Underdoggs: Five Venues Designed by Rish Saini

Rish personally designed five Underdoggs venues:

The Punjab venues came first, in 2017; Ludhiana and Jalandhar opened as Underdoggs Brewery & Kitchen brewpubs. Aerocity and Cyber Hub followed in 2018–2019, when Rish established Breakthrough Design Studio and took on design work beyond Underdoggs, beginning with Woks & Pans in Gurugram.

Of the five, Aerocity and Cyber Hub are his designs in Delhi NCR, and with his other design work in Gurugram they inform the studio’s work in the region.

Rish designed these venues for a brand he helps run, so operations shaped the brief as much as the look of the room did. A sports bar trades on fixtures it does not control. The same room has to work on a full match night and on a quiet weekday, and the bar, the screens and the service routes have to hold up under both.

Rish writes about this in Restaurant Design From the Operator’s Side of the Table.

Underdoggs Arena, the brand’s flagship, is not one of the five. Rish did not originally design it; he was deeply involved in completing it, as part of his leadership of the brand.