Thirty-five years ago, nobody in Dunedin was ordering a lamb rogan josh from a fish and chip shop. Today, Little India is one of New Zealand's best known Indian restaurant franchises, and the whole thing started because a family needed to sell more chips.
This is the story of how it happened, told in Sukhi and Joanna Gill's own words.
It started above a fish and chip shop in Ravensbourne
Before there was a restaurant, there was a dairy. Sukhi and Joanna Gill were running a small dairy with an adjoining fish and chip shop in Ravensbourne, just outside Dunedin. Joanna had already been making samosas at home and selling them to local delis, a sideline that stopped when the couple had their second child and took on the dairy instead.
The first attempt to bring Indian food into the business did not go to plan. The dairy had a rotisserie, and Sukhi decided to try cooking tandoori chicken in it.
"It didn't work," Sukhi says. "That was a failure."
Two kilos of lamb, and a curry that sold out in an hour
The real turning point came when Sukhi's mother, Premjit, came to stay. Between her and Joanna, the idea emerged to cook a proper curry upstairs, where the family lived above the shop, and sell it downstairs alongside the usual fish and chips.
They started small and specific: two kilos of lamb and rice, sold on a Friday. It was a lamb rogan josh, cooked exactly the way the family ate it at home, with no attempt to tone down the flavour for a New Zealand audience.
"Within the first hour, it just went," Joanna says. It sold out.
The customer who only bought rice
Not everyone realised what was happening. One early customer came in, bought only the rice, and came back the following week to complain that it "wasn't very spicy." He had no idea it was meant to be eaten with the curry. The next time, he ordered what he thought was fried rice from the takeaway menu instead.
It is a small moment, but it says a lot about how new Indian food genuinely was in Dunedin at the time, and how little marketing the Gills were doing beyond word of mouth and a queue forming out the door.
Demand kept building until the family could not cook any more than they were already selling from a single stove upstairs. Joanna was finding the seven-day dairy grind exhausting on top of the growing food demand, and it took around a year and a half to sell the dairy business. The family then went to India for a break, and came back with a plan to build on what they had accidentally started.
Learning to run a commercial kitchen in Sydney
Home cooking and running a commercial kitchen turned out to be two very different skills. A friend in Sydney, hearing what the Gills were planning, told Sukhi plainly that home cooking on its own was not going to work, and that he needed to come over and learn properly.
Sukhi spent three weeks in his friend's Sydney kitchen, doing the unglamorous groundwork of any commercial kitchen, including peeling and cutting onions, despite having no professional cooking background himself.
"I'm an accountant by profession and a chef by choice," Sukhi says of that period.
It was a crash course, not a qualification, but it gave him the fundamentals of how a commercial kitchen actually runs, which he brought home and combined with Joanna's chef training and Premjit's recipes. Premjit, now approaching 96, trained the family's chefs directly in her own kitchen, and the business has never used refined sugar, relying instead on ingredients like cashew and tomato paste to build sweetness into its sauces.
Why the name Little India
Choosing a name took longer than expected. The Gills worked with a local agency, went through a long list of ideas, and eventually landed on something simple and literal: Little India. It reflected exactly what it was, a small restaurant, and at the time, a single one. There was no plan to expand beyond that first site.
Growing without a plan: Queenstown and Christchurch
Little India's expansion beyond Dunedin did not come from a strategy document. It came from customers.
Visitors from Queenstown ate at the Dunedin restaurant, enjoyed it, and told Sukhi directly that they needed him there too. The same thing happened with Christchurch. As Sukhi puts it, "there was no strategic planning at all."
The quiet period after the opening rush
Opening the first proper restaurant brought an immediate rush, a genuine honeymoon period for the first three months. Then, just as suddenly, it slowed down. Neither Sukhi nor Joanna is fully certain why, though they wonder whether it was tied to Dunedin's large student population moving on for the year.
Rather than push through exhausted, the family closed the restaurant and took their children travelling around New Zealand. It was, in Sukhi's words, a chance to step back, because when you are that deep inside a business, "you can't see the picture because you're standing inside the frame."
Switching from buffet service to a la carte
That break led to the most significant operational change in the business's early history. The original service model had been buffet style, a bain-marie set-up with food held out for self-service. Coming back from their break, the Gills switched entirely to a la carte, cooked-to-order service.
