Dubai: The first time Sandeep Shetty was asked to pick up chairs to set up a garden buffet arrangement, he started questioning his life choices.Having arrived in the UAE in 2000, the 22-year-old hotel management graduate had worked for a year in Mumbai, India, before deciding to move to the UAE, where he’d heard that tourism was booming.“One of my first jobs was at the hotel pool, and we couldn’t take the trolley to set up the hospitality area in the garden so we’d have to pick up the tables and chairs to set it all up. Doing that during the peak summer months was a lot of hard work,” the 48-year-old Indian expat said.“Initially, I wondered: Did I make a mistake? But then I told myself to just keep fighting and things might improve,” he added.And improve they did.After an early promotion from waiter to captain, Shetty was given the responsibility of a restaurant at the Abu Dhabi hotel where he was working.“The restaurant was not doing that well but with God’s grace we tried a few things and business really picked up. I was then made senior captain,” he saidAfter moving to Dubai in 2003, he continued working in the hotel industry till 2006, at which point a friend asked him to take the lead at a restaurant he owned.“That’s how I got into the restaurant business,” Shetty added.Having grown up in Mumbai, his family which was originally from another coastal city of Udupi, always had a big focus on seafood.“My dad always wanted to have at least one fish on his plate,” he said.This is why focusing the restaurant’s cuisine on Mangalorean style seafood became a natural decision for Shetty. In 2016, after 10 years of running the restaurant, Shetty decided to start his own – Fisherman’s Hub.In the early days, he would take his four-wheel drive to the fish market in Deira, and pack the fresh catch of the day – sometimes 40 kilos of it – in his car to serve at the restaurant each day.“We sold a lot of fish,” he said, laughing.“People specifically came for our seafood, even though we served some very good tandoori options as well,” he said.In the 10 years since, Shetty has seen that effort to provide good quality food, with memorable service, pay off, and today runs 10 restaurants in Dubai, one in Ajman and a 12th restaurant in the UAE due to open soon.Over the years, he’s also expanded his business internationally with a restaurant in Sydney, Australia, and another in India.“The journey has been great, God has been kind,” he says.But if you ask Shetty, what exactly has been the secret to his success, he points to something really simple: “Stay focused on your job and stick to your basics. Serve good food and make sure the service and ambience are good. Those are the basics and that’s what people look for.”That commitment to the basics may explain why customers return, but Shetty also believes Dubai’s business environment made it possible to expand at the pace he did.A 6,700-square-foot restaurant in 26 daysHaving an idea that is scalable and expanding at such a pace has been a quintessentially Dubai-it story. A story that was possible because of the ease of doing business, which Shetty says has always been a defining feature of Dubai.He recalled how last year, he took over a 6,700-square-foot restaurant in TECOM area and was able to open doors in just 26 days.“When you submit everything properly, you can get the necessary municipality permits within two or three days. Which part of the world can you do that in?” he said.Even his Australian business partner, he added, was surprised by the speed at which the approvals came through.“This ease of doing business, I don’t think it is possible anywhere else. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, while our businesses in India and Australia were shut, we were able to operate in Dubai. We even opened two restaurants in that year. As long as you follow the rules that are clearly set by the authorities, you can operate more easily here than anywhere else in the world,” he said.‘We could support all our businesses’That ability to continue operating in the UAE allowed him to not just support the families of the workers at his restaurants, but also at the international outlets he has.Even today, as Shetty manages the ever-growing network of eateries across the UAE, he says a prayer before stepping into any of his restaurants during his daily rounds.“I always say we’ve gotten more than what we had imagined,” he said.Living in Dubai, with his wife and two children, Shetty says the city has given him the chance to do something he loves and find success. Success, that has been more hard-earned than he likes to admit, with late nights and long days.“I enjoy it. I will never say it is hard. My wife tells me not to expand more, but I tell her: Until I am enjoying it, let me do it,” he said.A simple interaction on New Year’s Eve last year crystallised the beauty of the life he has built over the years in the city.As he drove from his restaurant in Al Qusais to the one in Tecom, making sure they were handling the surge in guests, he stopped over at a petrol station near Global Village to fuel up. The attendant, he says, asked him to wait a couple of minutes.“The fireworks are about to start,” he told me.And that simple gesture from a stranger gave Shetty the chance to stand quietly and enjoy the view as the world welcomed another new year.“It was the first time I saw the New Year’s Eve fireworks, can you believe it?” he said.And as he went back to his car, to fill petrol, he asked the attendant if the fuel price would be higher as it was a new month.“He told me, no its actually lower this month. So, he asked me to wait to enjoy the fireworks. That’s just Dubai, right?”
