When we talk about Platesman internally, the conversation rarely starts with the food. It starts with a problem that nobody seemed to be solving.

Pune has plenty of places to eat. You can go to a chain restaurant if you want something reliable but soulless. You can spend more than you planned at a sit-down dinner that felt like an occasion when you just wanted lunch. You can grab something quick at a counter and walk out feeling like you settled. 

What the city did not have enough of was a good middle: a place where you could walk in on a Tuesday afternoon, eat something genuinely made with care, and leave without second-guessing either your meal or your bill. A place that felt like a natural part of your week, not a special decision.

That gap is where Platesman began.

The Decision to Start Platesman

Every project inside the Deshpee Group starts with a real observation, not a slide deck. With Platesman, the observation was personal. The people on our team, along with the urban professionals who live and work across Pune’s western suburbs, were spending a frustrating amount of time hunting for everyday food that was neither junk nor an occasion. 

Something made fresh. Something portioned sensibly. Something that didn’t feel like a compromise.

The everyday dining segment in urban India is genuinely underserved in a specific way. The extremes are covered well enough. Fast food is everywhere. Upscale dining has plenty of options. 

What’s missing is the dependable everyday eatery the neighbourhood spot that makes food worth returning to multiple times a week, without ever making you feel like you need to dress up or watch your budget anxiously.

We built Platesman to fill that exact slot. The philosophy was simple from day one: clean flavours, honest portions, and the kind of familiar comfort that doesn’t need explanation. Every dish made fresh with real ingredients. 

A space that works just as well for a solo breakfast before work as it does for a relaxed dinner with family. No gimmicks, no seasonal novelty menus, no concept you need to explain to your parents. Just food that’s consistently good, in a space that feels consistently welcoming.

We called it Platesman. Everyday comfort food, plated beautifully. And we opened the first outlet in Bavdhan.

Why Bavdhan Was the Right First Location

Picking the right first location for a food business is about reading a neighbourhood as much as it is about finding a space. Bavdhan, on NDA Road, offered something specific that we were looking for: a fast-growing residential and corporate pocket of Pune with real dining demand and not enough quality options to meet it.

The demographic in Bavdhan is predominantly young, working, and eating out regularly. Residential societies, small offices, and a steady flow of people who want their everyday meals to be decent without being expensive. The existing dining scene hadn’t kept pace with how quickly the neighbourhood had grown. That gap between what people wanted and what was available was the opening.

We set up on NDA Road, opposite Hotel Oliva, and opened to the public. The response told us what we needed to know. Not through a launch campaign or a promotional push, but through something more meaningful: people came back. The same faces returning in the same week. Tables of colleagues who had clearly discovered the place together. 

Families who made it their Sunday morning default. Reviews across platforms talking about the food, the portions, the staff, the plants that kept the space cool and easy to sit in. One reviewer described the experience as feeling like a budget-friendly European restaurant with a cool breeze and a relaxed atmosphere. 

Another said the service, taste, quality, quantity, and ambience were all a perfect ten. Dishes like kheema-pao and Biscoff cheesecake built their own small following among regulars.

That kind of organic validation is not something you manufacture. It comes from getting the fundamentals right, and it told us clearly that the concept worked, not just the location.

Why the Second Outlet Is Coming to Aundh

Bavdhan proved the model. The next question was where to take it first.

Aundh was the clear answer. Located in Pune’s northwestern corridor, Aundh has evolved over the past decade into one of the city’s most established and genuinely cosmopolitan neighbourhoods. Broad roads, green avenues, premium residential societies, and a population that is predominantly educated, urban, and food-conscious. 

Young IT professionals, startup founders, established families, and long-time Punekars who take their dining choices seriously. Property values in Aundh sit between ₹10,000 and ₹16,000 per square foot, which reflects the calibre of the consumer base living there. These are people who spend on food regularly and have high expectations for what they get in return.

The restaurant culture in Aundh is already active and discerning. Good cafés do well there. Quality dining options have a loyal audience. But look more carefully, and you will find the same gap that existed in Bavdhan: the clean, repeat-worthy, everyday eatery category is still largely empty. 

Fine dining has representation. Quick and cheap has representation. The middle- the place you trust to feed you well on a Wednesday evening without any planning is still underserved relative to the size and quality of the audience.

That is the position Platesman is built to occupy. And that position is as open in Aundh as it was in Bavdhan when we first arrived.

Beyond the demographic fit, Aundh also allows us to test something critical at this stage of the brand’s growth: whether the Platesman experience holds when you replicate it across a second location. 

