Boston's first ever cricket themed bar Hit Wicket is attracting sports enthusiast in droves. Hit Wicket owners/Restaurateurs Shubha & Nada feature a unique blend of home cooked recipes and popular street foods (their husbands added a generous dash of sports frenzy). These dishes are brought to life with locally sourced ingredients served up with craft beers & cocktails. 

Give us a background of this restaurant?

The managing partners - Shubha and Nada are close friends and their husband Raghu and Paul were colleagues working for a Technology Services company in Kendall Square for close to 10 years. Also, Shubha 's 2 brother-in-laws from India are investors in the venture.

Shubha and Nada are passionate about food and have brought a few of their home recipes into Hit Wicket's menu while their husbands and the India investors are sports buffs and  love cricket. Raghu and Paul play in the local Boston area cricket leagues.

How and why did you start Hit wicket?

Given the founders passion for food and sports, we wanted to start something that is unique but at the same time mainstream for Americans.

The goal of Hit Wicket is to provide a platform for cricket fans to have a meeting place to watch, debate and discuss anything related to cricket. At the same time, thru Hit Wicket we would like Americans to get to know the game of cricket in a mainstream concept of a sportsbar.

Hit Wicket being in the City of champions - Boston, we are dedicated to showing all our local sports teams as well as global sports such as Soccer, Rugby, etc.

Share with us some of the unique features of Hit Wicket?  

Hit Wicket has a central theme of cricket and has original memorabilia, merchandise and autographed cricket bats and posters. We have created a cricket demo area where our patrons can get to feel real cricket gear and play with them as well as compare it with baseball gear. Further, we have our food menu on miniature cricket bats and drinks menu shaped like a ball. At each table we an assortment of cricket and sports related books and a statistical sheet that highlights the best cricket players and teams in the world, rules of cricket,  gives key comparisons between baseball and cricket, etc.

Also, there are 8 large screen TVs including an 80 inch TV which is the center piece of the dining area.

We have been showing various sports across these TVs and during key cricket matches and soccer games on weekends we have opened as early as 7.30am.

We have hosted a number of profit at events both corporate and personal where our patrons   have celebrated birthdays, farewell, customer meetings, social meet up groups, etc.

We have also hosted former India cricket players - Dilip Vengasarkar and Robin Singh.

What are some of the specialties in the food you serve?

Our food is a Global Menu - street and popular bar fare from major cricket playing nations. So, we have dishes like - Aussie Meat Pie, English Banger with Indian Style Mashed Potato, Trinidad Roti Wrap, South African Bunny Chow, New Zealand Mahi Mahi, Pakistani Lamb Kebab, Bangladesh Smoked Fish, Sri Lankan biscuit pudding to Masala Peanuts, Yam Crepe and Curry/Rice.

We have plenty of  vegetarian and vegan options and most of the dishes can be customized for vegetarians. We also maintain separate cooking equipment to cook veg and non-Veg dishes.

One of our specialties is the 3 different sauces with varying spice levels served - 511, 711, 911 and we have plenty of unique dips and chutneys that accompany our dishes.

What is your favorite gadget, app or piece of software that helps you most with running this place?

We use an iPad based POS called Breadcrumb from GroupON. This allows us to take orders right at the table and send it out to the kitchen for faster order fulfillment and service. Also, being a cloud based software, we are able to monitor the sales and inventory levels from anywhere and the software provides us with analytics. We also use Swipley for Merchant Processing who add another layer of analytics which is very useful for us in understanding spend patterns and repeat customer data.

What are 3 tips for running a successful restaurant?

1. From business plan to opening - be flexible and open minded as a lot of things will not go per plan and you need to adapt in the fly.

2. Need to be constantly creative in planning and executing things as you are in a competitive environment and need to innovate each day with new ideas

3. Listen to your customer and take their customer serious

Do you have a personal story to share about opening this place?

Shubha and Raghu were expecting their second baby during the construction and we're hoping that Hit Wicket will open prior to the baby delivery but their daughter decided to come earlier and Hit Wicket opening was 3 weeks after the baby was born.

Finally are you involved in any community activities?

We are very active in the Cambridge and Inman Square   where we are located. We have taken part in Taste of Cambridge and supported other local events. 

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Hit Wicket

1172, Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA - 02139.

Tel: 203 252 4908 & 617 945 9259, 617 945 9319.

E-mail: tonventuregroup@gmail.com

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