Larah by Borosil and the Samosa That Fooled Everyone: The Story of Khaane Ko Banaye Khaas

The restaurant is exactly what you would expect of a fine dining establishment — hushed, elegant, every surface gleaming, the kind of place where the ambient lighting has been calibrated to make everyone look more expensive than they are. A man is seated alone. He opens the menu.

The menu defeats him almost immediately.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxWlhnABCKw

The names of the dishes are the kind that require both a working knowledge of French culinary tradition and a certain comfort with spending large sums of money on small plates. He reads carefully, flipping between pages, doing the arithmetic of a man who has come to a place he cannot entirely afford because someone, somewhere, suggested he should try it at least once.

The waiter arrives. He is impeccably dressed, impeccably poised, and speaks with the quiet authority of someone who has memorised the menu and all of its correct pronunciations. He helps the customer navigate the selection. A Delicately crisp fried wrap with rare savoury filling, he suggests. With Organic tamarind sauce on the side. The customer nods, relieved to have been guided to a choice without having had to expose the full extent of his confusion.

The waiter smiles and disappears toward the kitchen.

But he does not go to the kitchen. He goes through a back entrance — a rear door that opens not into the gleaming interior of a professional kitchen but directly onto a crowded, busy street market. His manner shifts entirely. The measured calm of the dining room becomes the immediate efficiency of a man who knows this lane and everyone in it. He calls out to a street food vendor. Ten rupees worth. With chutney.

He returns through the same door. He is impeccable again. He approaches the table with the unhurried grace of the finest service. He lifts the cloche.

On the Larah plate — beautiful, designed, presented with three drops of chutney placed with deliberate precision and a single leaf of dhaniya — are two small samosas.

The customer stares. He tastes. He is, immediately, entirely won over. He asks to meet the chef.

This was the film that launched Larah by Borosil — and it said everything the brand needed to say in under two minutes, with no product demonstration, no specification list, and no moment where the brand explained what it was selling. It simply showed you what a beautiful plate could do to the most ordinary food in India. And let you draw your own conclusion.

The Brand Behind the Plate

Larah is Borosil's opalware dinnerware brand. Borosil Glass Works — a company whose name most Indians first encountered in a school or college chemistry laboratory, gazing at the clear borosilicate glass of a test tube or beaker — had been systematically expanding its consumer product presence for years. From its foundational identity in scientific glassware, the company had moved into kitchen storage, drinkware, kitchen appliances, and eventually dinnerware.

In 2016, Borosil acquired the opalware brand Larah for ₹27 crores, giving it a vehicle to compete in India's serveware and dinnerware category. The category was not simple. The market leader was La Opala. Consumers made purchasing decisions based on aesthetics — the look and feel of the plates they chose — rather than on functional features, which were broadly similar across brands. And advertising in the category, as Abhijit Avasthi of Sideways — the creative agency behind the Larah campaign — observed, was uniformly generic. Family settings, happy meals, warm lighting, and the suggestion that a particular plate set would make the home more beautiful.

Sideways had been engaged to do something different. And different, for Avasthi, meant finding a story that was funny, specific, and memorable — that created conversations rather than simply communicating a feature. The brief, as articulated by the brand, was to highlight Larah's beautiful design while conveying the thought that Larah makes meals special.

The result was the samosa-in-a-fine-dining-setting film. And its central joke was so precise, so delightful, and so completely aligned with the product truth that it needed only to be told once to be remembered permanently.

Why the Joke Worked

The film's comedic premise is built on the oldest and truest observation about presentation: the same thing, shown differently, feels different. Two samosas from a street stall, placed on a plate designed with the care and artistry of Larah's ceramics, with three drops of tamarind chutney arranged with the concentration of a Michelin-starred plating, become something that a customer in a fine dining restaurant genuinely believes to be a menu item worth celebrating — worth meeting the chef over.

The joke does not mock the customer. It does not mock the samosa. It celebrates both: the universal appeal of a good samosa and the transformative power of a beautiful plate. The customer is delighted. The street food is unchanged. Only the vessel is different. And everything is different because of the vessel.

This was the proposition of Khaane Ko Banaye Khaas — Larah makes food special — delivered not through an aspirational image of a perfectly laid dinner table but through a comedy that made the audience laugh and then, immediately afterward, understand the product truth at a level that no earnest demonstration could have reached.

Avasthi was clear about the creative decision: "Larah operates in a category that's not top of the mind all the time. Moreover, most ads in this category are very generic and they fail to create excitement among consumers. So, our priority was that whatever we do to convey the 'Khaane ko Banaaye Khaas' proposition, it should create conversations. It should create a buzz. Hence, we decided to say it with humour."

The film was directed by Prasoon Pandey of Corcoise Films — bringing to the Larah campaign the same director who had helmed Fevicol's most iconic work and whose instinct for warm, precise, unhurried storytelling was exactly what the film required. The execution, as Avasthi noted, did not try hard — it was not goofy or over-the-top. It gave the film a rich look and feel in tune with the product's own aspirations.

The Campaign That Extended and Evolved

The Khaane Ko Banaye Khaas proposition did not stop with the samosa film. Sideways worked with Borosil across the entire Larah brand architecture — not just the communication but the product design itself. The agency designed plates for Larah, including the one that appears in the television commercial. It also developed a simple app to test new proposed designs: users could swipe right for designs they liked and swipe left for those they didn't, gathering feedback from internal teams, distributors, and consumers before new designs went to market.

In the second phase of brand building, the campaign turned to another dimension of the product's value — strength. A new slice-of-life story brought durability to life in an equally entertaining way, extending the brand's proposition beyond aesthetic to the practical reassurance that these beautiful plates were built to last in an Indian household.

