The first thing you notice about Boojee is that somebody is always waiting to get in. The queue is always populated by people in the kind of casual clothing that requires prior thought, with phones already out. You have probably seen the queue. You may have been in it.
Inside, the space is small and considered without being too serious. The lighting is the warm, slightly golden kind that makes everyone look like they're having a better time than they are. The menu runs from a berry chia bowl with raspberry compote and a non-casual price tag to a crab omelette that the founder will cheerfully tell you is sold at a loss. The cortado and house coffee are reliably good, and the cold brew has its devotees.
Whether any of this justifies the queue is, as with most cult objects, entirely beside the point.
When Rajdeep Singh Kukreja sat down in a conversation on NDTV Profit's Disruptors recently, he was asked, more than once, why he keeps saying no to money. His answer, each time, was essentially the same: he's not ready for it yet, and more importantly, Boojee isn't.
How Did Boojee Start?
Kukreja started Boojee in 2019, out of a 100-square-foot Bandra space with no washroom and a monthly rent of Rs 50,000. He was 25, had trained at IHM Mumbai's Dadar Catering College, and had spent the preceding year and a half doing sales jobs specifically to save money — around Rs 11 to 12 lakh — for exactly this.
He had not imagined anything beyond a sandwich and coffee shop doing maybe 30 to 40 covers a day. The name Boojee — his spelling, deliberately — came from a shortlist of concepts he'd been developing; it was easy for a child to say, it had recall, and it gestured at something he describes as "luxurious in lifestyle, yet humble in character."
The Covid Timing
The Covid timing, which might have been catastrophic for a business less than a year old, turned out to be gratifying. With almost every other restaurant shut, Boojee was one of the few places operational on delivery platforms in Bandra.
The serendipity of being the only listing on Swiggy in a neighbourhood that runs on breakfast brought in customers who would otherwise never have found a 100-square-foot cafe with no signage budget. They ordered because there was nothing else and then Covid ended, and the queue, which had already started forming outside the original space, never dispersed.
What followed is one of those growth stories that goes against the regular advice about how you scale a hospitality brand in India, largely because Kukreja says he's been quietly ignoring most of it.
Rs 100 Crore+ Revenue
Boojee now has five outlets across Mumbai, did Rs 103 crore in revenue last year, counts a reliable rotation of celebrities among its regulars, and has the word-of-mouth that actually works.
It has also, in six years, raised zero external funding, turned down conversations with investors who were mostly interested in outlet count, and operated on a philosophy of growth that is almost unfashionable in a startup ecosystem where a funding round is treated as a milestone.
Boojee, he says, cannot yet absorb large capital — the systems, the training infrastructure, the culture — are still being built. Growing faster than the culture can hold would produce something that looks like Boojee but isn't, which is both a brand problem and, for a founder who spent four years cooking 12-hour shifts in his own cafe, a personal affront.
There is also, he says, the question of what investors are actually offering beyond the check. He hasn't found one yet who has skin in the game in the way that changes the conversation. Someone offering a Rs 1,000 crore cheque, he said on the show, is still getting a no. For now.
Coffee Is Running The Show
The dishes that lose money are not a PR flourish — the crab omelette costs Rs 850 to make and sells for Rs 770; the berry chia bowl, with its raspberry compote, runs similar numbers — and Kukreja is unapologetic about this.
The coffee, which started as ordinary and improved significantly over the first few months — helped by the fact that Boojee's original location was right next to Blue Tokai, positioned specifically to capture people who wanted breakfast with their specialty coffee order — is what funds the ambition of the food menu. He adds that they make the money on the easy sell and spend it making people feel that the expensive, technically-losing item was worth coming in for.
Whether Boojee remains a Mumbai story or becomes something larger is a question Kukreja is in no particular hurry to answer. He talks about another city or two in India, about wanting to take the brand international, about an eventual IPO and employee stock options when the time is right. In the meantime, the lines outside continue to form. The servers ask your name. The stuffed hashbrown is, for what it's worth, very good.
Watch The Full Conversation
Essential Business Intelligence, Sharp Market Insights, Practical Personal Finance Advice, Daily Fuel, Gold and Silver Prices and Latest Stories — On NDTV Profit.