Putting Mumbai on the menu: Dishoom's founders in the city that inspired them

The Guardian

16-02-2025

When Shamil Thakrar talks about Bombay, he has a favourite word: palimpsest, 'something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form'. In fact, Shamil has been (fondly) banned from using it by his cousin Kavi, with whom he co-founded Dishoom, the hugely successful group of Bombay-inspired restaurants, 15 years ago.
But palimpsest is an apt word to describe Bombay – or Mumbai, as it is known internationally – the port city on India's west coast, where multicultural influences eternally trickle in without erasing the layers of what came before. Two eras of imperial rule, two waves of Persian migration, a Hindu majority and a large Muslim community, people from every Indian state, language and ethnicity rubbing shoulders with one another, Maharatis, Gujeratis, Punjabis, Goans; 19th-century gothic architecture alongside art deco, neoclassical opposite mid-century, and the onward march of new development along every major road. And it is absolutely its own place, of itself: 'Everything has coalesced here and become 'Bombayified',' says Shamil, as we wander around Colaba, the southernmost tip of the old city.
For the first time since Dishoom opened in 2010, the restaurant where 'all Bombay's communities jostle on one table' has introduced new dishes to its menu, and I've come to India with the team to see the palimpsest in its most edible form. 'You can eat an Irani breakfast, Gujerati lunch and a Muslim dinner here' says Kavi, 'and every single dish will be distinctly from Bombay.'
It was all these elements of the city's melting pot, and the stories which came with them, that inspired the birth of the first Dishoom, in London's Covent Garden. Back then, says Kavi, 'people thought of India in stereotypes: there were curry houses with their take on 'Indian food', a great tradition, but a very British one, or the lovely but not representative Michelin establishments. We felt there was something to say which was intrinsically Indian, but new to the UK: somewhere all-day, democratic, and which hinged on Bombay's comfort food and stories.'
Since then, Dishoom has opened a further 12 restaurants, employs 1800 people and serves some 100,000 people a week. At a time when running a restaurant in London has never seemed more precarious, Dishoom is a wild and wonderful success story, and makes its name – Bollywood's word for 'kapow!' – particularly resonant. Dishoom has garnered devotion both on home soil and internationally; an 11 day pop-up in New York's Meatpacking district last summer was a sell-out, with hungry wannabe diners queuing way past the High Line in hope of sitting down to their renowned black dahl or chicken ruby. Queues are par for the course, as are unlimited free cups of deliciously sweet, spiced milky chai to keep punters happy as they wait.
'Seva, the Hindu word for 'selfless service', informs everything we do,' Kavi tells me, 'I don't care about how much bottomless chai is going to cost us: I care about how you go away feeling. You touch someone's day with that chai, and that builds a culture around us.'
Kavi comes to Bombay about five times a year, either to research food or furnishings for their new restaurants, or with the Dishoom workforce on 'Bombay Bootcamp', a trip earned after five years service at the company. In 2023, he brought 200 staff to stay in the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, an institution in Colaba, and to eat at many of the spots we visit: Mohammed Ali Road for Bombay's Islamic street food, like chicken kathi rolls; K Rustom & Co near Marine Drive, for guava ice-cream sandwiches sprinkled with chilli and salt; and an evening of beer, hard liquor and peanut masala at the permit rooms in Bandra.
'It would be very easy to look at the bottom line in the P&L and think these trips are mad, but they are core to what we do,' says Kavi. 'You can have an idea of how a business should work, but you need to have hospitality at your core. We do everything in a big-hearted way.'
True to form, Kavi commits entirely to whatever he does – be it sleep (he has a slightly obsessive regime), exercise (he's a 6am spinner), or eating vada pau, the deep-fried, spiced potato patty sandwich, which comes stuffed with several chutneys and little nuggets of deep-fried batter on the side. He can put away double what anyone else can.
There are 10 years between the cousins, who are often assumed to be brothers. They consider themselves a generation closer than they are, though, because they grew up in the same house in north London's Barnet, with their grandparents, parents, siblings and other cousins. Their paternal grandfather, Rashmibhai, was twice a refugee – first from Gujerat to Uganda, where he traded in salt and corrugated iron, then in the 1970s, from Uganda, when Idi Amin expelled the Indian minority. He came to the UK where he founded a brand which would go on to become a household name, Tilda rice.
In Dishoom's early days, keen to forge their own path, Kavi admits that the pair were reticent about the family business, which was sold in 2014. Both worked for a time at Tilda, Kavi for several years in sourcing (he can still go granular on the subject of basmati clones), and both lived for a period in the US, Shamil for an MBA at Harvard, and Kavi in Washington D.C. where he worked for the World Bank.
