Darshini
One of Bangalore's restaurateurs, Mr Prabhakar, opened an outlet called Upahara Darshini in mid-1980s. The novelty was that the food is cooked just behind the serving counter, visible to the customers, and one has to eat while standing by placing the food on tall tables. It is a self-service place where one has to buy a coupon before eating. It offered typical south Indian snacks at highly affordable prices resulting in an instant hit with the office goers as well as students. The size and the enclosed design of the eating space and consequent spilling over of the eaters onto the footpath during the busy hours indicates that he did not anticipate the level of success. This issue is addressed by those who copied the module by keeping the entire face of the outlet open to the road. It would not be wrong to say that this was a trend setter and its format, described earlier, is even to this day replicated by other across south India. The popularity of this business module can be gauged from the fact that many restaurants which adopt this format have "Darshini" as suffix in their names.
Read more about this topic: Indian Fast Food