15 Years Of Dishoom

Fifteen years and fifteen restaurants, and I feel it deep in my bones. Not just the years, but the distance. I think we’ve done a lot, none of it easy. Perhaps this milestone should be a glossy champagne moment, but for me, it feels like a hard-won smile of grateful acknowledgement for the journey and those who have made it with us. We all have bruises, marks, grit under our fingernails from challenges faced and numberless mistakes made (some even more humbling than others). And yet, Dishoom – this world we’ve tried to build, rooted in Bombay – has grown.

We built it with all the care we could possibly find within ourselves, and we fed it with stories and recipes and imaginings and history. We always tried hard to listen to and learn from our guests and our team.

This beautiful, slightly fragile thing is fifteen years old.

I close my eyes and exhale, and I’m back in 2010. I remember clearly the day before we opened the first Dishoom. I was sitting on my own on a bentwood chair at a marble-topped table in our freshly painted Covent Garden café. I can smell that paint, right now, as I write. This was a project that had been years in the making. Our love letter to the food of all Bombay and its many varied people, with inspiration from my and Kavi’s childhood memories of the city. A tribute to the city’s old Irani cafés, sadly now almost all gone, which were important for being truly shared spaces, where people of any culture, class or religion could share tables, rub shoulders and break bread together.

I can see the slowly rotating ceiling fans, which stirred the air. Sepia-tinted portraits of our family lined the walls. The last bottles of Thums Up were being unpacked from their crates behind the bar. We were full of nervous anticipation. Was ‘Dishoom’ – the word for the sound effect used in an old Hindi movie when a hero lands a satisfying punch – too silly a name for our café? Would our food and service and atmosphere be enough of a ‘punch’? Would people even drink the Thums Up? Would they love the Black Daal as much as we did? Indian breakfast – really? Would our chai always be tasty?

We were nervous for many reasons, of course. I think perhaps the root of our worries was a deep desire to look after people – guests or team members – with the warmth of our hearts and to the very best of our ability. To spark moments of joy. To make people feel seen, valued and comfortable. In Dishoom, we now refer to this idea and the pleasure we take in it as seva (selfless service). It’s one of a few deep values that has evolved and has been steadily stitched into the fabric of our business.

I close my eyes and exhale again. Fast forward 10 years from 2010 to 2020. The year of Covid. I get cold shivers just writing this. Navigating the pandemic was surely our most humbling challenge. We put on new face masks, locked the doors of our restaurants tightly shut, and went home. As we stared at each other through the novel prism of endless Zoom, every plan we made, every course we mapped through the storm was wrong, much too optimistic. It seems strange, and like a lifetime ago. Well-meaning friends sent us polished reports by smart consultants and bankers that made for frightening reading. Would Dishoom be viable as a business? Would restaurants ever be the same again in the future?

We found ourselves facing difficult decisions with uncomfortable frequency, and I know we didn’t always get the answers right. Perhaps naïvely, we set one early objective – to retain every one of our 950 team members’ jobs. This worked us so very hard, and I’m glad that we managed to achieve it. It helped a lot that we added a new delivery business – something we had said we would never do (over my dead body, I used to say!). We always thought our work was to receive our guests warmly in our restaurants with our hospitality, but in those murky and uncertain times, people wanted to eat at home. So we scratched our heads, rolled up our sleeves and created a delivery business that we could be very proud of, and learned to make and dispatch meal kits for DIY Breakfast Naan Rolls. And we happily kept our kitchens open to cook food for NHS workers.

All of this helped us to continue our ‘meal for a meal’ work – donating meals to feed children in India and the UK through our charity partners, Akshaya Patra and Magic Breakfast. Childhood hunger is so utterly corrosive. It has massive and damaging long-term consequences for individuals and societies. It means an enormous amount to us to help with this in some way. Back in 2020, our donations were funded with more borrowings from the bank, but those meals became all the more urgent and important during the pandemic.

Equally important was supporting our team through the many challenges, personal and otherwise, that the pandemic brought. It is, after all, only because of their hard work and resilience that we came through and are here at all. I’d like to think that those things that matter so very much to us – looking after our teams, serving people the most delicious and true Bombay food, receiving you with the warmest hospitality, breaking down barriers – didn’t just survive; they deepened, and together I think we became stronger and perhaps even better at weathering and navigating storms.

So, I exhale once more and open my eyes, and I’m here now, in 2025. It’s a fair distance we’ve travelled since 2010. Nervous new café to fifteen of them today. Countless plates of food across the pass, countless drinks across the bar. Adventures, misadventures, tailwinds and headwinds, and one big pandemic. As I look back, I don’t think success is necessarily the number of years (although I’m grateful for each one of them), and I certainly don’t think it is shiny expansion or glossy accolades.

I think perhaps success is the quiet daily work. It’s seva. It’s our team. It’s the feeling of serving the most satisfying dish, which is most true and faithful to its Bombay roots, or the most thirst-quenching drink, in lovely surroundings in which lights glow golden and scents evoke fond memories. It’s reaching the milestone of 25 million meals donated to school children in India and the UK, as we have this year

Success is honouring the old Irani cafés, where all kinds of people from all walks of life share tables. Shared spaces beget shared experiences, and shared experiences mean better communities. So for us, success is inviting our guests and team members to tie rakhis on someone from another faith when we celebrate Raksha Bandhan in our cafés each year. It is the events we’ve hosted these past fifteen years for Holi and Ramadan and Eid and Diwali, which bring people of all different cultures and faiths together, differences being a reason for exuberant celebration, and never for resentful judgement.

Success is also surely the slightly barmy idea of inventing a unique fictional owner for every Dishoom we open. It is investigating each character’s story deeply for months, writing it, re-writing it, understanding it, documenting it, and expressing it in design (and sometimes even in immersive theatre, or with an LP): whether it’s the history of Indian independence in our King’s Cross restaurant, the Swadeshi movement in Birmingham, Bombay’s history of espionage and the rise of Bombay noir in Glasgow, or the 1970s Bombay rock scene in Carnaby. It’s the jokes connected to these stories that we paint in Hindi and Gujarati on our walls. It’s embedding a little bit of Keats in a menu description. It’s baking the stories of Irani cafés onto our plates in Shoreditch for all to read.

As I write, I find it hard to do justice to the deep gratitude we feel for all those who, over these past fifteen years, have been our companions on this journey. So many who have done so much, poured their hearts and minds, their love and their intellect, into this work that we do. Thank you, and thank you again. And profoundest, profoundest gratitude is due to you, O treasured patrons of our livelihoods – our guests – who leave us with your wallets slightly lighter and your stomachs slightly heavier than when you arrived. We are literally nothing without you.

My father, the late, great Rashmi Thakrar, who passed away too, too soon, believed that “for something to truly succeed, it must have a little poetry at the heart of it.” This idea steers us in perhaps every single one of our endeavours. My father was our most joyful and ardent cheerleader, and finder-in-chief of obscure nuggets for us to turn into fully-formed ideas. He is surely the reason that Dishoom is so full of stories. He also believed in reincarnation. I’d like to think he’s somewhere reading this, smiling with delight and wishing us a happy fifteenth birthday.