Brand and Strategy), IBM India, who set up Roomali With A View three years ago in partnership with his wife Deepali, who runs its day-to-day affairs, while he focuses his energies on his day job.

Kapoor and Peter of Dal Fryday continue to hold on to their regular careers, but others such as Mast Kalandar's Gupta (and husband Gaurav Jain) and Madhu Menon of Shiok have chucked up promising it careers to become full-time restaurateurs. "We always knew that we wanted to do something on our own and this gave us the chance to do it," says Gupta as she makes a brief appearance from her bustling kitchen.

A five-minute drive from Kapoor's restaurant, Madhu Menon, md, Shiok, is busy cooking up a far eastern storm for diners. Rather than delegate cooking to his chefs, Menon, a self-confessed 'web head', is enveloped in a mountain of steam as he tosses, cuts and dices an avalanche of orders for his guests. Menon's love affair with this kind of food started while he was studying in Australia. "We had to stop over either at Singapore or Malaysia on the way to Australia and I had my first brush with this cuisine there," Menon tells us the next day over a late lunch. In a market dominated by "Indian" Chinese restaurants that serve the usual cornflour-laden soups and heavily-spiced chicken and cauliflower Manchurians, Menon is trying to create a niche for authentic Oriental cuisine.

Abhik Biswas, who has worked with TCS, Verifone, ca and Cisco, is another member of this tribe, and started Biryani Merchant in September 2004. "We wanted a one-stop shop for a unique biryani experience," says Biswas, who teamed up with his close friend Vishy Shenoy (former marketing head of the Maharaja Group in Sri Lanka) for this venture. For nearly a year prior to its launch, Biswas and Shenoy spent days sampling an assortment of authentic Lucknowi, Chettinad and other biryani in the bylanes of Lucknow and Chennai to get the taste just right. "We would try a couple of spoons of each, get a fix on its distinct taste and then replicate it on a large scale in Bangalore," says Biswas.

At Mast Kalandar, the aim is less lofty and more utilitarian. Gupta and her techie husband Gaurav Jain are content catering to the ever-burgeoning demand for clean, hygienic north Indian food from the hundreds of it companies around its four units. "We have used some retail expertise we picked up previously (Wipro Technologies, TCS and Vensys, an Australian it company where Jain worked closely with Pizza Hut) and have even put in place a retail matrix to run our business," says Gupta. While she manages the kitchen and back-end of the restaurant, her husband looks after marketing and customer services. The matrix allows them to keep tabs on each of their units and manage supply chain, logistics and even unexpected demand for extra staff easily. Kapoor even has a web-enabled system that allows him to log in remotely to check on Roomali With A View's operations.

Given the crowd at these outlets (when we visited Mast Kalandar at 1.10 p.m., we found the place packed; at Roomali With A View, patrons, ranging from large families to groups of techies, crowd the place in the evening), these code jocks have clearly got their strategy spot on. However, all of them are quick to admit that running a restaurant is a difficult business and that they are only just coming to grips with it. Biswas of Biryani Merchant, for instance, has tied up with Collabrant Incubators, a firm that specialises in taking over and scaling high-potential businesses, to try and ramp it up from just one restaurant and a handful of kiosks to 300 restaurants nationwide. Under this arrangement, Biswas will continue to be part of the management of this chain, but the responsibility of scaling up the business now lies with Collabrant Incubators, a Bangalore-based business strategy and incubation services provider. "In the long term, our business requires scale and some capital infusion to be successful," he argues, adding that he hopes to close around Rs 9-10 crore in funding soon.

Elsewhere, Peter of Dal Fryday had more mundane issues-involving money-to deal with when he decided to take a plunge into the restaurant business. "I did not have the required collateral to qualify for loans from most banks and financial institutions and my plans were rejected several times. As an MBA working for multinationals, you are used to travelling in luxury, staying at the finest hotels, having an expense account and face no problems setting up meetings with customers. The rejections made me realise that I had to succeed on the basis of my wits and determination," says Peter. All the techies in this report faced, and overcame, similar problems.

Despite these odds, these techies-turned-restaurateurs have ambitious expansion plans lined up. Perhaps the most ambitious is Biswas' plan for Biryani Merchant. He envisages having 300 outlets of all sizes-from small take-out kiosks to full-scale sit-down restaurants-over the next three years. Gupta and Jain of Mast Kalandar, meanwhile, plan to follow the IT industry to Tier-II towns such as Hyderabad and Pune, and Kapoor is planning to extend his reach within Bangalore. Interestingly, Peter of Dal Fryday is looking beyond the restaurant business and plans to foray into the resorts business in the long term. "We are just at the tip of the iceberg and the journey ahead promises to be a challenging, yet rewarding, one," says Jain.

And, that's clearly food for thought.