EPISODE 13
September 23, 2021
I first heard Aparna Aurora speak on a Women in Business panel at the annual Lisbon Web Summit, Europe’s most influential tech event, which will be live once again November 1-4, 2021. Aparna talked to a largely millennial and female audience about growing Chutnify, her Indian restaurant from its inception as a street-food concept in 2014 in Berlin, to locations in Portugal, including Lisbon, Porto, and more recently Cascais. In this podcast episode, she talks of her restlessness and moving countries while juggling marriage, a family, and what the ups and downs of building a 5-restaurant business taught her about herself.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Welcome to Women Who Walk. I’m Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women, who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom. You can find a transcript with pictures to each episode, and my books, on my website, LouiseRoss.com. If you’d prefer to listen to an interview while simultaneously reading closed captions of the transcript, you can do that on YouTube, under my channel Women Who Walk Podcast.
[00:00:56] Hello listeners. Welcome to Episode 13 of Women Who Walk. My guest today is a Aparna Aurora.
[00:01:04] In November, 2019, I heard Aparna speak on a panel of Women in Business at the annual Lisbon Web Summit, Europe’s most influential tech event. Aparna talked to a largely millennial and female audience about growing her Indian restaurant concept from its inception in 2014 in Berlin, to locations in Portugal, including Lisbon, Porto, and more recently Cascais.
[00:01:33] Born in central India and raised in Delhi, Aparna’s mother left her father when Aparna was 7. At age 9, she began attending a co-ed British boarding school in Northern India, flying to Hong Kong on school holidays, where her mother had moved to live with her boyfriend.
[00:01:53] Having lead a protected and cloistered childhood, Aparna chose to attend university in Bombay, where she studied economics, followed by a move to London at age 20, where she studied fashion merchandising. A couple of years later, she was lured abroad by a job offer in Sydney, Australia, where she lived and worked for seven years.
[00:02:17] At 29, she left Australia for another adventure this time in New York, where she worked for the fashion label, The Limited. On a business trip to Hong Kong, she met her German husband-to-be, and shortly thereafter, they married and moved to Singapore, and then to Germany, where Aparna worked for Hugo Boss.
[00:02:39] But the enormous demands of the couple’s respective careers left them wanting for a different life. And so they pulled out a world map and identified Mexico as their next move. Monterey in the Northeast of Mexico was home for the next six years. And it’s where they started their family. Struggling to find the kind of baby clothes in Mexico that she wanted for her adopted and biological daughters, Aparna began to make her children’s clothes. Her label, Mila-Tara, quickly turned into a successful business.
[00:03:14] Within six years, the gun violence in Monterey escalated and the family moved to Brazil. Due to her husband’s work, they made another three moves within a short period of time. The final move was back to Germany.
[00:03:30] Now in her mid-40s, with 20 years in the fashion industry, and lamenting the lack of good Indian food in Berlin, Aparna decided to change career directions. A year later, she launched her south Indian street food restaurant, Chutnify.
[00:03:47]
[00:03:58] Welcome Aparna. And thank you for being a guest on Women Who Walk.
[00:04:01] Thanks Louise.
[00:04:03] Listeners are aware from my introduction that you have restaurants in Berlin and Portugal. Do you have a home in both cities, Berlin and Lisbon?
[00:04:12] My main home is in Lisbon now, used to be in Berlin. I do travel a lot to Berlin and Porto. But, I don’t have a permanent home there, so it’s just me staying in hotels or Airbnbs or whatever I can find as close to my restaurants there.
[00:04:32] Do you have a preference? Do you prefer Lisbon over Berlin?
[00:04:36] Yes, I do. I definitely prefer Lisbon over Berlin. I mean, I love Berlin. It’s a very cool city. It’s a young city, but Lisbon has what I need at this point in my life.
[00:04:47] Can you give us a little sense of what that is?
[00:04:50] The weather of course, and the people. I live five minutes’ walk from the beach, which is amazing. It’s really a dream come true. I think also for my children, this is a much nicer city. When they go out, they go to beaches and it’s a lot of outdoorsy stuff as opposed to in Berlin. Don’t get me wrong. Berlin’s an incredible city. Great energy. I love going back there. I think I’m very fortunate that I can do both.
[00:05:17] So now I want to go back in time a little, uh, you went to boarding school at such a young age. What was it like to go back and forth between boarding school in India and Hong Kong, where your mother was living, and two very different countries and cultures?