The food, the atmosphere, the staff behaviour, the sense that this place gives a genuine damn about what lands on your plate — all of that needs to travel intact. Aundh is where we prove that it does.

Platesman Is Also Getting Into Desserts

If the Bavdhan regulars have a favourite that keeps coming up in conversations and reviews, it is the Biscoff cheesecake. That one dish probably told us more about our customers than a year of feedback forms could have. People do not just want a good meal at Platesman. They want the meal to end well too.

That observation is what’s behind Platesman’s upcoming dessert line. We are building a range of in-house desserts that fit the same philosophy the rest of the menu runs on: made fresh, kept honest, and good enough that you do not feel like you compromised by eating in rather than going somewhere else. 

Not a separate dessert menu bolted onto a food concept as an afterthought, but a natural extension of what Platesman already does well. Comfort food plated beautifully applies to what comes after the main course just as much as it does to everything before it.

The dessert range is being developed to work across all the formats Platesman already operates in. As the Aundh outlet prepares to open and the brand moves toward a multi-location future, having a dessert range that is distinctly Platesman’s own is a brand signal that the kitchen takes the full meal seriously – start to finish.

The Road Ahead: Every Corner of Pune, Then Beyond

Platesman was never designed to be a single-outlet restaurant. The vision, built into the brand from its earliest days, is to set the benchmark for India’s modern comfort dining category and expand into a network of reliable, repeat-worthy eateries across major cities.

The roadmap is deliberate. Bavdhan first. Aundh next. Then, as the operational foundation solidifies, we move across Pune’s high-density neighbourhoods: Kothrud, Baner, Kalyani Nagar, Viman Nagar, Wakad, Kharadi. 

Each of these areas carries the same profile: urban professionals, residential density, genuine dining demand, and each of them has the same gap in the everyday dining segment that Bavdhan and Aundh presented. The goal is to make Platesman the name Punekars reach for first when they want something good, wherever they are in the city.

After Pune comes the next chapter. Cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, and Hyderabad have the same kind of urban professional density, the same eating-out frequency, and the same unmet demand in the everyday comfort dining category. 

The Platesman identity- clean food, honest portions, a space that feels grounded and consistent translates cleanly across geographies. It does not rely on being local to one neighbourhood. It relies on being reliable everywhere it operates. That scalability was engineered into the brand from the beginning, and expanding beyond Pune is a matter of timing, not concept.

How the Platesman Brand Gets Built

Building a food brand in 2026 is front-loaded with digital work. Before a new customer walks through the door for the first time, they have already searched for you, looked at your photos, read a few reviews, and made a provisional judgement. That digital first impression is often the deciding factor on whether they ever show up at all.

Platesman’s brand building runs through Socinova & Trigacy, the digital marketing consultancy within the Deshpee Group. The approach is focused rather than scattered. A consistent Instagram presence at @platesmaneverydayeatery that shows the food as it actually looks — real plates, real portions, real colour. 

A clean, functional website at platesman.com that covers the menu, catering options, corporate meal plans, and subscriptions without unnecessary complexity. Google Business Profile listings that are accurate, updated, and actively managed, because that single asset drives more new footfall than most other channels combined.

The brand does not lean on discounts or aggressive promotions to pull people in. The food earns the trust, the digital presence makes sure people can find it, and the review system ensures that genuine customer experiences are visible and responded to. That combination compounds over time in a way that paid promotions never do.

There is also a community dimension to how Platesman operates. The brand is part of an ongoing initiative with the Nelda Foundation, a Pune-based tree-planting programme working to make the city greener. 

That partnership is not a sticker on the window. It reflects something real about how Platesman wants to exist in its neighbourhoods as a business that takes its presence in the community seriously, not just its presence on a menu aggregator.

What This All Adds Up To

Platesman started as an honest answer to a real gap in Pune’s everyday dining market. Bavdhan showed the answer was right. Aundh is the first step in proving it scales. Every neighbourhood after that is the same proof being run again, until the brand is present across the whole city, and then in the cities that come next.

For Deshpee, this is what building something properly looks like. Not chasing quick growth at the cost of consistency. 

Not expanding before the model is solid enough to replicate without slipping. Getting the food right, getting the experience right, getting the digital presence right, and then growing from a foundation that holds.

Platesman is that kind of build. And the second outlet in Aundh is where the next chapter starts.

Platesman is part of the Deshpee Group, a Pune-based group of companies spanning food, digital marketing, design, and more. 

Visit platesman.com to explore the menu, place a catering order, or find your nearest outlet. The Aundh outlet is open now. 

Follow @platesmaneverydayeatery on Instagram for the latest updates.