At the end of the noughties, Shamil was a disillusioned management consultant who'd had a brainwave: a restaurant which told stories about the city in which he'd spent so much time as a boy. The eldest grandchild, he often accompanied his grandparents to Bombay on Tilda research trips; Kavi, too, spent every school holiday with them there, and both the cousins remember vividly the likes of sweet, nutty malai kulfi on Chowpatty beach at dusk. They share genes and much experience, but the magic of Dishoom is, I'm sure, in their differences. As Shamil says, 'we can compare notes, but those notes won't even have a word in common.'
Shamil might love the word palimpsest because it is also a fitting description of his brain. While we are in Bombay, he describes his existential conversations with Chat GPT, how his favourite novel is Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate ('it covers everything I ever cared about: Keats, The Doors, Tintin, Scrabble') and reveals his deep knowledge of Indian history. 'His mind is a treasure trove of information, and he's brilliant at intertwining stories, which he diligently brings into our physical spaces,' says Kavi, 'whereas my joy is in sharing and understanding the food – and editing it for a UK audience. He likes history, I like chilli cheese toast!'
As we wander around old Bombay, Shamil points out the Parsi temples, built by these early settlers from Persia, in which a fire is always lit. We visit Bombay Green, headquarters of the city's cotton bubble, where he describes some of the enterprising and often brutal characters who got rich here under the British East India Company; 'Bombay has always been full of people on the make,' he says, citing cotton, commerce, opium and land reclamation as all formative to the city's historic wealth. He talks about how, in the 1940s, India began as a secular state, and that now it is run by a group of hardline Hindu nationalists in the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party).
We walk to Oval Maidan, a massive public cricket green surrounded by the rounded pastel contours of art deco flats which face gloomy Victorian government buildings, like the Bombay High Court, its dark geometry softened by palm trees at the front. 'There is so much of Britain strewn around Bombay,' he muses, 'statues of men with moustaches, gothic architecture. We thought it was time to do the opposite: to take Bombay and strew it around London.'
With this in mind, each Dishoom restaurant has a different theme pertaining to Bombay, around which Shamil writes a story complete with vivid characters. At King's Cross, inside a Victorian industrial building on Granary Square, it is Indian independence; in Kensington, Bombay jazz; pirates at the Permit Rooms (in Brighton, Cambridge and Oxford); a financial swindler in Canary Wharf. The menu might be the same across most sites, but the decor never is, each poster or photograph, bentwood chair or lamp in some way speaking to the story of that specific restaurant. Shamil remembers how his father, Rashmi, said that 'for something to truly succeed, it has to have poetry at its heart', and is determined that, as Dishoom continues to grow, it keeps the depth of these stories.
Shamil's commitment to storytelling initially made him resistant to Dishoom doing home delivery. But when the pandemic struck, the business pivoted almost overnight, bringing customers their Bombay comfort food at home, right when they needed it most – and, crucially, keeping their staff engaged. They now have 12 delivery kitchens which bring in 15% of the business, and in November, a report by Deliveroo revealed Dishoom's chicken ruby to be the 12th most ordered item in the UK. It seems delivery is a more natural brand extension than Shamil first thought. 'It does stay true to seva,' says Kavi, 'connecting to communities, albeit in their home environments.'
Also true to seva is Dishoom's 'Meal for a Meal', charitable program: for every meal sold at one of their restaurants, they donate one to Magic Breakfast in the UK, or Akshaya Patra in India, a charity which feeds children at schools in 12 states across the country. We visited one in Thane, just outside Bombay, and while serving chana dahl and rice to a hundred or so primary school kids, Shamil tells me that the endeavour is about more than just nutrition; that it quietly tackles societal misogyny. 'People are more likely to send their daughters to school, rather than make them work, if they know they will be fed there,' he says.
What did the Thakrars' own community think about them opening Dishoom, I wonder? 'Our parents' friends thought we were mad,' says Shamil, 'it was the anti-immigration story to them.' For Indians of a particular generation and class, he explains, it would have seemed bizarre for two public-school educated boys from a successful family to open a restaurant. 'I think our grandparents, who were strict Hindus, were a bit shocked by all the meat and fish on our menu,' he continues, acknowledging that while the likes of sheekh kebab (marinated and grilled minced lamb), Goan monkfish curry and pau bhaji (buttery-spicy mashed vegetables with home-made buns) wouldn't share a table in Bombay, they do share a city of origin. Even the fish curry, originally from Goa, has been 'Bombayified', as we see at Gable's restaurant in Colaba, where three generations of the Fernandes family have served the likes of fish in a red hot spicy recheado marinade, or prawns fried in semolina batter. Likewise, pau (or pav), the white pillowy buns we see everywhere, and which are used in all manner of dishes, originated with Portuguese imperialists (pão meaning 'bread'), but have become Bombay's own.