[00:05:33] I went to boarding school when I was nine. And it’s the thing you do in India when you want to go to a private school, or a public school, as they call it in the UK. I actually loved being in boarding school. It was by choice that I went there and I did spend all my holidays in Hong Kong. They are two very different cultures, but I was at home in Hong Kong. That’s really actually the first home I ever had. My parents separated at a very young age and I was all over the place living with grandparents and then to boarding school. Hong Kong was my first grounding place, I guess in a way.
[00:06:17] Yeah, that makes sense. And then from this fairly cloistered life in boarding school, you chose to study in Bombay and London. Two enormous cities. Is this because you wanted the freedom that a big city can offer, especially after all those years in boarding school?
[00:06:37] I’ve kind of always been a big city girl, even though I went to boarding school in the middle of nowhere in the Himalayas. My family is a big-city family. I grew up in Delhi until I was 9 and my mother came from there or her family came from there. I’ve always liked big cities. I like what they have to offer. Obviously the universities are better. Like the university that I wanted to go to in India was in Bombay. I always had this dream that I would leave India. I think one of the reasons for me to go to London to study was also just to see a different part of the world. And when you leave India as a kid, it’s either the US or the UK, or at least it used to be. If it’s the UK, it’s often London. It was kind of the thing to do at that time. And London felt comfortable because I had family there. It wasn’t as scary, I guess.
[00:07:41] And then that move to London began what has been nearly 10 country moves? Do you think that you’re an inherently restless person?
[00:07:51] Well, Louise, I’m a gypsy. I come from an airline family. So I started traveling at a very young age and saw the big world at a very young age. And I always knew that I wanted to fly. And, I haven’t stopped. I, I am restless and I want to see the world. I want to learn languages. I want to learn about different cultures and it started with London.
[00:08:13] And then ultimately the nature of yours, your husband’s work, meant opportunities to advance always came with a country move. How did you and your husband manage to both have successful careers while raising a family in so many countries?
[00:08:31] We just supported each other. The one really, really good thing about my marriage was that my husband encouraged me to do what I wanted to do, and I let him do what he wanted to do. His career always was more successful than mine once we had kids. But I think that’s more of a logistics thing. We had children, I was at home with the children for a while. Got restless sitting at home, started my own business. So I think it was respect and support for each other.
[00:09:01] I remember in a conversation, you said to me that you took on a lot, that it felt as though you were just managing everything.
[00:09:10] What really happened there was my husband was the one with the more successful career after we had children, because I was busy, juggling what I was doing, uh, professionally, as well looking after the kids, finding schools, moving to different countries, making friends, looking for supermarkets and hairdressers and all of that. So I think a lot of my time went in juggling things, professionally and personally, so that he could focus on his professional career. That’s just logistically, how things worked out.
[00:09:48] So then there are enormous demands on you and your time as basically the CEO of the family doing all that juggling.
[00:09:59] I surprise myself sometimes because, the longest we ever lived in a place was six years and that was Mexico. But other than that, every other country was one year, two years, three years. And every time you move, you have to start new. The schools, making friends, that’s probably the hardest part. But I think that’s also what kept us together as a family, because we only had each other, every time we moved, we were each other’s best friends. I think that’s really what was the key to the success of our marriage or our family.
[00:10:34] So you mentioned six years in Mexico. Did you also say that that was the longest country stay that you had?
[00:10:42] It was the longest country stay I had with my husband. Obviously before that, I grew up in India. I was in India until I was 20. I lived in Australia for almost seven years, other than that, Mexico was the longest.
[00:10:57] Would you say that Mexico was one of your favorite countries?
[00:11:00] Yes, it was. It was incredible. It was also my first experience in Latin America. It was the first time we lived in such an exotic country. So it was all new and yet, somehow it was all familiar. Mexico has a lot of similarities to India, cuisine, color, dress, so I think I felt, I felt really at home there. The friends you make also make the place. We had a really good group of friends, which, I’ve had also in Spain and other countries, but I think the exoticness of, of Mexico and the familiarity was really what got me. I would say it was probably the best place I’ve ever lived.
[00:11:45] Do you think Latin culture is one that you feel the greatest affinity with then?
[00:11:50] For sure. For sure. I’m an Indian body with a Latin soul is what I’d say.
[00:11:58] When you were living in Latin America, did people assume you were? Did people think that you were Mexican or Brazilian?
