Would you rather spend ₹5 lakh a month on rent in a busy mall, or ₹3 lakh on Instagram influencers and Meta ads to convince customers to visit a cheaper but less visible restaurant?

Burma Burma co-founder Chirag Chhajer has publicly explained why, for his restaurant business, the more expensive property can sometimes make better financial sense. His argument is simple: a restaurant inside a busy mall or corporate hub already sits where potential customers are spending time. A cheaper standalone location may save money on rent, but the brand may then have to spend heavily on digital marketing just to create comparable awareness and footfall.

Chhajer described the higher rent as a form of customer acquisition cost, comparing roughly ₹5 lakh in monthly mall rent with around ₹3 lakh that might otherwise go towards influencers and Meta advertising for a non-prime location. It is a provocative comparison, but it reflects a much bigger shift inside India's food and beverage industry. Restaurants are no longer simply tenants inside shopping centres. Increasingly, food itself is becoming one of the reasons people visit malls in the first place.

Burma Burma's ₹5 Lakh vs ₹3 Lakh Calculation

Chhajer said that when the company first began considering mall locations, the rent numbers looked expensive compared with its high-street restaurants. He eventually began thinking about that premium differently.

Instead of comparing only:

mall rent vs cheaper rent

he started comparing:

mall rent and built-in visibility vs cheaper rent plus the marketing required to generate traffic. In his example, ₹5 lakh a month for a mall location could provide access to customers already walking through the property, while a restaurant in a weaker location might spend around ₹3 lakh on Instagram influencers and Meta ads trying to persuade people to make a dedicated trip. That does not mean every ₹5 lakh mall lease is automatically better than ₹3 lakh of advertising. It means restaurant operators need to compare the total cost of acquiring diners, rather than evaluating rent and marketing as completely separate expenses.

Why Location Can Work Like Customer Acquisition Cost

Traditional digital customer acquisition cost asks how much a company spends to acquire one paying customer. Chhajer's argument effectively expands that idea into restaurant real estate.

A well-positioned mall can provide:

• Existing shopper footfall
• Cinema audiences
• Office traffic
• Parking
• Security
• Established destination value
• Visibility next to other brands
• Easier discovery
• Shared mall marketing

For restaurants, those benefits can reduce how much effort is needed to convince someone to visit.

A standalone restaurant may have cheaper rent but require stronger advertising, influencer marketing, local awareness campaigns and discounts before consumers even know it exists.

This is particularly relevant in India's premium casual and fine dining market, where customers increasingly choose an entire destination — mall, business district or lifestyle centre — before choosing the individual restaurant inside it.

But Rent and Advertising Are Not Exactly the Same Thing

There is an important limitation to the comparison. Rent is not purely marketing expenditure. It also pays for the physical space required to operate the restaurant. A mall lease gives a brand dining space, utilities infrastructure, visibility and access to the property ecosystem. Advertising, by contrast, is specifically designed to influence customer behaviour. Mall footfall also does not guarantee restaurant customers. A property can attract thousands of visitors while a poorly positioned or weak restaurant still struggles. Digital advertising has a different advantage: campaigns can be targeted, changed quickly and measured through clicks, leads, bookings and conversions. So Chhajer's argument is best understood as a unit-economics framework, not a rule that expensive mall rent is always superior.

Why So Many Burma Burma Restaurants Are in Malls

The strategy becomes clearer when looking at the chain's physical footprint. According to Hindustan Times, Chhajer said around 75% of its locations are now inside malls and integrated corporate-office parks. That number initially appears slightly different from comments made by co-founder Ankit Gupta earlier in 2026. Speaking at an Economic Times Retail industry event in March, Gupta said approximately 60–70% of the chain's restaurants were inside malls. The figures are not necessarily contradictory.

Gupta was referring specifically to malls, while the later figure includes malls and corporate office parks. The company's footprint has also continued evolving through 2026.The broader conclusion is unchanged: organised retail and mixed-use commercial properties now form a major part of the chain's location strategy.

