The McCurry Story

Meet the man who took on McDonald’s and won. P Suppiah, a Malaysian born in Tamil Nadu, runs McCurry in Kuala Lumpur. McDonald’s sued him for trademark violation. What followed was a remarkable story of big MNC vs small entreprenuer. Now he gets fan mail from India all the time

You can’t have fries with that and no, you can’t supersize it either. But yes, it is called McCurry. In the heart of Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur, within spotting distance of the landmark twin Petronas Towers, stands Restoran McCurry.

The restaurant serves Tosai Masala (masala dosa, as we know it) for 2.50 Malaysian ringgit, Roti Canai (an adapted Chennai parotta) for RM 1.00, Ghee Uttapam (RM 1.70), and even Chicken Tikka (RM 6.00) and Aloo Paratha (RM 2.50).

It is Indian fast food, unmistakably, but the menu is not its claim to fame.

McCurry hit headlines around the globe last year-end for delivering a legal thrashing to the global fast food giant McDonald’s in a trademark infringement case in Malaysia’s highest Federal Court. The one-outlet McCurry thus retained the right to use the ‘Mc’ identifier in its name.

It was a battle that captured the imagination of Malaysia, a country dominated by Malay Muslims but home also to Chinese and ethnic Tamil Indians.

Now its victorious owner P. Suppiah, 55, a third-generation Malaysian who traces his roots back to Tamil Nadu — his grandfather came to Malaysia 100 years ago to work on rubber plantations and he himself was born in Tiruchirapalli — says he wants to go global with McCurry.

Fresh from the legal triumph, Suppiah, who dabbles in Malaysian real estate market, runs a bistro and dips into the running of his family’s palm oil plantations, says he is already talking licensing arrangements with partners in Sri Lanka, Australia and Indonesia.

Since the landmark win against McDonald’s, likened by the global media to a David versus Goliath battle, McCurry has become a tourist hot spot. More importantly for Suppiah, the victory has also brought a flurry of overseas franchising inquiries, some 53 from 21 countries at last count.

Suppiah hopes that McCurry’s first overseas branch, sporting its trademark logo of a smiling chicken flashing a two-thumbs-up sign, will be in India. “I would like nothing more than to bring the McCurry brand to India with the help of a strategic partner,” says the affable businessman who was educated in New Zealand.

McCurry certainly has grand designs for the future. But Kuala Lumpur’s original McCurry is a modest 24×7 eatery wedged between a 7-Eleven convenience store and a car spare parts dealer on the prominent Jalan Ipoh thoroughfare. It is an all-day, all-night, year-round restaurant that only shuts for two days during Diwali.

Unlike the typical ambience of the American fast food giant’s outlets, there are no fresh-faced teenagers behind the cash till at McCurry. There are no items with the ‘Mc’ prefix on the menu. “Look around you — is there anything here that resembles McDonald’s?” asks the bespectacled, be-suited Suppiah.

Indeed, there is no evidence that McCurry is trying to confound customers by passing itself off as part of the slicker, global fast food chain. The restaurant is outfitted with old-fashioned formica-topped tables. Overhead fans cool customers as they fight the formidable Malaysian heat.

In fact, there is barely anything Western about McCurry except its casual format. On McCurry’s wall are instructions, “Easy Steps — Order Drinks, Take Food, Collect Drinks, Pay”. The popular fare on the menu is a Friday ‘Beryani Special’ and the spicy chicken curry that gave the restaurant its original name.

As the protracted legal battle wound its way through the High Court and the Federal Court, Suppiah and his wife Kanageswary have maintained that their restaurant did not intend to copy the American fast food chain. Nor did they intend to dilute the global brand name.

It has been a gutsy battle for the Suppiahs in Malaysia which boasts of over 140 McDonald’s outlets. In fact, ads for McDonald’s Prosperity Burgers are all over Kuala Lumpur city, from Monorail stations to high-end shopping malls, showing the vast footprint of the brand.

All along, the Suppiahs said their own restaurant’s name is an abbreviation of popular offering, Malaysian chicken curry. During the height of the legal dispute, they were reluctantly forced to drop the ‘c’ from their name and turn into ‘MCurry’.

McCurry has been reinstated, but oblivious to the significance of this legal battle, courteous staff dressed in McDonald’s-like golden yellow-and-red colours tend to the flow of customers that include curious American tourists, Indians hankering after some ‘home food’ and blue-collar Malaysian workers. To cater to this jumble of clients, the wall menus also list Malaysian specialties such as mee goreng, fried noodles, and kway teow, stir fried rice flat-strips, both huge local favorites.

“Many small guys would have run scared at the thought of taking on the financial might of McDonald’s,” says Suppiah. He will not reveal how much he spent on legal fees, but adds, “I had nothing to lose but the name.”

And everything to gain. Suppiah says McDonald’s — whose website proudly proclaims that it has sold one billion burgers in over 100 countries and serves 47 million people daily — came off looking like a “big bully” for taking on a small guy like him. For weeks after the courtroom victory, McCurry was inundated with Western tourists. “We could not cope with the rush,” he says.

Things are just settling back to a saner level at the restaurant. One evening early this month, two Bangladeshi students who gave their names as Jutun and Reuben presented an unusual sight at McCurry. They ate rice and chicken curry with their fingers and licked off the flavours afterwards. “This food tastes like home cooking,” said Jutun, who vouched for McCurry’s popularity amongst a wide gamut of South Asians.

Suppiah has supporters in celebrities like famed photographer Steve McCurry with whom the restaurant shares a name. Early this month, the businessman was readying to welcome the photographer to his restaurant. He quoted McCurry as joking whether McDonald’s would next attempt to sue him for using his own name.

It isn’t everyday that a modest mom-and-pop business takes on the world’s number one food chain, a 32,000-outlet, 4 lakh-plus employee corporation, and wins. Many businesses around the world have fallen flat in trying to taken on McDonald’s. In Bangalore, for instance, the global corporation won a case against a bathroom fittings retailer called P.C. Mallappa whose logo resembled the famous golden arches. Legal victory has been elusive except in rare cases such as the McChina Wok Away in London.

Now that he has pulled off the seemingly impossible, Suppiah dreams of turning the ten-year-old McCurry brand into an international chain ready to take on McDonald’s in other countries.

He proudly displays newspaper clips of his victory in a dozen Indian-language newspapers. “I get fan mail from all over India,” he says, showing letters from strangers who say they feel proud that an Indian has won such an important victory.

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