On a hot Thursday evening in Delhi, customers have queued up outside Olive Garden’s first outlet in India.

Some have come straight after drooling over Instagram reels about the American casual-dining restaurant chain. Others are office-goers from the nearby business park in Aerocity. Most of them have spent at least half an hour waiting for a seat.

When Bharti Group broughtLivemintBharti-backed Gourmet Investments brings Olive Garden to India Olive Garden to India in May, it probably hoped to see this very crowd.

Together with chains like Pizzaexpress, PF Chang’s, and Ministry of Crab, Gourmet Investments, the group’s dining arm (spearheaded by Ramit Mittal, nephew of Sunil Bharti Mittal, the billionaire chairman of Bharti Enterprises), operates about 55 restaurants across India today. The business has grown its sales by over 40% to Rs 176 crore in the five years to FY25.

And over the next three years, Bharti wants to take it forward. Its plan is to more than doubleLivemintBharti-backed Gourmet Investments brings Olive Garden to India the footprint to 125 outlets, including 10 Olive Garden outlets.

It’s an ambitious target. And Bharti hiringStoryboard 18Former Pizza Hut India MD Rohan Pewekar to lead PizzaExpress, Chili’s Ops former Pizza Hut chief, Rohan Pewekar, as the vertical’s new CEO is a sign of that ambition. The timing seems right, too. Cuisines once considered niche—Italian, Chinese, American, Mexican, Japanese, and Thai—have all found aficionados in urban India.

But the challenge is that Bharti’s bet is on casual dining, a segment that has proved too difficult to scale. Unlike fast-food chains that run on fixed menus and standardised operations, casual dining depends on larger kitchens and longer service times. Their staff, too, are expected to deliver hospitality with food.

Chili’s, the American Tex-Mex chain which landed in India in 2009, knows it best. Its planLivemintTexMex Cuisine to invest Rs150 crore in restaurant chain Chili's for expansion was to open at least 50 outlets in south and west India alone.