Mourning the end of their passion project due to rising costs and low foot traffic, Rasam co-owner Ranga Tiruman says their South Indian restaurant will serve its last customers at the weekend.
For two years, Mr Tiruman says the team poured everything into Rasam, cooking in the kitchen, serving customers, while working full-time jobs and digging into their own pockets to pay bills and salaries of additional staff.
"We still have the passion, but you can only do so much for your passion," Mr Tiruman said.
He and friends Uday Vasiraju and Gayathri Srinivasan first opened Rasam in May 2024, with a mission to bring "authentic South Indian vegetarian" food to Childers Street, on the fringe of Canberra's central business district.
In India, purely vegetarian Udupi-style restaurants are known to draw thriving crowds from breakfast until late into the night without any alcohol or meat on the menu.
In Canberra, however, it is a completely different story, Mr Tiruman said.
He said while their restaurant broke new ground in the city by bringing the familiar flavours to families and students who missed the taste of home and home-cooked food, it struggled to appeal to the broader community.
"Since the day we started, we haven't really made even a single dollar for this business ... whatever you get in a restaurant, it just goes towards the restaurant again," Mr Tiruman said.
"I think for anyone in future, running a vegetarian restaurant here in Canberra is simply not viable at all."
"Some people prefer to have a meat dish in their dinner and lunch. So that was another reason why we could not get bigger groups," he added.
In the beginning, tables at Rasam were regularly full with international students from the Australian National University and suburban families who trekked into the city for a meal.
Mr Tiruman said the Indian student population dropped significantly in mid-2025 before the US-Israel-Iran war broke out this year, escalating fuel and living costs, and eventually breaking the camel's back.
He said customers would only visit on Fridays or at the weekend and all profits made on those days went towards keeping the restaurant afloat Monday to Thursday.
"In the last four, five months, people have really stopped eating out too much, so that's one of the main reasons," Mr Tiruman said, adding that Rasam could not compete with bigger chains or food trucks with lower running costs.
"I was never confident that the current business is going to replace my full-time job too. I knew that from day one.
He added: "We tried to do different types of dishes every day, provide everything fresh ... we just didn't have the ambience ... we were just not successfully able to take our cuisine to the wider world, because you cannot just sustain a restaurant just based on how many Indians, or how many South Indians are coming."
In March 2026, Mr Tiruman opened Annam on Akuna Street which included non-vegetarian dishes on the menu, but was forced to close the venture a couple of months later.
"I just lost interest now because of all these mounting pressures... I just decided to take a step back and then just concentrate on my family," Mr Tiruman said.
With dozens of comments lamenting the loss of Rasam in the city, the friends have decided to share their "labour of love" for a final time on Saturday, June 20 for a breakfast and lunch service.
