Little India’s legacy
A rogan josh experiment one Friday night in 1988 Dunedin was the seed of Little India, a family-owned group of Indian restaurants that now spans the country. This isn’t just a business story though; Metropol deputy editor Tamara Pitelen discovers a legacy built on hard work, migration, and an unshakable belief in family.
In 1988, Sukhi and Joanna Gill ran a small dairy and adjoining fish and chip shop in Dunedin. With a six-month-old baby and two children under four, failure wasn’t an option.
“It had to work,” says Sukhi, recalling those early days that sparked a culinary revolution and led to the Little India chain of seven restaurants across New Zealand.
The turning point came when Sukhi’s parents visited from India. The couple added some of his mum Premjit Kaur Gill’s Indian recipes to the menu.
“On Friday nights, we used to get two kilos of lamb and make lamb curry with rice, rogan josh. It got really popular. We used to sell out very quickly,” Sukhi says.
Joanna, a United Kingdom-trained chef, and Premjit, cooked curry upstairs in their flat on a single electric stove. “Suddenly, we had queues out the door of our small takeaway. We had to give away free Cokes to keep people calm while they waited.”
Two kilos of lamb quickly became six, and soon the couple opened their first restaurant. For more than six years, they only took Christmas and Boxing Day off.
That dedication built what became one of Christchurch’s best-known Indian restaurant brands. Back then, it was just Sukhi and Joanna – two hardworking parents building a new life in New Zealand after emigrating from the UK in 1986.
A family recipe for success
“We were doing everything ourselves,” Joanna remembers. “Sukhi was working front of house and in the kitchen, I was also in the kitchen. Our kids were little. We worked every single day.”
Was it easy to work together? “No, not always,” Joanna says. “But there was no time to argue,” Sukhi adds. “The kids were little, we had to drop them off at kindy, come back to clean the restaurant, do the prep work for the veggies…
“I used to go in early in the morning and clean and do all the prep. Sukhi would come in before the lunch service, and then I would pick up the kids, says Joanna.”
“The good thing is you have youth,” Sukhi says. “We were young, so we never thought ‘oh it’s going to be a tough day’, we just got on with it and the passion was there.”
All the recipes came from Premjit, now in her 90s. “She was the heart of it all,” Sukhi says. “Those first dishes we served came straight from her. She taught Joanna to cook by example, Jo just stood behind her and watched, that’s how she learnt.”
The couple offered something new to Dunedin – authentic Indian food without Westernised shortcuts. “Our motto was always ‘authentic Indian food – a real taste of India’,” says Sukhi. “We’ve stuck to that ever since. People know what they’re going to get.”
From their first restaurant, Little India expanded – firstly to Queenstown, then across the country. At its peak, there were 17 locations. After the Christchurch earthquakes and Covid-19, that number dropped to seven.
“The Christchurch earthquakes were devastating,” says Joanna. “Just as we were starting to recover from that, Covid-19 hit. It felt like starting from scratch again.”
Still, they stayed focused. “We didn’t jump on trends. We didn’t do fusion or reinvent the menu every few months,” says Joanna. “We just stuck to what we knew – quality food, consistent flavours, warm hospitality.”
Expansion and franchising
As the business grew, so did the workload. “There came a point when we just couldn’t run it all ourselves anymore,” Joanna says. “That’s when we decided to franchise.”
Franchising let them keep their values while giving trusted staff more responsibility. “Some of our current older franchisees started working with us in their 20s,” Sukhi says. “They grew with us. That’s the kind of family environment we’ve always tried to build.”
The rest of the Gill family has also played a part. Their son, Arjun, left school early and joined the business from the bottom rung. “When he said school wasn’t for him, we said, ‘fine, then you work’. He started as a dishwasher.” From there, Arjun worked every role in the business, including time in the kitchen learning to cook.
He now oversees the national operations and co-authored the Little India at home: Indian dishes made easy cookbook with Joanna – adapting the original recipes so people could cook them at home. “We were getting so many requests from customers for our recipes,” says Joanna. “So we thought, why not share them?”
Beyond food, the Gills have supported their communities, sponsoring teams and schools, supporting charities like Cure Kids, and organising four tours to India for friends, colleagues and customers. “We took them to local golf clubs, on a luxury train journey, and to meet Sukhi’s family,” Joanna says.
Today, 34 years after opening that first restaurant in Dunedin, the Gills are passing the torch. “We’re gradually transitioning things to Arjun,” says Joanna. “It’s not easy to let go, this business has been our life, but it’s time.”
Sukhi agrees. “There’s no shortcut to this kind of success. You have to believe in yourself. I used to say, ‘While everyone else invests in the share market, I invest in me and I expect a return.’ That’s how we built Little India.”
Built it they have. A chain of restaurants and a lasting legacy. A family business that now spans the country, touching thousands of lives along the way. All because Sukhi’s mum had a great recipe for rogan josh.