One of the earliest inspirations for Dishoom was the city's Irani cafes, something of an institution in Bombay. Clammy after a dawn visit to the fish market at Sassoon Docks, we visited one – Olympia coffee house – for a restorative breakfast of egg bhurjee (scrambled with green chilli and onion) and brun maska – a tutti-frutti-flecked pau spread with butter then dipped in chai. Started by a later wave of Persian migrants who came to Bombay some 200 years ago, and usually occupying the corner sites which superstition precluded Hindu business owners taking, 'Irani cafes were our jumping-off point', says Kavi, 'because they are all-day, have a democratic ethos, and some of the dishes make up the backbone of Dishoom's menu'.
But they are now a dying breed; in the 1960s, there were many hundreds in Bombay, now there are only around 30. 'Kids want frappuccino and WiFi,' says Kavi, surveying the interior of beautifully preserved Café dela Paix over a cup of Persian-style, dried-mint-infused chai. Hardwood panels, bevelled mirrors and signs prohibiting the likes of smoking and fighting – typical of Irani cafés – share space with the onward march of Westernisation: a Pepsi fridge and plastic tubs of sweets. Too little, too late, I fear.
On our last night, we bar hop around Bandra, a bohemian, middle-class neighbourhood to the north of the city. Over plates of bhel and bottles of Kingfisher, we reflect on how Bombay's cosmopolitanism is at odds with, says Shamil, 'extreme inequalities and Hindification'. While here, we have seen abject poverty alongside gross wealth, like the luxury skyscraper that is the Ambani family home. 'We definitely look at Bombay with rose-tinted spectacles,' Shamil goes on, 'it's a consciously nostalgic, romantic relationship with the place.'
When we arrived here, I assumed Mumbai to be the correct name for the city in its post-imperial chapter, but its nationalist connotations were quickly explained to me. I remark that while I might have left London for Mumbai, it is from the Thakrars' Bombay, a palimpsest of open-doors and democratic street snacks, that I will return.
For breakfast of champions: Olympia Coffee House for keema per eedu (minced mutton with a fried egg on top), or egg bhurjee (spiced scrambled egg), washed down with copious chai, for a 100% Bombay Irani cafe experience. Olympia Coffee House, Rahim Mansion 1, Shahid Bhagat Singh Marg, Colaba.
For puris all day: Pancham Puriwala, where you can watch giant, golden, puffy puris being fried before sitting down to – curried chickpeas, sweet semolina, pickles and a great big puri. Pancham Puriwala, 10 Perin Nariman St, Borabazar Precinct, Ballard Estate, Fort.
For ice-cream: K Rustom & Co, this institution of an ice-cream parlour is run by two Parsi women. You come for ice-cream sandwiches, with original flavours in between thin wafers. 'Everyone's favourite is the guava with chilli and salt. It hits all the senses – crispy, tangy, salty, sweet,' says Kavi. K Rustom & Co, Brabourne Stadium, 86, Veer Nariman Rd, Churchgate, Mumbai.
For vegetarian thali: Shree Thaker Bhojanalay serves a rainbow of hyper-seasonal little dishes that just keep on coming, including patra (a Gujerati curry made from colocasia leaves stuffed with gram flour), dhokla (steamed lentil cake), and puran poli (a sweet lentil flatbread with ghee). Shree Thaker Bhojanalay, 31 Dadiseth Agiyari Ln, Marine Lines East, Gaiwadi, Kalbadevi.
For meaty street food: Mohammed Ali Road is a wonderfully chaotic feast, especially for the carnivorously inclined. Think paya (lamb's trotter soup), baida roti (fried roti stuffed with mince and egg), and chicken kathi roll (parathi stuffed with chicken).
For vada pau: Have a chicken kathi roll at Ashok Vada Pav in Dadar, after a walk around the nearby flower market. This stall is the place to come for pillowy pau filled with a deep-fried spicy, fried potato patty, slicked with chutney and masala. Knockout. Kashinath Dhuru Marg, Dadar West, Dadar, Mumbai, Maharashtra.
For a bar crawl: Hit the 'permit rooms' in the northern coastal suburb of Bandra, so called because the 1949 Bombay Prohibition Act has never been repealed and in theory you still need a permit to drink in them. The ambience is divey, the food divine – chilli cheese toast, chicken lollipops, chaat or bhel to accompany cold beers and hard liquor.