Thejus Shivarama

Thejus Shivarama didn't come from nightlife. His first business was Serene Mist — a nine-cottage homestay near Chikmagalur that he talked his father into building on the family land, and opened in 2018. Covid turned that homestay into a full house and turned him into someone who'd fallen for hospitality. He carried it back to the city, and in 2023 — as, in his words, literally nobody, with no F&B backing, no brand and ₹30,000 in the bank — he took three floors of an M.G. Road building and built Juliet on top, Two Moons for dining below, and Minx behind a private door.

It almost didn't survive the opening. Hired consultants over-ordered everything, took their cuts on the way, and delayed the launch until he was paying rent and salaries with no revenue coming in — it took the better part of two years just to climb back out of the pre-opening losses. Then, weeks after launch, the kitchen he'd been handed walked: thirty-six people down to six or eight, no menu, no manager, no floor team. He rebuilt all of it from the ground up while a rumour that 'Juliet is on sale' followed him around the city for the first six months.

Today Juliet is one of Bangalore's most loyal rooms — one group has come ninety Saturdays straight — and Thejus runs six businesses off the back of it. He plays it his way: resident DJs only, no guest artists; salaries out by the 8th of every month; DJs paid before they go on stage; the same two bouncers on the door since day one. He takes loans from people he knows rather than investors, so nobody can tell him how to run it — and on Juliet's third anniversary he posted that the place doesn't belong to him, it belongs to the city. He talks about walking away in a few years, maybe to open a place called Romeo. This is the build, the near-death, and the ethics underneath it.

The VIC Fix is hosted by DJ VIC — an international DJ and producer who performs at weddings, corporate events and festivals across India, staged as a signature audio-visual show.