Sandeep followed his passion for food and started a restaurant and soon quit his teaching job. He has seen good success with his two restaurants

Sandeep Patel is the owner of two restaurants in Udaipur.

Sandeep is from a small village Katewari in Kherwara Tehsil, Udaipur. He did his schooling in his village itself. He did his graduation from Dungarpur.

After graduation, Sandeep came to Udaipur and started teaching in a private school. However, his heart had always been in cooking and food-related business. So, after five years in the teaching line, he decided to open his own Chinese restaurant in Udaipur.

In 2010, Sandeep started his first restaurant, China Town: The Real Taste. He says that his brother-in-law, Shanti Lal Patel, and some of his friends from Mumbai and Nepal helped him a lot in setting this up.

Initially, Sandeep was managing both his teaching job and restaurant together. He hired four people to help him. Soon, he started getting positive feedback from people, and even the demand to start non-vegetarian food came to him as China Town was a pure vegetarian restaurant. To cater to this rising demand, he started his second restaurant, Schezwan Express in 2012.

Sandeep shares that the COVID time was really tough on the restaurant/hotel industry. He had workers from Uttarakhand and Nepal. He made arrangements for the ones from Uttarakhand to return but sending people to Nepal was not an option. So, he housed them with him and provided them with all the amenities they needed. He says that the good thing about it was the time he got to spend with his family and kids. Even after the lockdown, the business did not take off easily due to time restrictions and he also started takeaway options in his restaurants to get the ball rolling.

Sandeep says that to open a restaurant it is not necessary to know cooking but to have a sense of taste is necessary. He feels that ‘taste’ is the king of this field and nothing else matters.

When asked about role models, Sandeep says that his father is his role model. He worked hard to give a life of luxury to Sandeep. He also gets motivation from other people as well like his teacher Ashok Vyas, and his brother-in-law Shanti Lal Patel who helped him in every way. He also loves watching cricket and Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid are his inspirations.