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Indian restaurant emerges from class projectThree Executive MBA students at Thunderbird School of Global Management turned a class project into a real-world business venture this summer. In the process, the recent graduates are breaking cultural barriers through food.

“Your first contact with culture is not through the language or through business,” project participant Amol Khade says. “It’s usually through food. If you want to break cultural barriers, it’s the food that will bring people together at the same table.”

Khade and his partners, Govind Arora and Venkat Nallapati, with venture capital support by India Plaza, opened an Indian restaurant called The Dhaba on June 21 at 1872 E. Apache Blvd. in Tempe, Ariz. The classmates started exploring the concept for the restaurant during an entrepreneurship class taught by Thunderbird professor Steven Stralser, Ph.D.

“In the process of writing a business plan for class, they really saw the opportunity to make it happen,” Stralser says. “It demonstrates that they’re getting applied skills with the Executive MBA.”

Stralser says he visited the restaurant site with his students during the project to help them “kick the tires, so to speak.” He says the three students, who graduated from Thunderbird on May 2, had little experience in the restaurant industry but did their homework.

“They’re all very bright and willing to learn,” Stralser says. “They definitely have the entrepreneurial DNA.”

The business partners all come from India, and Khade says they all have a passion for food. He says their market research showed the need for an authentic Indian dining experience along the path of the new light-rail track near Arizona State University, about 30 miles from the Thunderbird campus in Glendale.

“The cooking style is home-style cooking, and the food is very fresh,” Khade says. “Actually, the chef still calls his mom to get some recipes.”

Khade says the community response has been tremendous, and he expects even more traffic when ASU students return in the fall.

“On opening night we had a wait of about one hour,” Khade says, “and it has been repeating since then every weekend.”

Thunderbird’s Executive MBA program caters to working business professionals, who meet all day on Fridays and Saturdays on alternating weekends for 16 months.
BusinessWeek ranks the program No. 22 in the world among similar Executive MBA programs.