{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"First Principles","title":"Impresario's Riyaaz Amlani on 25 years of selling time, not food, and surviving four near-deaths","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":7558,"description":"In a business with the highest mortality rate of any, Riyaaz Amlani has spent 25 years building Impresario into 80+ restaurants across 20 cities — Social, Smokehouse Delhi, Antisocial, Bandra Born, Mocha — serving 8 million guests a year. He sits down with Rohin Dharmakumar for the full two hours: the philosophy of \"handmade\" at scale, the economics that actually decide a restaurant's life or death, the generational taste shifts from Gen X to Gen Alpha, his fights and truces with the aggregators, and the personal operating system behind it all.\nCHAPTERS\n00:00  Cold open: 25 years, one craft, an 8-million-guest business\n02:25  Why Mocha in 2001: Bombay's missing \"places to be\"\n06:24  The MTV generation and a West-aspirational India\n08:18  UCLA, entertainment management, and learning to \"live\" culture\n12:08  What \"Handmade\" and \"Impresario\" actually mean\n14:51  The business today: 80 restaurants, 900 cr, 5,500 people, 20 cities\n15:31  Why restaurants die — and the people-vs-process debate\n20:05  Social, the millennial third space, and the shisha ban\n26:21  Decoding Gen Z; Saltwater to Bandra Born; evolution vs revolution\n31:10  Real estate is the game: location vs locality, India's \"80 pockets\"\n32:53  The only metric that matters: AOV x covers x table turnaround\n35:57  Mass-extinction events: shisha ban, vanishing PE money, COVID\n39:55  The COVID town hall: how the team carried the company\n41:25  What losing a restaurant feels like; the discipline to quit\n43:22  A resilient restaurant group needs 4-5 engines for every cycle\n47:21  Childhood hustle: the fake-Chinese-marble business\n53:28  Bowling alleys & Phoenix Mills: people buy time together\n54:11  Self-rating: 7.5 as a parent, 5 as a CEO\n55:46  Building a restaurant vs building an organization\n56:43  The HR crisis: replacing half the staff in a year\n59:21  The one thing he can't delegate: layouts and property\n1:04:11 Zomato & Swiggy: the \"digital landlords,\" then and now\n1:08:52 The Booking.com parallel: stop...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/rfHh6dytJaKTzLNweTZ38EX73SZVevO_Bw9InyHzKY8/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS84NzVk/NWFiYmI1NzFkMjJl/NmM2OTY0N2U5YTBh/YmQyNC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}