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

The team behind the much-loved restaurants explore the places that inspired their ‘Bombay comfort food’ dishes. 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.