Curry Up and Go Broke: The Gourmet Path to Pauperdom
By Shyam Mudireddy

Every restaurant begins with a dream. Perhaps it’s your grandmother’s recipe, a love of hosting friends, or the fantasy of running a buzzing café with your name glowing above the door. Add in a few cheerful Excel sheets full of optimistic numbers, friends who encourage you, and the irresistible lure of India’s ever-growing appetite for dining out, and the plan feels foolproof. After all, people must eat, and good food surely means good business. But as anyone who has actually tried will tell you, the gap between the dream and the reality of running a food venture in India is wide—and often fatal.

In Curry Up and Go Broke: The Gourmet Path to Pauperdom, industry veteran Shyam Mudireddy dismantles the romantic notion of the restaurant business with honesty and humour. With over a decade spent in hospitality across India and the UK, he has seen both soaring highs and devastating lows. Partnerships that began with excitement collapsed under the weight of money and egos. Lease agreements that once promised security became financial shackles. Staff, painstakingly trained, walked out without warning, often taking recipes and loyal customers with them. Suppliers who once delivered their best quietly swapped quality for shortcuts and side deals. Each disappointment chips away at the foundation until the whole venture comes crashing down.

And then there are the aggregators—the sleek food delivery platforms that once promised salvation. They bring you customers but demand a slice so big that little is left on your plate. Their discounts train diners to chase offers instead of flavour, and their policies change faster than you can update your menu. In no time, your customers are loyal not to you, but to the app that shows them a cheaper option. What was meant to be a partnership begins to feel more like a hostage situation, one where the ransom is your margin.

But perhaps the hardest truth is emotional, not financial. Shyam Mudireddy captures the heartbreak of watching empty tables where once there was life, of losing teams you spent months building, and of serving food made with care only to see it dismissed by a customer chasing coupons. Yet even in these painful accounts, there is humour—sometimes absurd, sometimes bitter, but always real. His stories of staff walkouts, unreasonable customers, and bureaucratic theatrics are told with wit that makes the pain easier to swallow.

This is not a glossy celebration of restaurant success. It is a survival guide dressed as satire, a behind-the-scenes tour of the pitfalls that doom most food businesses in India. Shyam doesn’t simply recount failures—he explains why they happen, why they repeat, and why passion alone can never carry a venture across the finish line. From partnerships and leases to staffing, suppliers, overheads, and aggregators, he takes the reader through the 360-degree reality of building and losing a food business.

And yet, Curry Up and Go Broke is not written to discourage. It is written to open eyes. If, after reading, you still choose to chase the dream of running your own restaurant, you will do so armed with the truth, not seduced by fantasy. You will know the odds, the traps, and the hidden costs. And if you decide against it, you will come away with a deeper respect for those who try—and perhaps a little relief that you didn’t mortgage your future on a recipe.

Whether you are an aspiring restaurateur, a weary veteran of the industry, or simply a diner curious about the chaos behind the kitchen doors, this book is for you. It will make you laugh, it may make you wince, and it will certainly make you think twice. Because in the end, the restaurant business is a recipe few survive—and most, sooner or later, curry up and go broke.