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Then he did the only thing he knew how to do well. He took over the interview. He asked the hiring manager where he was calling from, learned it was near Napa, and spent the next fourteen minutes on Cabernet, Sauvignon Blanc, and which wine belongs with which dish. Five days later, he landed in the United States.
He still could not code. He left his wife and children back in India on purpose, certain that his new employer would soon find out and fire him. So he cut a deal with the other Indian engineers who had just arrived, the ones who could write software but could not find a decent home-style meal anywhere: they would write his programs, and he would cook their dinners. Their work was so good that he got promoted to be their manager.
That is Jay Jayaraman. And that story is the small version of the lesson that runs through his whole life: work out what you actually bring to the table, then build everything around it.
This episode is not really about restaurants. It is about the years Jay spent away from professional food after he arrived in America, and what it took to walk back into a kitchen in his late forties and build the Mylapore group: dine-in restaurants, a flash-chilled food delivery business, a growing line of Idly Express quick-service outlets, and a central kitchen that wakes up at three in the morning to feed all of it.