[00:12:06] They did actually. It happens to me quite often. I think I can get away as being, Lebanese, Middle Eastern, Southern Italian, lot of different, um, cultures or countries, but yeah, in Mexico it was actually really funny because when I moved to Mexico with my ex-husband, he was the one who could speak Spanish and I couldn’t. So people would ask us questions and they would look at me thinking I was Mexican and I’d look at him to answer. It was funny. It was funny to see people’s reactions. They thought that I was Mexican and the same thing happened to me in Brazil. They thought I was Brazilian and it’s happened to me in other countries as well when I travel. I think it’s an advantage having my look.
[00:12:54] You really responded to how exotic Mexico and Latin America is. Maybe that has something to do with how exotic you look. So you mentioned, uh, ex-husband. Now when you made significant change in your career direction, It also ultimately impacted your marriage, but, but we’ll get there. First of all, I wanted to, ask you a little about, uh, transitioning from the fashion industry. Was it because you, you’d just had enough and you wanted something different?
[00:13:27] I did have enough of the fashion industry. I knew I wanted to do something different. I had done it for 22 years. I had worked for big companies, had my own business. I felt like I’d done what I needed to do. And it just wasn’t challenging enough for me anymore. But I wasn’t sure what was next and so I was kind of in that limbo land that a lot of people at the age that I was at that time are in.
[00:13:57] You were living in Berlin at this time? And I remember in a conversation, you said to me that there was a lack of good Indian food in Berlin and so you felt that there was an opportunity for you to do something about that.
[00:14:09] Hospitality wasn’t really something on my mind, but it was something I loved. I’ve always loved cooking. I’ve always loved entertaining at home. Having enormous groups of people coming over for dinners. And it was really on just like a crazy, almost drunken night that I mentioned to my husband at the time that I wished there were more, or better Indian restaurants in Berlin.
[00:14:38] Berlin is very different now. At that time, this was, you know, talking eight years ago, more than eight years ago, there was really a lack of authentic Indian food in Berlin. And being the man that he is, and he’s always supported my crazy ideas, because I was the crazy one in our relationship, um, he said, yeah, just why don’t you do it, go ahead. If anyone can do it, it’s you! Don’t be silly me in a restaurant. I had never even worked as a waitress. But somehow that conversation stayed in my head. And a couple of days later, or even the next day I woke up thinking, Hmm, maybe there is something there. Maybe I could do it.
[00:15:21] My idea was not to have five restaurants or six restaurants. It was more, I’ll open a tiny little restaurant where I’ll be the chef. I’ll do the cooking. Have one person working outside and it’ll be like a cute little small restaurant. And that’s how it started. That’s how Chutnify started almost seven years ago. There was not much planning. I didn’t put much thought into it. I just thought, okay. It’s something I could try. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
Chutnify, Berlin Germany
[00:15:52] And it really did work. It totally took off. What was that like for you, juggling family, home, and the restaurant, which so quickly increased in popularity. I mean, where do you, where did you find the energy? Where do you still find the energy to do so much?
[00:16:15] I dunno, Louise. I asked myself that every day. You know, the energy comes. I think when you’re doing something that you really enjoy energy comes. We all have it. I think the unfortunate thing is a lot of us are living a life that we don’t really want to be living. And I think that’s when we get really drained, but if you enjoy what you do, it just comes. We all have it within us.
[00:16:41] And then what was the impact on your personal life?
[00:16:45] Like I said, I really wanted to do it in a small way. I didn’t think it would end up being what it is today. It did start in a small way, but it took off very quickly, too quickly and we weren’t ready for it. So I was working 15, 16 hours a day for months. And it took a toll. It took a toll on my marriage. It took a toll on my family. My kids were small. It was okay, my husband was there to be a father to them. But I think what happened was my husband and I lost the connection we had.
[00:17:22] Obviously, there’s never only one thing that brings a marriage to its end, but in our case, that was a big, big factor because suddenly I went from being the mom who was around all the time, who was cooking to being the woman who was leaving home at nine o’clock in the morning and coming back at sometimes three, four in the morning. And I was just tired. I was unhappy. You know, I was unhappy, but also happy. I was finally doing what I wanted to do. And I think that gave me so much energy to go on and on and on.
