This excerpt was originally published in Pre Shift, our newsletter for the hospitality industry. Subscribe for more first-person accounts, advice, and interviews.
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In March, Molly Irani, co-founder of the James Beard Award-winning restaurant Chai Pani, is releasing Service Ready: A Story of Love, Restaurants, and the Power of Hospitality.
In 2009, Irani and her husband Meherwan left their jobs to start an Indian street food restaurant, building the business from scratch. Through candid vignettes, Irani discusses the challenges she faced along the way, what it’s like to build a business with a partner, and how she incorporates parts of her own culture and traditions into her work.
Service Ready is a helpful peek behind the scenes for anyone in the industry charting a similar path. Here, Irani has shared an excerpt with us from Chai Pani’s opening day.
The Art of Jugaad
Excerpted from Service Ready: A Story of Love, Restaurants, and the Power of Hospitality. Copyright © 2026, Molly Irani. Reproduced by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
Meherwan and I had been married for 15 years, so we knew how to work through challenges together.
One thing I discovered early on about a strong partnership is knowing when the other person has reached their point of overwhelm. A gift that our long, shared history brought to our business partnership is the ability to read the signs and know each other’s tipping points so that we can step in when help is most needed. We relied on not falling apart at the same time. This helped our marriage as well as our business, and it prevented our staff from seeing us fight. There were countless times that we missed the mark, but we always tried to catch each other.
Staring at the cash register on Chai Pani’s opening day, I quickly realized we had no choice but to jugaad it.
“Jugaad” is a term used throughout India to describe the reliance on ingenuity to make something happen with what you have, instead of waiting to have all the right parts or pieces. Sometimes it means bending the rules, or getting inventive with your resources. Meherwan says it’s like figuring out how to make chai with a Zamboni (the ice-resurfacing vehicles at skating rinks) because that’s all you have, and why waste a perfectly good machine?
On opening day, with bloodshot eyes, Meherwan said, “I’ve tried everything; the register won’t print tickets in the kitchen. It won’t print tickets any fucking place at all.”
I didn’t think our brand-new food runners would be capable of getting the food to tables (and clearing them) as well as the tickets delivered to the kitchen—we needed more hands to pull it off. The only solution I could think of was to beg our beloved band of friends (who that day were finishing painting the restaurant) to put on clean Chai Pani T-shirts and spend the day carrying tickets from the register to the kitchen. Being the rock-star human beings that they are, they agreed to help run tickets. They were tired to the core, unshaven, unbathed, and spattered in paint—but they did it. If I’d had time I would have cried with gratitude.
We scrambled to set up for our first service. I had five minutes to learn how to work the ludicrous-non-printing register, we gathered the freshly hired, barely trained employees, and before we could blink there were fifteen minutes left until opening.
A line had begun to form outside as we buzzed around like bees on speed. Last-minute issues were resolved at breakneck speed. Ruby called from behind the bar, “Does anyone know how to make a lime rickey? It’s on the menu, but I don’t have a recipe.” James, ever calm, emerged from the kitchen wearing a crisp white chef’s coat and said, “None of us know how to make an uttapam. Can anyone help?” Angi realized we didn’t have any change for the register. Food runners looked like deer in the headlights trying to identify the endless array of dishes they didn’t know how to pronounce correctly. The “sound system” (Pandora played off my cell phone) wouldn’t play.
Then in the middle of the mayhem, Meherwan’s mother announced that we couldn’t open without having a Pooja ceremony. A Pooja is an Indian tradition that marks important events. It differs in detail depending on family background, but the practice stretches across religions and cultures. The common threads woven through most Poojas are: making an offering to God, blessing the space and/or people, and taking a moment for gratitude and prayer. I had no idea how to stop the frantic last-minute preparations for a prayer ceremony with customers staring at us from the other side of the door, but I wasn’t about to argue with my mother-in-law.
Fifteen minutes past the planned opening time, we gathered our crew into the front of the house. The already exhausted cooks, the increasingly terrified young food runners, the whole team paused the last moments of preparation and came together for a Pooja ceremony to bless the space. Meherwan’s mother assembled the ceremonial items; I’m pretty sure a coconut was cracked, a sacred photo was placed in a spot of honor, a bell was rung, and we held hands in a big circle, closed our eyes, and had a moment of silence—while the line of customers watched from the sidewalk.
This moment would never come again, and my mother-in-law knew it. She made us stop and give thanks, and ask God, or Grace, or each other for help. I’m deeply grateful for her guidance in that moment. The pause for centering that she made happen that day helped set us on a course that is uniquely our own and became an essential part of the scaffolding behind Chai Pani’s success. It helped us focus on what really matters. I’m sure some new employees were deeply moved, while others wondered what the hell they’d gotten themselves into—but together we took a collective breath and opened the doors to a line up the block. That line never went away.
This excerpt has been lightly edited from Service Ready. To read the full book, preorder it here.
