Narayan Poojari of Shiv Sagar: Living the Bombay dream

livemint.com:

₹100 crore and the tiles business earned ₹8 crore in revenue. Till date, the most successful brand from his portfolio has been Shiv Sagar. He says, “Aap Shiv Sagar ka board laga do, log aa jayenge (You put up a Shiv Sagar board, diners will come)." Growing up in Udupi, Poojari began working in restaurants early on.

His father ran a small eatery that served dosa and idli, where Poojari assisted after school. He would see people who had migrated to Mumbai, return home wearing bell-bottoms and carrying large cassette players. The optics were enough to enthral the pre-teen as markers of success, and he decided to leave the village for the city of dreams.

“I had this passion: I wanted to move away from the village," he says. At the age of 13, he accompanied his grandmother to Mumbai; she was visiting her pregnant daughter in Santacruz. He did not return.

Instead, Poojari took up a job as a canteen boy in the Fort area, and joined a night school to complete his studies. He was making around ₹40 a month, spending his free time playing football and sleeping in the canteen. He recalls being entranced by a particular restaurant in the neighbouring area of Churchgate.

It was called Sapna and seemed like a fancy place with a live band. “I would stand in front of it and think to myself, one day I will build something like that." A decade later, he bought the restaurant along with his partner Bagubhai Patel and renamed it Shiv Sagar. Patel gave direction to Poojari’s lofty ambitions.

The two met through common friends in 1990, when Patel was looking for someone to oversee his small ice-cream parlour in Kemp’s Corner. By then, Poojari had switched several jobs, with a brief stint at a paint shop called Shalimar Paints. He had applied