[00:18:05] But I did realize I was disconnecting from, from the rest of my life, from my children, my husband. But there was really no other way. I mean, when you open a business, whatever business it is, if you don’t put your 150 percent into it, it doesn’t happen. And I think that really was also the secret of the success of Chutnify, because I put in that effort in the beginning when it was the most needed. But yeah, it took its toll on my, on my marriage. Although I have to say we kept trying and we kept going on. I only separated a year ago, not even a year ago. So for six years after opening Chutnify, we tried and tried, but we had already lost something.
[00:18:59] You’d lost something, but you’d also gained something. And I think I’ll return to that idea too. But first of all, I, I just want to comment on the really fun name of your restaurants Chutnify. When I first heard it, I immediately thought of that it was a spin on the word chutney, but tell us, does Chutnify mean something or have a particular meaning in Hindi?
Chutnify, south-Indian-style street food
[00:19:23] It doesn’t actually mean anything in Hindi, but at the time that I was in the process of opening the first Chutnify, one of the hardest things is what do we call it? You don’t want it to be like a Taj Mahal like a common name. I wanted a name that would work everywhere. I wanted a name that was Indian and yet modern. And at the time I was reading a Salman Rushdie book, Midnight’s Children, and he talked about the chutnification of the British people. And I thought, wow, that’s kind of cool because it means Indianizing the foreigner and then I started Googling it. The name didn’t exist anywhere. There wasn’t another Indian restaurant in the world called Chutnify. And I thought that’s what I want to do in Berlin. I want to introduce good Indian food in Berlin. I want to Chutnify Berlin. So it made complete sense.
[00:20:18] Did anyone from Salman Rushdie’s entourage, agent or, um, assistant reach out to you and say that it was a breach of copyright using the word chutnify?
[00:20:31] They didn’t actually, but they might now,
[00:20:36] Well, hopefully not, hopefully this exposure is not going to cause any problems for you. I’ll just come back to the comment I made previously, which is that when you made this transition one door closed and another opened. So, um, it was sort of the beginning of the end of your marriage and yet it was the beginning of a whole new life for you. And I think what you’ve alluded to is that you’d really found your passion and perhaps found your sense of personal empowerment too, as a business woman. So knowing what you know about business, are there any pearls of wisdom that you share with your daughters or the young women working for you at the restaurants?
[00:21:21] I would say don’t be scared to do the things you want to do. Don’t be scared. Take the leap. Go with your heart. I think we overthink things sometimes and women, especially, we’re very scared. We’re scared to do what we really want to do. I think for me, the important thing is do what your heart wants to do, take chances in life, because if it doesn’t work out, you can stop. You can do something different. In my case, I had to lose myself to find something. And I think that was really the lesson that I learned from this. That if you don’t take a chance, you’ll never know. And I took a chance and I went through some terrible times, but in the end I’m a happier person for it. So the thing that I tell my girls, I have a 16 year old and an 18 year old, they’re at a very ripe age, and the thing that I always tell them is go ahead. If you want to do it, do it; because the last thing you want is to get old and think I could have, I should have. What if.
[00:22:29] I think this is my motto in life. I try not to overthink things. I met my husband and we decided to get married, I don’t even know if it was three months, two, two months after we met. And I think this is with everything in life, not just business, if you want to do it, do it. Nothing in life is permanent.
[00:22:48] The other thing that occurred to me is that the restaurant business is still so male dominated. So what has it been like as a woman in an industry that is still so male-dominated?
[00:23:02] I did have six restaurants. I have five now. We closed one, but yeah, that was probably the biggest challenge I had because most people expect there to be a man, uh, a male owner of the restaurant. So when I started in Berlin, the hardest part was suppliers giving me credit because I was a woman and they didn’t think it would work out. Neighbors would come and say, oh, so you’re opening a restaurant here and you’re the owner? And I’d say, yeah. And they were like, Hmm. Okay. And I could see, they were thinking a woman, an immigrant, someone who has no prior restaurant experience. This is never gonna work. And they would say it to my face. They would say, I will give you a couple of months.
[00:23:48] But I think that’s what made me stronger. It was just like the more people said that the more I thought I’m going to show you. We women can do so much when we decide to. So I think I kind of turned it around. It empowered me actually.
[00:24:05] You’re right, Aparna, women can do extraordinary things and you’ve proved that. And I talk a little about this in my first episode, because it was the premise on which I began this podcast. I wanted to interview women who are kind of working behind the scenes, doing extraordinary things. And when I heard you speak at the Tech Summit a few years ago, I thought, yep, this woman’s doing some extraordinary stuff out there.
