Start-up for and by seafood lovers

“There’s no restaurant that you can visit casually for seafood — most of the places serve fancy dishes with an exorbitant price tag yet taste only average,” says Poornachandar Kalaivanan, a true blue Chennaiite. “I’ve lived near Marina beach all my life so we get the freshest of catch, which my mom turns into delicious dishes. But it’s sad that you can’t find seafood that tastes like it’s homemade, Chennai style, just the way you find other meats,” he adds. 

He along with a few others decided to answer this question through Something Fishy, a start-up that delivers homemade seafood like meen kuzhambu and ayla varuval. Fish is easily available in places like Kerala but not in Chennai because most of the fresh catch is exported; so what’s left over is either stale or not the best of the produce. “We’ve solved this by identifying sources that will supply us fresh fish, which one of us go and supervise for quality each day,” Poornachandar says. 

His mother Sharmila and a few other homemakers come together each day to prepare all the dishes in a centralised kitchen. A ‘universal’ masala created by the team is their USP — it’s called so because it can be used to make any dish but each one will taste differently. “I never used to eat seafood, but their preparations have converted me and now I can only eat fresh fish,” jokes Vidya Krishnamoorthy, who’s also part of the start-up. 

Their pilot test of serving cooked seafood during an event in Loyola Institute of Business Administration was a runaway success. “We thought if people like our meat then we might as well supply the raw produce also to those interested, on a pre-order basis. We’re not techaverse either so without being dependent on Swiggy or Zomato, we’ve created a website: it’s a one-of-a-kind platform that converts a fish market into virtual reality that can fit in your pocket. Like a vendor, it can suggest which product or dish you can buy instead of something else,” the team says. 

They’re in the process of setting up a standalone restaurant that they hope will disrupt the market — it will resemble a cloud kitchen that will still enable customers to see and pick what they’re eating.