in the press
Selected coverage of Spice Route Restaurants since 2019. For media kit requests, please write to press@spiceroute.com.pk.
Spice Route is named in Dawn's annual roundup of restaurants shaping Pakistani food. The piece focuses on the chain's refusal to gentrify the karahi.
"Tariq Mahmood and Chacha Imtiaz have spent a decade resisting the urge to make Pakistani food fit somebody else's idea of fine dining. The result is a kitchen that tastes like home, served on better plates."
A long-form business case study on Spice Route's training and quality-control programme — including a deep dive into the chain's decision to keep central training in Lahore through 2024.
"Most chains lose the kitchen by branch four. Spice Route's answer was to make Chacha Imtiaz personally certify every head chef before opening day, and to fly him to each branch twice a year forever."
Spice Route Gulberg awarded the Restaurant of the Year title at the Hum Foodies Awards. The award noted the chain's combination of consistency and warmth.
"It is the only restaurant in our shortlist where the founder works the floor on Friday nights — and you can see it in the room."
Coverage of Spice Route's adoption of AI-assisted review response across all six branches. Tariq is quoted on the importance of human approval in the loop.
"Every reply is still signed by the person who would have written it anyway. The model just gets it onto their desk thirty minutes after the customer hits post."
Spice Route Lahore Gulberg, Lahore CCA, Islamabad F-7, Karachi DHA, and Faisalabad Susan Road earned Travellers' Choice badges for being in the top 10% of restaurants on TripAdvisor in 2024.
"Consistency across six branches is rare. Spice Route is a textbook example of how a Pakistani chain holds its standards through expansion."