[00:24:32] So besides your mother, tongue of Hindi, you also speak English and I’ve heard you speak Portuguese with a perfect accent. Are there other languages that you speak?
[00:24:43] Thank you, Louise. I do, I speak Spanish a little more perfect than my Portuguese. I also speak German, cause I was married to a German for many, many years. You know, we Indians grow up learning more than one language. Hindi is my mother tongue, but I do understand other Indian languages. It’s basically those five languages.
[00:25:06] Do you think growing up in India speaking a number of Indian languages helped you learn and adapt to speaking other languages?
[00:25:17] I think so. I think because growing up in India, we hear so many languages. Apart from English and Hindi, there’s a lot of other languages that we, even, if you don’t speak them, we hear them all around us. I also have, for some reason, a head for languages. I always say the first foreign language is the hardest one to learn. Once you speak one, then it just gets easier. Obviously Spanish and Portuguese are similar languages so my Spanish helped my Portuguese. I’m trying to learn Italian now and my Spanish and Portuguese, are helping my Italian. I did learn French in school, so they’re all kind of connected in a way.
[00:25:56] They are the Latin languages are connected. I’ve noticed that with other people who speak one Latin language, they seem to be able to pick up others with some ease. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for me, but then I do think it takes some, some dedication and I just find other things to do, quite frankly.
[00:26:14] We’re in Lisbon, everyone speaks English.
[00:26:17] I know. It doesn’t help. And so where do you see yourself in say five years time? Do you think that there’s another country move or another Chutnify that you’d like to open up somewhere?
[00:26:31] It’s hard to say, I’m not much of a planner. I live each day as it comes and try to live in the moment. There was a time where I felt like I wanted to grow the business more – or we, because now my ex-husband is fully involved in the business with me or we do it together. But, I’m changing that opinion a little bit because I feel like the older I’m getting the more, I want to take it easy, spend more time just by myself or traveling or in, in the wild. I think if we can make the five restaurants we have a success, I’d be happy, more than happy with that.
[00:27:10] That’s interesting that you mentioned that despite that you and your husband and now divorced, you’re very much involved in the business together. Could you tell us a little about that?
[00:27:19] Well, we’re not actually divorced. Yeah, just separated. But we get along really well together probably now even better than before. We respect each other. We work really well together because we are good at very different things. So he’s the business and financial head of the business and I do more the operational marketing, human resources, the day-to-day running of the business. I live in Portugal and he lives in Switzerland, but we manage to run the business together doing the different things that people do. He travels here. I travel to Berlin.
[00:27:59] So you and your husband are great friends now. You’re good business partners, one of your daughters has launched. One’s still at home. So things are really changing.
Starting life anew, Aparna Aurora
[00:28:10] Yeah. We’ve had a lot of changes. We’ve gone from a family of four to a family of two in less than a year. But what I find is we’re all a lot happier. My daughter who had to go to Canada all by herself to settle in is doing amazingly well in Montreal. My younger daughter and I are alone at home and my husband in Switzerland, but we’re all happy. And I think that’s another little piece of advice that I always like to give younger people that it’s great to be in a marriage. It’s great to be in a relationship, but sometimes things have an expiry date and don’t go past the expiry date. Sometimes people are happier to be apart than together. We’re still a family, we’re just a family that lives in different parts of the world.
[00:29:01] Well, in fact, it reflects something of your childhood because your family was scattered around the world as well. So here you are at a point in your life where, uh, everyone in your family is happy. They just don’t happen to live together. So thanks Aparna. And for listeners who are curious about Chutnify, where can they find details about your restaurant online?
[00:29:23] The best place would be Chutnify.com our website. Instagram, Facebook.
[00:29:29] Okay. Well, what I’ll do is in the transcript to your episode, I’ll link to your website and your social media so that listeners can, in fact, you can check out menus, I think on Chutnify.com. I’ve done that. It’s a great way to get your digestive juices going, looking at restaurant menus online. Thank you so much for being available today, Aparna, it’s great to talk to you. You really are a firecracker. I can see how your life mission is to fly.
[00:30:01] Thank you, Louise. Thank you. I really enjoyed that. Thank you.
[00:30:05] Thank you for listening today. And so you don’t miss future episodes with more impressive, intrepid women do subscribe on your favorite podcast provider. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Women Who Walk on either Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. I’ve linked to them both in the transcript of this episode, which you can find on my website, LouiseRoss.com.