TABLE TALK #151
🍝 MAIN COURSE 🍝
What makes it remarkable is how easily it could have gone the other way. With eleven restaurants, four sister cafés, and now even a hotel, most groups at this scale tend to trade individuality for efficiency. Dishoom doubled down on the opposite: deepening, not diluting. Each space is distinct, with its own narrative thread, music, and character. They resisted the bland efficiency of templating and instead embraced complexity - the very thing most operators are desperate to eliminate.
That complexity is what makes them feel so alive. Each restaurant is inspired by the 1960s Irani cafés of Bombay: wood-panelled interiors, tiles underfoot, retro photographs on the walls, and plants tumbling from ceilings. They are cultural pastiches, yes, but done with such care and texture that they avoid ever tipping into kitsch.
Each new opening brings with it a fictional “proprietor” whose story is written, re-written, and baked into the design. A King’s Cross outpost that nods to Indian independence. Birmingham channelling the Swadeshi movement. Glasgow steeped in Bombay noir. Even Carnaby Street with a hint of the 1970s rock scene. These aren’t gimmicks - they’re worlds to step into, stitched with enough history and imagination to feel lived in.
Photo Credit: Dishoom
You feel it in the little gestures: a steaming cup of chai in the queue, bottomless porridge for breakfast, a cookbook so handsome it lives on coffee tables. You saw it in their agility through lockdowns, when they rolled up their sleeves to launch delivery and meal kits without losing an ounce of their magic. And you sense it in the way queues still snake outside their doors, where scarcity fuels desire - not because of hype, but because people genuinely want to be part of the story.
It’s no wonder Dishoom has grown beyond restaurants. With international expansion on the horizon and a newly opened hotel in Notting Hill, they’ve become custodians of a cultural space that’s larger than bricks and mortar. That space is anchored by something the founders’ late father believed deeply: “for something to truly succeed, it must have a little poetry at the heart of it.” That poetry - in menus, murals, music, and meals - is what turns a restaurant into a cultural institution.
Photo Credit: : James Veysey/REX
🍮 SWEET ENDINGS 🍮
If you’re after a winter warmer, Dishoom’s Pineapple & Black Pepper Crumble is just the thing. It’s simple, soothing, and full of faraway brightness. Recipe here.
🍷 WHAT'S NEW
FROM
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Luke x
