Local cuisine provides palatable profit

While some entrepreneurs are hungry for expansion, restaurateur Dinu Pistalu’s appetite is sated with the present success of his eatery Babadochia. He told Business Review how the tastes of local diners had shaped his business recipe and how the restaurant’s progress to date is just a hors d’oeuvre.

Anda Sebesi

Starting a business on the restaurant scene could mean biting off more than you can chew, as the local market is full to bursting at the moment. But while there are many players active in this tasty domain, there is still room for new entries, especially on well defined niches.

This is what Dinu Pistalu, managing partner of Babadochia, was banking on two years ago, when he decided to set up his own restaurant serving Romanian cuisine to fill a gap in the market.

“I started this business in 2009 when I realized that there weren’t that many restaurants serving Romanian cuisine in Bucharest. The concept of national specialties from Moldavia, Transylvania, the Banat, Walachia and the Dobruja recalls the doyenne of Romanian cuisine before 1990 – Sanda Marin,” says the entrepreneur. He adds that discovering Radu Anton Roman at that time also helped him to fully understand the diversity of Romanian cooking around the country. Pistalu chose a specific niche targeting a clear segment of diners and focusing on a particular idea: that of evoking the tastes and dishes of childhood. “Babadochia restaurant is mainly about old, traditional culinary arts. But it is also about the cuisine invented in the cottages of Heath, the sheepfolds of the Maramures area, and the houses of the Danube Delta, Moldavia and Bucharest,” says the restaurateur. He also paid attention to the food embraced by the old gastronomes and culinary historians. “This is why some of our traditional dishes have their original names, in order to respect the Romanian pioneers of gastronomy,” he adds.

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The entrepreneur chose to set up this kind of business because he wanted to benefit from the huge potential of the local market at that time. And like any businessperson, Pistalu saw profits and challenges instead of difficulties in developing his restaurant.

“I considered this lack of restaurants serving Romanian cuisine as potentially profitable, because of the increased demand for such dishes, especially from foreign tourists,” he says. “We identified this market niche and we thought that the authentic Romanian tastes could catch the fancy of those people who want both to go out and to remain loyal to traditional cuisine.”

Any business that positions itself on a specific market niche takes a gamble because of its limited number of potential customers, and so the market approach needs to be very clear. “It’s probably hard to believe but promoting this business and our intention to create a specific outlook for this kind of restaurant needed a lot of patience from us over time. And I can add that our mission is not fully accomplished yet,” says the managing partner.

He notes that Romanians are still at the stage where their main choice is between a Romanian and Italian restaurant for example, which is a tremendous challenge for him.

If he started another venture he says it wouldn’t be a restaurant. “I would probably choose a less perishable business. It is a very dynamic market with a huge responsibility. We always want to fully satisfy our customers in order to make them come back to our restaurant and recommend us to other potential diners,” says Pistalu.

Each day is a challenge for the businessman, from choosing the best supplier in terms of quality-price ratio to trying to convince a Romanian to eat local food or providing the best service to groups of foreign tourists. Turning to the specifics of his market segment, the restaurateur says the competition is not yet too tough. “There are no players with a similar business concept to ours. Each restaurant serving Romanian cuisine tries to be as original as possible, starting from its decoration to the creation of its menu,” says Pistalu.

On the topic of what differentiates his eatery from the crowd, the entrepreneur says that in Romanian cuisine you cannot invent anything new. So originality is crucial for the success of such a business. “We saw several Romanian restaurants with different styles of decoration, from rustic to modern. We chose Art Nouveau, the inter-war style, and we offer dishes for all tastes.”

As for future plans, Pistalu prefers to remain cautious. “We intend to live in the here and now,” he says. A rational entrepreneur, he intends to concentrate on the present situation of his business rather than making big plans for the coming years.

“I think that each restaurant tries to offer high quality services and dishes. I believe that it is more realistic to limit our future plans to this goal. We still have many things to develop in this business and we simply cannot think about the future,” says the restaurateur.

He adds that when the eatery reaches a certain level of development, that will be the time to consider further plans for Babadochia.

anda.sebesi@business-review.ro