A new restaurant has opened in Carnarvon St, Suva giving people more options to choose from authentic Indian cuisines and has provided employment to 18 people.
Rajdhani Multi Cuisine Restaurant specialises in North Indian cuisines from India according to the manager Sanjesh Chand.
During its launch on Wednesday he said the restaurant had hired six expatriate chefs from India to prepare the meals.
“We have about six chefs that have already joined us from India where my director is from,” he said.
“Ever since my director had moved to Fiji in 2004, he has been working for Ashiyana for 11 and half years and from there he has started Yellow Chilli restaurant and then moved to Swagat restaurant.
“This is a new venture that I wanted everyone to try and get the feeling of a restaurant, get the taste of India at home (Fiji) and we are proud to bring you the food deriving from the North part of India.”
Mr Chand said they had to basically close down Yellow Chilli as the building was too old and in dire need of a renovation.
“We have closed down Yellow Chilli and because the structure of this building is quite old and we have refurbished it with a new environment.
“We want to give the community a better look, better taste and an up-market restaurant that everybody can go out to and spend time with their family.”
Rajdhani is a family restaurant, with highly trained staff that had been re-hired from Yellow Chilli. Mr Chand said he had been with the company for five years working with the director.
He said the construction and refurbishment had taken almost five months with two contractors coming in to complete it despite facing some issues with the pandemic.
“We faced a lot of challenges in terms of the building materials supply which was not on time, luckily we got it sorted out with the distributors.”
He said as the border would open they expected more people to be coming in to work for them, as they planned to also sell authentic Indian sweets in the future.
Mr Chand urged the public to come and try out the meals and enjoy the atmosphere as they were just a walking distance from Holiday Inn and the Grand Pacific Hotel.
The restaurant has a seating capacity of 80 people which was possible after a new extension to the premises was built.
It also has a bar and because of COVID-19 restrictions in place the opening hours are from 3pm to 9pm, seven days a week.
