"Aaj naya kya kiya?"

It's a question Sanjeev Kapoor often asks his employees.

India's first celebrity chef probably asks himself the same question just as often. The man who became a household name riding on the back of his staggeringly popular cookery show, Khana Khazana on Zee TV (it began in 1992 and ran for 19 years), has a penchant for doing new things. In the process, he has built up a food-based empire comprising restaurants, cookware, cookbooks, spices and ready-to-eats, plus a 24-hour TV channel and a YouTube channel - featuring, what else, cookery and food shows.

Last month Kapoor ramped up his digital presence by launching an elegantly designed mobile application called Sanjeev Kapoor's Recipes, available both on iOS and Android, and consisting of nearly 11,000 recipes. On the cards is another app, about which he is fairly tight-lipped at the moment. All that he is willing to say is that it would involve commerce. And, of course, it would involve food.

"We are basically an intellectual property company. It's my expertise and my tried and tested recipes that are delivered on each and every vertical of our businesses," says the 51-year-old Kapoor, looking fit and relaxed sitting behind his vast desk in his office at Mumbai's Andheri West. His toothy smile (minus the moustache) from the Khana Khazana days is intact. So is the charm. The building opposite houses his Food Food television channel. Yash Raj Studios and the offices of Ekta Kapoor's Balaji Telefilms are a stone's throw away. If they are selling dreams, Kapoor here is dispensing something far more fundamental - food and the know-how to make a smashing good meal of it.

Kapoor is not India's only chef-turned-entrepreneur, of course. Others, such as Ritu Dalmia or Rahul Akrekar with their Diva and Indigo brands respectively, have gone the same way. But Kapoor is far and away the only one to have amassed such a huge and diversified repertoire of businesses. In a sense, he is India's Jamie Oliver, the British celebrity chef, who has TV shows, cookbooks, cookware, spices and restaurants all revolving around his top-billed brand name.

Consider the numbers: Kapoor has 55 operational restaurants, most of them franchises, not just in India but in places like Dubai, Doha, Amman, Riyadh, Dhaka, Kathmandu and Toronto; his cookbooks (45 individual titles) have sold some 15 million copies; his cookware brand Wonderchef, started five years ago, is now a Rs 200 crore company and boasts 600-odd products; Food Food, his 24-hour TV channel, which also features his own show, Cook Smart, is the only one in the world to be owned by a chef; his YouTube channel, Sanjeev Kapoor Khazana, has had more than a billion hits... Although exact figures are unavailable, as Kapoor's companies are not listed, according to him, the total turnover of his businesses is close to Rs 1,000 crore.

And now he is making an aggressive push to expand his restaurant business further. This year his company SK Restaurants Pvt. Ltd (SKRPL), which has 10 brands under it, including Khazana, The Yellow Chilli, Grain of Salt and so on, plans to open 20 new restaurants in India and abroad. "We want to become the biggest franchising restaurant chain from this part of the world," says Rajeev Matta, CEO, SKRPL. Plans are also afoot to launch quick service restaurants (QSRs) in multiple Indian cities.

That's not surprising. For Kapoor, who knows a thing or two about staying ahead of the curve, would be aware that India's food service industry is continuing to grow by leaps and bounds. According to a report by consultancy firm Technopak, the country's food services market was estimated at Rs 2,72,000 crore in 2014 and is projected to grow to Rs 5,05,000 crore by 2020. Significantly, one of the biggest drivers of this growth is chain restaurants, especially the QSRs - the market for which was estimated at Rs 15,440 crore in 2014 and is likely to grow at the rate of 21 per cent to Rs 49,000 crore by 2020.

However, long before he learned to look at numbers and market drivers, Kapoor had a knack for hitting upon the next big thing. When the newly launched Zee TV decided to run a cookery show called "Shriman Bawarchi" and Kapoor, then executive chef at Bombay's Centaur Hotel, was asked to host it, he nixed the decidedly downmarket name and came up with one of his own - Khana Khazana. The name clicked, as did his easy, cheerful style, and the show became a runaway hit, catapulting Kapoor into the sunlit uplands of celebrity.

He was also an early mover in the Internet space - he launched his website, sanjeevkapoor.com, as far back as 1996, when the Web was still in its infancy. And he came up with CDRoms of his recipes in 1995 when the number of home computers with CDRom drives in India was fairly miniscule.

By 1997, Kapoor was already a colossal, instantly recognisable, brand. But he had very little money - he did the Khana Khazana show for free, he says. "I had my Rs 10,000 salary, but no house and no money in the bank."

