How Chirag Chhajer Built India's Largest Burmese Restaurant Chain by Breaking Every Rule
In this episode, Ashish Tulsian speaks with Chirag Chhajer about building Burma Burma from a single restaurant in the bylanes of Fort to a 22-outlet, nine-city chain, all without a central kitchen, without discounting, and without following a single piece of conventional restaurant industry advice.
Chirag Chhajer
Co-Founder, Hunger Pangs Pvt. Ltd. (Burma Burma)
Chirag Chhajer is a Bombay-based entrepreneur and co-founder of Burma Burma, India's largest Burmese restaurant chain, with 22 restaurants across nine cities. With a background in his family's textile trading business and no formal restaurant experience, he co-founded Burma Burma in 2014 alongside Ankit and spent nine years bootstrapping the brand before raising ** crores across four rounds of funding. Burma Burma operates on a single menu, single price, and single service standard across all locations with no central kitchen, no discounting, and a food cost that sits at 18%, among the lowest in the country.
In this episode, Ashish Tulsian sits down with Chirag Chhajer, co-founder of Burma Burma, for a wide-ranging and remarkably transparent conversation on what it actually takes to build a scalable, profitable restaurant brand in India — and why most of the rules people follow are the reason most restaurants fail.
Chirag traces his journey from a Marwari textile family in Bombay, three formative years cooking in a shared apartment in Australia, and a decade in his father's business, to co-founding Burma Burma in 2014 with zero restaurant experience and a concept that every industry veteran told him was a mistake: a vegetarian, no-alcohol, single-cuisine casual dining restaurant serving food most Indians had never heard of.
He breaks down the business decisions that defined Burma Burma's growth, opening in six different cities before mastering any one of them, maintaining an 18% food cost without a central kitchen, paying every vendor within 45 days as a negotiating strategy, and building a 32-person cost control team that he considers one of the company's core competitive advantages. He also walks through four rounds of fundraising in detail: the 2018 failure, the ghosting by a major PE fund, the cold DM to a finance creator with 10,000 followers that eventually led to *** crores raised, and the moment investor demand flipped from reluctance to competition for allocation.
The episode covers the real math behind delivery economics and why Chirag believes any commission above 15% is a slow bleed, his framework for defensibility and why most restaurants that close deserve to, and what it means to run a brand where the P&L is the only performance metric that counts.
Chirag also reflects on what has changed in him as a founder, and what he believes it will take to finally put a genuinely Indian restaurant brand on the stock exchange.