Owner John Kapoor and chef Sunil Kumar are intent on bringing authentic Indian cuisine to Americans.

Bombay Spice Grill & Wine
7000 N. 16th St., Phoenix,
602-371-0111
10810 N. Tatum Blvd., Phoenix,
602-795-0022
bombayspice.com

THE FLEDGLING FRANCHISE
When John Kapoor came to the United States from his native India to pursue a graduate degree in medicinal chemistry, he couldn’t warm up to the Indian food served here in restaurants. It just didn’t taste like what he grew up eating in his childhood home.
“Even today India is a very poor country,” Kapoor explains. “Probably 50 percent of the population has never eaten in a restaurant. So, as restaurants evolved, a different, more specialized food was served, something much richer and more highly seasoned. ”
He also noticed that Indian food had never really taken off in America the way other ethnic cuisines had.
In the mid-1980s, he says, his pharmaceutical company was doing a lot of business in Japan. “When the people I was working with there came to Chicago, I’d take them to Japanese restaurants, which were everywhere. They had kept the cuisine simple, made it friendly, and it had become mainstream.”
It sparked Kapoor’s imagination. “I felt it was something that could also be done with Indian food,” he says.
By 2005, he had spent plenty of time thinking about the prospect of opening a restaurant. Kapoor says, “Many Americans I talked to simply did not like the overwhelming scent of curry in Indian restaurants. The food can be too heavy with oil and cream and too spicy-hot with little other flavor. I thought, why not serve the kind of food eaten in Indian homes? It is simple, light and healthy.”

Chef Sunil Kumar

With the help of chef Sunil Kumar, he set about doing just that. For more than a year, the chef cooked, and Kapoor tasted. They settled on a streamlined menu to make the ordering process easy. All the food would be cooked with olive oil and grilled rather than fried. Ingredients would include nonfat yogurt and tofu instead of cheese. They used marinades instead of heavy spices and developed flavorful sauces that diners could add to suit their tastes. Unleavened chapatti made from chickpea flour replaced the breadier naan, which is rarely made in Indian homes.
The next step was making the restaurant, Bombay Spice Grill & Wine, a reality. Kapoor hired Andrew Fotis, a fixture in Valley restaurant circles who has opened 27 restaurants for himself and others. Fotis created a 220-item checklist beginning with “site selection” and ending with “open for business.” The initial site choice at Tempe Marketplace “looked great,” Fotis says, but the lease revealed some unforeseen problems. So the geographic focus changed to the intersection of 16th Street and Glendale Avenue. Again, a location fell through when a city inspection found asbestos in the building. Fortuitously, kitty-corner across the street, the old Convivo space sat empty. It was the right size and didn’t need much alteration.
Six months later, on December 26, the first Bombay Spice Grill & Wine opened. By then, the team was working on the second location at Tatum and Shea boulevards. Almost immediately, Kapoor says, he began getting nibbles from potential franchisees. “Everything we have done lends itself to duplication,” he says. “My mission is to popularize the real Indian food.”
Fotis laughs now that a third Bombay Spice is slated to open this spring in Chicago, where Kapoor still has family and business ties. “Here’s a man who has owned and run major companies, and he said to me the other day, ‘I had no idea how tough the restaurant business is,’” Fotis says.