Still, he decided to quit his chef's job and build on the name that he had made for himself. "I was doing several things at this time - writing cookbooks, newspaper columns, consulting with hotels and restaurants and so on," he says. "Restaurants excited me the least because I had been there, done that. I wanted fresh challenges."

In the end, though, it was a case of "you can take Sanjeev Kapoor out of restaurants, but you can't take restaurants out of Sanjeev Kapoor". An opportunity to open a fine dining outlet in Dubai came up in 1999. And he took it. Called Sanjeev Kapoor's Khazana, it was a sort of a joint venture, with the brand being owned by Kapoor and the investment made by his partner.

Kapoor's journey into the food services industry had begun.

One significant feature of Kapoor's businesses is that most of them have a franchisee model or are joint ventures and the revenue is based on a royalty percentage. "My father was a banker and he told me, 'I am an expert at lending, but I am giving you one advice - don't borrow.' I have managed not to," says Kapoor. "But if I am not investing, someone else has to. That's why, for growth, we find partners."

Kapoor seems to be happy with his business model. In fact, CEO Matta claims they have honed it to perfection. "It's being managed in a very structured and organised manner, where we oversee marketing, quality control, training, menu updation - everything," he says.

However, some industry experts feel that in the restaurant chain business at least, Kapoor has fallen back.

Says Ravindra Yadav, associate director, food services, Technopak, "His restaurants are not that visible in India. His Dubai restaurants do well, but somehow, his brands are not talked about here. They are pushing Sanjeev Kapoor as a brand, but not so much his restaurants."

Riyaaz Amlani, president of the National Restaurant Association of India and CEO of Impresario Entertainment & Hospitality Pvt. Ltd which owns chains such as Smoke House Grill, Smoke House Deli and Salt Water Grill, points out that the franchisee model, while convenient in some ways, comes with its own problems. "Kapoor's Yellow Chilli brand of restaurants is the most visible, but franchisees tend not to share your long-term vision. If the going gets bad, they tend to panic and run."

Indeed, with a turnover of about Rs 100 crore, Kapoor's restaurant chains are nowhere near market leader Specialty Restaurants, which boasts of brands like Mainland China, Oh! Calcutta and others, and has a turnover of Rs 260 crore plus, according to its last annual report. But it's clear that he is intent on moving up the value chain and by next year, says Kapoor, SKRPL is likely to have 100 restaurants within and outside India.

That said, even today, Kapoor, who is an alum of the Indian Institute of Hotel Management, Delhi, insists that restaurants don't really turn him on. What does, and what's consuming him now, are his plans to grow in the digital space. "There are 2-3 billion people on social media today. The challenge is to bring the power of content, which we understand, to this community," he says. It's still at the ideas stage, he admits, "but if I have thought of it, a business it will be," he says with a confident smile.

He points to the beauty of content. "You cook one dal and put that on every platform - TV, digital, books... It will earn money every time. In a restaurant, however, you have to cook that same dal again and again, and ensure quality and service each time."

Kapoor is afire with other plans too - he wants to launch apps for each of his restaurant brands, SKRPL may get listed in the next two years, and he is even looking at opening high-end culinary schools in the not too distant future.

So how involved is he in his businesses? " Ek patta nahin hilta mere bina (not a leaf stirs without my say-so)," he grins.

I ask him how much he is worth. With charming insouciance, he feigns ignorance. But he does volunteer that he charges upwards of Rs 1 crore for endorsing a product for a year. "I charge that because you're not only getting a famous face, but someone who has expertise."

In the midst of setting up and running businesses, hasn't the chef in him got lost somewhere?

"Not at all," he says. "I am a chef first and foremost, and even today I cook for my family (his wife and two girls) on weekends. And I cook with whatever is available, and always try to make something new."

Evidently, for Sanjeev Kapoor, every day is a fresh opportunity - to push the envelope, attempt the untried and dream of something new.

Kapoor’s Kingdom

• 55 restaurants in India and abroad 20 more coming up this year
• 10 restaurant brands: Khazana, The Yellow Chilli, Sura Vie, Gold Leaf, Signature, Grain of Salt, Jimmy Hu, Hong Kong, Options, The Brooklyn Shuffle Diner
• Wonderchef cookware
• Food Food: 24-hour TV channel
• Sanjeev Kapoor Khazana: YouTube Channel
• Khazana pickles, spices, chutneys and  ready-to-eats
• Khana Khazana Publications (cookbooks) 
• Khana Khazana Productions 
• Sanjeev Kapoor’s Recipes: App