Udupi Sukhanivas Mylapore

The third generation that is now managing the business is confident of taking the seven decades old Udupi(Udipi) Murudi’s Sukhanivas into the next phase of growth despite the challenges relating to the Pandemic and the upcoming Metro Rail work. 39 year old P.H.P. Raghavendra along with his younger brother Rohith have been carrying the legacy of this popular restaurant near the Luz Signal.

Raghavendra recounts the period in the 1940s when his grandfather, P.H.  Rao, who hailed from Udupi, moved to Madras to join the Woodlands as a Dosa Master “My great grandfather who was an accountant passed away when my grandfather was very young. As the Woodlands’ owner too was from Udipi, he roped in my grandfather as a dosa master for his restaurant.

That was the beginning of a long and trusted engagement with the traditional South Indian food lovers of Mylapore.

After serving for many years at Woodlands, he decided to start out on his own and launched Murudi’s Sukhanivas (Murudi is their family name) in 1954. There were two other popular joints at that time -Easwari’s café and Shanti Vihar.  The early phase was a struggle and business was dull in the first few years but Rao hung on to build a long standing brand, competing against these two other players . 

"Cho, Nagesh and Srikanth were regulars at Sukhanivas. There was a garden by the side and they would sit around it and have their Sambar Idly and Idiappam before leaving for the drama at Mylapore Fine Arts”, Raghavendra remembers his grandfather telling him.

A few years after the launch of Sukhanivas, Rao started Murudi’s lodge in the same complex with around 10 rooms. That continues to run to this day. 

By the 1970s, Sukhanivas had begun to see a steady flow of customers and expanded from being just a tiffin destination to one with a full meals section. The ambience inside the restaurant continues to be simple Udipi style. While Rao resided in Mint, in North Madras, in the 1940s and 50s, he bought a house in Karpagambal Nagar in 1961 where the family has been staying for the last six decades. He managed the restaurant for almost 35years till his death in 1989.

Rao’s son PH Padmanabhan, a commerce graduate, took over charge of the restaurant in the late 1980s. He had received intense on the job training from his appa starting out at a very early age. “When my appa took over, he went in for a big diversification. Family crowd had started coming in good numbers in that period and he converted the open terrace to a banquet hall” says Raghavendra on the diversification of the business by his appa.

Raghavendra and Rohith have both done their Masters in Business Administration. After taking over the mantle from their appa in 2008, the two brothers went for the next major expansion. The entire interiors were re-done just under 15years ago. Raghavendra says that they went in for a major overhaul to reach out to a larger audience "We set up an AC party hall where family functions could be held. In an effort to reach out to a larger set of customers, we also began offering outdoor catering.  Today, we have three generations of customers walking into our restaurant both for our food as well as their family functions’

 

As part of its expansion, the brothers also launched a new restaurant in Royapuram just over a decade ago and that had seen good growth till the Pandemic.

Raghavendra is a bit worried on the likely impact of the Metro Rail work “Having coming out of two challenges years of the Pandemic, we have some interesting growth plans but the Metro Rail work has forced us to put those on hold. Currently, it is a wait and watch approach on how the Metro work and traffic regulations pan out. Based on that, we will roll out the next upgrades at the restaurant.”

He says with great delight that over the last seven decades, they have been able to build a loyal set of customers. There are those who come in from as far as Tambaram, Medavakkam and Chromepet to organize their family functions, such has been the customer connect.“SV Sekar regularly comes here to pick up his favourite Semia Bagala Bath. Ghee Roast and Rava Dosai are the other specialties at the restaurant.”

While there have been challenges in the recent past arising out of the Pandemic, and the Metro Rail Work could turn out to be another dampener, Raghavendra and Rohith are optimistic of continuing to take this restaurant business that their grandfather had set up 68years ago into its next successful phase of growth.