The Khaane Ko Banaye Khaas tagline also found a new home in 2024, when Borosil Glass Lunch Boxes — with Sideways again as the agency — deployed the same proposition in a fresh context. In that film, two office employees bring the same dish — Karela Sabzi — for lunch. The boss reacts with disgust to the Karela in a plastic container. He reacts with delight and enthusiasm when he sees the same dish in a Borosil Glass Lunch Box. The dish has not changed. The vessel has. And the vessel, once again, makes all the difference.

The proposition had proved itself durable enough to travel across product lines and years — a sign that Khaane Ko Banaye Khaas was not a campaign line but a brand truth.

Five Lessons We Should Learn From This Campaign

1. A Single, Precise Insight Can Carry a Campaign Across Years

Khaane Ko Banaye Khaas — Larah makes food special. This insight, derived from the product's most fundamental characteristic (beautiful design transforms the experience of eating), has been the foundation of multiple campaign executions across different product lines, different years, and different creative contexts. The Larah samosa film in 2016. The strength film in the second phase. The Borosil Glass Lunch Box Karela Sabzi film in 2024. All of these are different stories built on the same truth: the vessel changes the experience of the food.

The lesson: a brand insight that is genuinely true — that is not manufactured for a campaign but discovered from the product's actual value — is not exhausted by a single execution. It compounds. Each new story that demonstrates the same truth from a different angle deepens the brand's ownership of that territory. The goal is not to find a new campaign idea every year. It is to find a true idea and then find new ways to demonstrate it.

2. Humour Is the Fastest Way Into a Low-Involvement Category

Dinnerware is a category that no consumer thinks about until they need to. It is not searched for, not discussed with friends over coffee, not the subject of anxious research before a purchase. It sits in the background of daily life — present, functional, largely invisible. Getting a consumer's attention in this category requires, as Avasthi recognised, something that breaks the invisibility. And the most reliable breaker of invisibility is laughter.

The samosa film made people laugh. And in laughing, they engaged with the product truth at a level of attention that no straightforward product communication could have achieved. The lesson: in low-involvement categories, the creative challenge is not to communicate — it is to earn the right to be heard. Humour, when it is built on a genuine product insight rather than grafted onto a product that cannot support it, earns that right faster than any other creative approach.

3. The Category Convention Is the Creative Opportunity

Every brand in the dinnerware category was using the same visual vocabulary: beautiful homes, happy families, artfully photographed food, warm festive lighting. The entire category looked the same. Sideways deliberately chose to avoid the family setting — choosing instead a restaurant, a back alley, and a street food vendor. The visual contrast between the fine dining setting and the ₹10 samosa was the joke. But it was also the differentiation: the one piece of advertising in the category that looked unlike every other piece of advertising in the category.

The lesson: the fastest path to distinctiveness in any category is to study what the entire category does in its advertising — and then do the opposite. Category conventions exist because they work. But they also create the conditions for easy differentiation, because the brand that breaks the pattern will be remembered simply by virtue of being the one that looked different.

4. Design Is a Product Claim — and Products Can Be the Proof

The Larah campaign made no abstract claims about design. It did not say beautifully designed plates or premium craftsmanship or any of the language that advertising uses when it wants to communicate quality without having to demonstrate it. Instead, it showed the plate — placed a plate that the audience could see clearly — and let the design speak for itself. The samosas were plated on it. Three drops of chutney. One dhaniya leaf. The presentation did the rest.

This is a form of advertising that trusts the product entirely. It does not ask the audience to take the brand's word for the quality. It shows the quality in action. And the action — the plating of street food into something a restaurant customer genuinely cannot distinguish from a fine dining creation — is the most convincing demonstration possible. The lesson: when a product's design is genuinely strong, the best thing advertising can do is create a situation where the design can demonstrate itself. Get out of the way of the product. Let it do the talking.

5. The Best Agency Relationship Extends Beyond Communication

Sideways' relationship with Borosil Larah was not a conventional agency-client advertising relationship. The agency designed the plates. It developed the app for consumer testing. It consulted on brand strategy across product lines. It was, as Avasthi described it, a creative problem-solving partnership that touched every dimension of the brand's consumer-facing experience — not just the communication.

This depth of relationship produced communication that was impossible to separate from the product itself — because the agency had been involved in the product. The plate in the television commercial was designed by the same people who wrote the film. The insight that made the samosa joke work was inseparable from the understanding of what the plate's design actually did to the food placed on it.

The lesson: the most powerful brand communications are produced by agencies that understand the product from the inside. The brands willing to give their creative partners genuine access — to the product, the design process, the strategic decisions — will receive, in return, communication that is rooted in something real. And real, in advertising, is always more powerful than borrowed.

What the Plate Does

There is a moment in the Larah film, just after the waiter places the covered dish on the table and just before he lifts the cloche, when the film holds its breath. The audience knows what is coming — they have watched him walk through the back door, they have seen the samosas ordered from the roadside stall — but the customer does not. And in that moment, the film makes you feel, from the inside, what Larah's proposition is about.

The plate matters. The design matters. The presentation changes what the food is. Not its taste — the samosa is still a samosa, still exactly ₹10 worth of filling and pastry — but what it means, how it feels, the experience of receiving it and consuming it.

Khaane Ko Banaye Khaas. Makes food special.

It took two samosas, a waiter in a tuxedo, and a Larah plate to make one of the most honest product demonstrations in Indian advertising history.

The customer asked to meet the chef. The chef, had he existed, would have been a roadside vendor with a frying pan and ten minutes of experience. The plate did the rest.