Three friends have opened an Indian street food restaurant inspired by their childhood in this Southeast Asian country.
Vikram Vadlakonda, from Ladybridge, started 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 Kearsley the food they loved growing up in India.
Dishes reflect the heritage of their hometowns with Vikram from Mumbai, Ajay from Delhi and Sony from Goa.
Patrao
Vikram said: “We’ve worked in hotels before, then in 2015 we thought about doing our own thing, so first we opened the Copper Lounge in Hazel Grove.
“We also do street food there 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 because the others were too far away.”
pani puri
The friends opened two more Bolton restaurants called Tonge Thai and Mumbaikar before Patrao.
Vikram said, “We all come 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 home and there’s hardly anything around Kearsley.
“The best thing about India is the street food, it’s so popular there and people always have samosas, dahi puri and pani puri.”
The new restaurant opened last week with staff trained by Vikram.
The food
He said: ‘I’m a chef and trained all the staff for two to three months before they joined the new one.
“I worked as a chef in India, notably at the famous Mariott hotel.
“The food we serve reflects us and the staff are mostly from India so they know that.”
Patrao’s interior is inspired by nature with plants and simplistic wooden tables and chairs and traditional drinking cups laid out for customers.
The chef’s favorite – the traditional Indian-style homemade butter chicken, where cashews are boiled for the creamy batter and the Indian-Chinese menu.
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