25,000 Meals, 1 Day To Prep: UAE Restaurants Gear Up For Busy Onam Weekend

(MENAFN- Khaleej Times)

Several Indian restaurants in the UAE are gearing up for a busy long weekend as the festival of Onam falls on Friday. Some are anticipating hours of wait while others are prepping 24 hours in advance for thousands of potential customers.

One of the biggest features of Onam, which is the harvest festival of the southern Indian state of Kerala, is the Onasadhya (Onam feast). Served on a banana leaf with over 30 different varieties of items, it is usually a fully vegetarian meal that takes several hours to prepare

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At the Calicut Notebook restaurant which has six outlets across the UAE, the expectation is to serve a whopping 25,000 Onasadhya on Friday alone.“During Onam, we suspend our normal operations and concentrate on the Sadhya alone,” said Satheesh Kumar, managing director of the restaurant.“We are expecting about 25,000 people across our outlets but if there are more, we have the backup to serve them. This year, since it is the long weekend and Friday is a holiday, we are expecting heavy footfall from both pre-booked customers as well as walk-ins."

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The restaurant, which also undertakes corporate and event orders, is expecting to sell more than 100,000 Onasadhyas during the season.“In Dubai, the Onam season continues at least for the entire month,” he said.“We already have several bookings for the rest of the month so we are expecting a good number of sales.”

Waiting time

At Lallumma's restaurant in Karama, at least 5,000 sadhyas are expected to be sold over this weekend, with one huge feast on Sunday that will serve over 1,000 people.

“We sold about 800 sadhya on Thursday, the first day when we served the feast,” said restaurant co-founder Anees Fareed.“On Friday, we are expecting a huge crowd. We have advised our pre-booked customers that they can expect to wait about 30 minutes or so. However, walk-in customers may have to wait up to an hour to be served.”

He added that the restaurant was expecting to serve the meal in five turns and that all their seats have been completely booked.“Right now, we only have a handful seats remaining for our grand Onam event on Sunday,” he said.“Everything else is booked out.”

No bookings

According to Natasha Farook, owner of Pepperlane restaurant in Silicon Oasis, they are not taking any bookings and will serve on a first-come, first-serve basis.“Bookings are sometimes an issue as people sometimes change their minds, get delayed or don't show up at all,” she said.“So for us, the first-come, first serve system works best.”

She said that her staff worked for over 12 hours to get sadhya ready.“The cutting and preparations happens overnight,” she said.“On Thursday, we had over 400 sadhya corporate orders in the area. On Friday, we are expecting to sell at least 600 sadhyas. Once we finish serving that at 4pm, the restaurant will be shut for the rest of the day so that the staff can rest.”

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