Roos Pal, the owner of New Delhi Bistro in the Rheem Shopping Center, has reverted her restaurant, Baagan, back to its original Indian cuisine. Pal took a chance in 2019 by making the restaurant vegan, but when sales dropped, she decided to add Indian dishes back to her menu.

What gave Pal the initial push to change to a vegan menu was her belief that customers in the community would appreciate it. “I thought Moraga is very health conscious and everybody is also into the vegan and the plant based and gluten free and all kind of options,” said Pal. “I’m vegetarian myself so I thought that would be a good choice in Moraga-Lamorinda.”

While Pal’s mission was to best serve her local patrons, the business was not thriving. “In 10 months, it was only going down,” she said. “We were not doing very well so what we did is we switched back to the New Dehli Bistro because every day 5 to 10 people will just leave because they wanted Indian food.” 

In turning the restaurant back to Indian cuisine, Pal also retained the vegan options on the menu. Now, the New Dehli Bistro menu contains vegan and Indian food options, including the restaurant’s most popular dish, chicken tikka masala.

Freshman Maddy Kearney is happy to see more traditional Indian food back on the menu.” Kearney added, “the go-to thing I order is the chicken tikka masala.”

Jay Pandya, a colleague who sometimes comes to New Delhi to assist Pal at the restaurant,  said of the improved menu, “All the items that we have are what people crave for, they are the very popular items.”

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