As a boy, Dhanush followed his grandfather from one outlet to the next, not knowing he was being handed a company one conversation at a time. He thought he was just tagging along. There were curries to taste, regulars to greet, and a kitchen that smelled of ghee and Guntur chillies long before he understood why any of it mattered. Without realising it, he was learning to run Nandhini, and learning what the third generation of the family would one day be asked to protect.
Today Dhanush Srinivas is the third-generation Managing Director of Nandhini Deluxe. The grandson of founder N. Ananda now leads a business that serves more than 10,000 customers a day across 19+ outlets in Bengaluru and Mysuru. This is the story of how a boy who liked following his grandfather around became the person responsible for everything that grandfather built. It is also the story of what the Nandhini third generation decided was worth keeping exactly as it was.
The Boy Who Kept Tagging Along
The family recalls a child who was fond of his grandfather to the point of stubbornness. Where N. Ananda went, Dhanush wanted to go. To the office. To the outlets. Into the back of kitchens most customers never see. A restaurant founder’s day is not built for a small boy trailing behind him, but the founder made room anyway, and the boy paid attention to things he could not yet name.
What he absorbed in those years was not a business plan. It was a way of moving through a room. He watched how his grandfather spoke to a cook and a cashier and a regular with the same evenness, and how he noticed when something was off on a plate before anyone complained. Dhanush remembers the outlets less as workplaces and more as the place his grandfather happened to be. That is usually how heritage reaches the next generation: sideways, through company, long before anyone thinks to call it heritage.
Three Years That Did the Real Teaching
The serious education came later. After school, while he was still in college, Dhanush began working alongside his grandfather directly. He was not an heir being groomed for a title. He was someone learning the floor. The family recalls roughly three years of this before N. Ananda passed away, three years of standing next to the founder while the founder did the job.
Three years is not long to learn a kitchen that had already run since 1989. But it is long enough to learn the thing that mattered most, which was never the recipe. Dhanush remembers being taught how to treat people. The staff who had cooked the same biryani for two decades. The suppliers who brought chillies down from Andhra Pradesh. The families who had eaten at Nandhini since before he was born. The recipes were written down somewhere. The other lessons were not, and those were the ones his grandfather spent the time on.
When he describes that period now, he keeps landing on the same point. He inherited recipes, outlets and a name. The part he values most is the part that is hardest to put on a balance sheet, and it took three years beside the founder to understand why.
Stepping Up as the Third Generation
Taking the Managing Director’s chair as the founder’s grandson carries a particular weight. A founder builds with nothing to lose. A grandson leads with everything to protect. Dhanush stepped into a company that already worked. It had run since 1989, stayed company-owned, never opened a single franchised outlet, and still fed the same kind of crowd the same recipes. The first job of the Nandhini Deluxe owner family was not to reinvent any of that. It was to understand it well enough to keep it intact.
In his 2024 interview with Kitchen Herald, he put the inheritance plainly. The family steps into the shoes of its predecessors with a deep respect for tradition and a forward-looking vision, he said, blending time-honoured recipes with contemporary flavours. It is the sentence of someone who has thought hard about which half of that promise comes first. At Nandhini, tradition leads, and modernisation follows only where it earns its place. You can read more about the family and the outlets on our about-us page.
He does not run it alone. A management team carries the day-to-day alongside him, including directors Rupesh Anand, Mamatha S and Loma, with Raju as Chief Operating Officer. But the bigger questions, the ones that decide what Nandhini is rather than how it operates this week, still come back to the grandson who learned the business by following the founder around.
What He Refuses to Change
Ask a new-generation leader what he will modernise and you usually get a long answer. Ask what he refuses to touch and you learn who he actually is. For the Nandhini new generation, that second list is short and very specific.
The recipes stay. The Mutton Biryani carries the same spice blend it has carried since 1989. The Guntur chillies still come from Andhra Pradesh rather than from whatever is cheapest that month. The banana-leaf meals are still served the way they were served when the founder watched the floor himself. And the model stays company-owned, with no franchising, because a franchise can sell the name but not the standard, and the standard is the whole point.
What moves forward is everything around that core. There are new outlets across Bengaluru and into Mysuru. There is a flagship that brought the food into a contemporary room. There is digital ordering and delivery that the founder’s generation never had to think about. Dhanush has spoken about growing the company well beyond its current footprint, towards 50 outlets and a far larger business, and there are announced plans to take Nandhini beyond India in the years ahead. The ambition is real. So is the line it will not cross.
People Over Profit, Written Down Nowhere
The lesson Dhanush returns to most is also the one with the least documentation. The family remembers N. Ananda as a man respected less for what he achieved than for how he carried himself. He was jovial, even-handed, and decent to people who could do nothing for him in return. He is remembered for the kind of person he was, not only for the company he left behind.
That is an awkward inheritance to manage, because it cannot be enforced through a process or measured in a quarterly review. It can only be modelled. A third-generation leader who treats the kitchen staff, the suppliers and the regulars the way his grandfather did keeps something alive that no recipe card protects. It is the part of the business the founder spent his final years of teaching on, and it is the part Dhanush seems most determined not to lose.
The Continuity a Regular Actually Feels
For the patron who has eaten here for years and quietly worries whether the new generation will change it, the honest answer sits on the plate and in the room. The recipe is the one they remember. The welcome is the one they remember. What has changed is mostly what they would have wanted changed anyway: cleaner spaces, more outlets closer to home, and the option to order in on a night they cannot come out.
That is what a generational handover is supposed to feel like when it goes right. Not a relaunch, but a continuation, run by someone who learned the kitchen from the person who built it. The Nandhini third generation did not arrive to put its own stamp on the place. It arrived to keep the stamp that was already there. If you want to see where that continuity is heading next, our contact page lists every outlet across the city.
What He Carries Forward
Three generations into a single name, the story of Nandhini Deluxe is no longer really about a restaurant chain. It is about whether a way of doing things can survive the people who started it. A founder built it. A grandson now leads it, having learned it the slow way, by following an old man through kitchens he would one day be responsible for. You can trace the whole arc, and the 37 years behind it, through our 37-year story.
The recipes, the outlets, the name. All of that was handed to him. But what mattered most was never something you could count: the way his grandfather treated the people around him. That’s what he’s really running. The restaurant is just what grew around it.He inherited recipes, outlets and a name. What he values most is harder to put on a balance sheet: how his grandfather treated people. That is the thing he is really running. Everything else is just the restaurant it built.