India's Malls Are Giving More Space to Food

That strategy mirrors what is happening across the wider restaurant market. At the March 2026 Great India Retail Summit, Gupta said that when Burma Burma Restaurant & Tea Room began in 2014, its focus was primarily on high streets. Malls were not initially central to the expansion strategy. According to Gupta, mall space allocated to F&B was once around 10–15% but has increasingly moved towards roughly 20–25% in newer formats. Other developers at the same discussion gave different numbers depending on the property, illustrating how rapidly mall design is changing.

One mall executive said F&B had moved from roughly 5–8% of gross leasable area in earlier years to around 15% today. Another industry participant said newer developments can allocate as much as 25–30%. The precise percentage therefore varies by mall. But the direction is clear. Food and beverage businesses are taking a larger role in mall tenant mixes.

Restaurants Are Becoming the New Mall Anchor

Historically, department stores, multiplexes and large fashion retailers were considered traditional mall anchors. That model is changing. Executives quoted by Economic Times Retail described restaurants and cafés as increasingly important traffic generators because consumers may eat outside their homes several times a week but do not buy clothes at the same frequency. For mall owners, that makes restaurants useful because dining can increase:

• Visit frequency
• Evening traffic
• Weekend dwell time
• Social gatherings
• Cross-shopping between categories

For restaurant operators, meanwhile, the mall offers customers who are already present. That creates a mutually beneficial relationship. The mall supplies traffic to the restaurant. The restaurant helps create traffic for the mall.

Where the Strategy Is Showing Up

The chain's expansion during 2026 provides examples of that preference. In January, it opened an outlet at Sky City Mall in Borivali, Mumbai, strengthening its presence in the city's western suburbs. Contemporary reports described that opening as the brand's sixth Mumbai restaurant and its 21st nationwide. Then in February, the company entered Chandigarh with an outlet at Nexus Elante Mall.

Interestingly, that company release also described Chandigarh as its 21st restaurant, showing that contemporary outlet counts were not completely consistent. More recent industry material describes the business as operating 22 restaurants across nine cities. That is the safer current figure to use rather than trying to reconstruct the numbering from individual launch announcements.

Why Mall Economics Can Work for a Restaurant Chain

For a growing restaurant brand, mall locations can potentially make expansion more predictable.

A landlord already has information on:

• Daily footfall
• Weekend traffic
• Catchment demographics
• Parking volumes
• Cinema attendance
• Competing restaurants
• Office populations
• Average dwell time

That does not remove business risk.

But it gives an operator more information than simply opening a restaurant on a quiet street and hoping customers discover it. This is why restaurant location is becoming as much a data decision as a real-estate decision. A higher rent may be acceptable when the additional customer traffic produces enough additional revenue to compensate for it.

The ₹5 Lakh Question Comes Down to Unit Economics

Imagine two hypothetical locations.

Location A

• ₹5 lakh rent
• Strong mall traffic
• Lower marketing requirement

Location B

• Lower rent
• Weak organic visibility
• ₹3 lakh or more in monthly customer-acquisition spending Location B may initially appear cheaper. But once digital advertising, influencer fees, promotions and customer discounts are included, the difference can narrow substantially. The correct calculation is therefore not simply: Which location has cheaper rent?

It is:

Which location produces the highest sustainable restaurant-level profit after rent, marketing and every other operating cost? That is the real business lesson behind Chhajer's argument.

Why This Matters Beyond One Restaurant Brand

The debate has relevance well beyond Burmese cuisine. India's restaurant market is becoming increasingly organised, competitive and expensive.

Operators face rising:

• Property costs
• Salaries
• Food costs
• Delivery commissions
• Advertising costs
• Customer expectations

At the same time, malls increasingly want restaurants because dining keeps consumers inside properties for longer. That changes the bargaining relationship between landlords and the food and beverage industry. A strong restaurant can be valuable to the mall just as the mall is valuable to the restaurant.

rent should not be judged in isolation. The real question is how much total money a restaurant must spend to put a paying customer in a seat — and whether the location itself is already doing part of that job.