McDonald’s Debuts in India--Sans Beef

McDonald’s first Indian restaurant, and its first in the world with no beef on the menu, opened Sunday in New Delhi with a traditional Hindu ceremony and a rush of enthusiastic customers.

O.P. Sahani, a 75-year-old retired civil servant, said he came all the way from Vrindavan, 90 miles south of New Delhi, to show his support for McDonald’s efforts to do business with India.

“They have not brought raw materials from overseas,” Sahani said, proudly wearing a red-and-yellow McDonald’s cap.

Other customers didn’t seem all that interested that the mutton for Maharaja Macs came from Indian sheep, the potatoes for the fries from Indian farms and the Coke from an Indian bottler.

“As long as the food’s good, I don’t care,” said 19-year-old Pankresh Mathur. Mathur, his teenage brother and two cousins were crowded around a table, showing the rest of the diners just how fast a Maharaja Mac could be consumed.

Other foreign restaurants in India, including U.S.-based Pizza Hut and KFC, have been targets of demonstrations and vandalism organized by Indians who insist on self-sufficiency. There were no protests at McDonald’s on Sunday.

Vikram Bakshi, an Indian real estate magnate who formed a partnership with McDonald’s to open the New Delhi restaurant, was serving mutton instead of beef because about 80% of his countrymen are Hindu, a religion whose adherents don’t eat beef and believe cows are a sacred symbol of the source of life.

The menu also featured rice-based vegetable burgers patties--flavored with peas, carrots, red pepper, beans, coriander and other spices. vegetable McNuggets were bite-size, unspiced versions of the vegetable patties.

Bakshi broke a coconut on the threshold of his restaurant, and his wife and three daughters lit incense Sunday, a ritual meant to encourage Hindu gods to bless the new venture.

Sahani, a strict vegetarian who was the first customer, praised the vegetable burgers but had some word advice for Bakshi: “It was nice, but you require some improvement in the potato chips,” he said, describing the fries as “too soft.”