Three pals have opened an Indian street food restaurant inspired by their childhood in the south east Asian country.
Vikram Vadlakonda, from Ladybridge, has launced Patrao Indian Street Food with friends Ajay Chowdhary and Sony Dsilva.
With pani puri, samosa chaat and Afghani seek kebabs on the menu, the friends want to bring the food they loved growing up in India to Kearsley.
The dishes reflect the heritage of their hometowns with Vikram from Mumbai, Ajay from Delhi and Sony from Goa.
Vikram said: “We have worked in hotels before and then in 2015 thought of doing our own thing so we opened Copper Lounge in Hazel Grove first.
“We do street food there as well and it did really well, so we opened Hitchkey’s in Cheadle.
“But we live in Bolton so we thought why not do something here?
“We have friends in Bolton who said we should open more in Bolton as the others were too far.”
The friends opened two more Bolton restaurants called Tonge Thai and Mumbaikar before Patrao.
Vikram said: “We’re all from different places in India so we wanted to bring that together.
“The name Patrao means boss in Portuguese to reflect their control over Goa in 1961.
“It’s close to our home and there’s hardly anything around Kearsley.
“The best thing about India is the street food, it’s so popular over there and people always get samosas, dahi puri and pani puri.”
The new restaurant opened last week with staff trained by Vikram.
He said: “I am a chef and trained all the staff for two-to-three months before they came to the new one.
“I worked as a chef in India including at the popular Mariott Hotel.
“The food we serve reflects us and the staff are mostly from India too, so they know it.”
The interior of Patrao is nature inspired with plants and simplistic wooden tables and chairs and traditional tumblers laid out for customers.
Chef's favourite - the homemade traditional butter chicken the Indian style, where cashew nuts are boiled for the creamy paste and the Indi-Chinese menu.
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