Two things drove the change. Customers wanted a proper menu and a plated experience rather than a self-service buffet, and the buffet model was generating significant food wastage. Moving to a la carte let the family see exactly which dishes customers actually wanted, and adjust the menu accordingly, something a buffet format makes almost impossible to track.
Butter chicken, chicken tikka masala, rogan josh and the vegetarian dishes were the standouts then, and largely remain the standouts now.
Becoming part of the community
Ask Sukhi and Joanna what they would tell a business owner five or ten years into their own journey, and the answer is not about marketing spend or menu engineering. It is about genuinely becoming part of the community: sponsoring local sports teams, inviting local school children into the kitchen, supporting charities, and keeping kitchens visibly open so customers could see exactly how the food was made, at a time when many people had real misconceptions about what a "foreign" kitchen might look like.
That openness extended to staff as well. Many of Little India's chefs and managers came directly from India, often needing guidance on basics like what warm clothing to bring for a New Zealand winter. The Gills describe being drawn into staff members' personal lives far beyond the usual employer relationship, including being called to hospitals when staff members' children were born.
"We wanted to make their lives easier for them and just help," Sukhi says. "They relied on us. We were their guardians, I suppose."
Turning staff into franchise owners
As the business grew, a practical problem emerged: how do you keep good staff long term when they are starting families and need financial security? The answer became the franchise model itself.
"We thought that we have to share Little India with them," Sukhi says. None of the staff being offered a franchise had the capital to buy one outright, so the Gills financed them into ownership directly, backing people who already knew the systems, had worked the floor and the kitchen, and wanted the opportunity.
It worked because trust had already been built. As Joanna notes, once staff had ownership themselves, they began to understand the business decisions the Gills had made for years, and started making the same calls for the same reasons, because it was now their bottom line too.
Auckland, notably, was the one market the Gills specifically identified and pursued rather than responding to customer requests, and it proved to be the hardest market of all to crack given how fragmented the city's suburbs are. Little India now operates in the Auckland suburb of Glen Eden, an example of the localised, suburb-by-suburb approach that has worked better than a single flagship Auckland site.
Surviving earthquakes, Covid and 35 years of hospitality
Thirty-five years in hospitality has not been a straight line upward. The business has traded through the Christchurch earthquakes, the Covid-19 pandemic, and what Sukhi and Joanna describe as some of the most difficult trading conditions the sector has faced, driven by rising costs across the wider hospitality industry.
There was a point, in the very early days in Dunedin, when Sukhi seriously considered walking away and rang his old accounting employer to ask for his job back. He was told the position was filled. "It's now down to me," he remembers deciding. He does not regret staying the course.
Hamilton, a 28-year location for the brand, closed two years ago, not because the restaurant itself was struggling but because the building was no longer fit for purpose. The Gills are actively looking for the right premises and the right landlord to bring Little India back to Hamilton.
What's next for Little India
Looking ahead, the priority is straightforward: keep trading through what both founders describe as the toughest period the hospitality sector has faced. Beyond that, the ambition is to bring Little India into smaller communities, not necessarily as full restaurants but through formats like Little India at Home, the brand's takeaway and home-cooking offshoot, alongside new ventures the family is still developing.
Day-to-day leadership has now largely passed to son Arjun, a transition that was not always smooth. Early on, staff and franchisees treated him as "the boss's son" rather than a decision-maker in his own right, and Arjun himself pushed his parents to move faster on decisions than they were used to. Sukhi credits Arjun's persistence, alongside his own health scare, as one of the direct triggers for formalising the franchise model in the first place.
Frequently asked questions
When was Little India founded? Little India was founded in Dunedin in 1991 by Sukhi and Joanna Gill, growing out of a dairy and adjoining fish and chip shop in Ravensbourne.
Where did Little India start? It started in Ravensbourne, just outside Dunedin, where the Gills first sold Indian dishes such as lamb rogan josh alongside their existing fish and chip shop menu.
Is Little India a franchise? Yes. Little India operates as a franchise, with several locations run by former staff members who were financed into ownership by the founders, as well as family members in some regions.
Why doesn't Little India use sugar? The brand developed its sauces using ingredients such as cashew and tomato paste rather than refined sugar, a recipe approach that has been part of the business since its early years in Dunedin.
