Words by: Shamil Thakrar
A FEW OF YOU will know that come late December, I invariably end up in one or another of our restaurants, untidy, slovenly and hunched over the bar, babbling to myself, chewing the end of a pencil. Somehow, at the end of ’25, I feel I have never been so tired. So tired that even babbling is wearying. This is the fifteenth year of Dishoom, and we’ve opened fifteen restaurants. I feel it in my bones. My doctor, who is both smart and kind, says that I should work a little less. I’m certain she’s right, but I wonder if I will ever pay her heed.
Today, I cycled to the Dishoom in King’s Cross. My route takes me down the Chalk Farm Road into Camden and then via the Regent’s Canal to King’s Cross. I cycle deliciously slowly along the canal towpath even in the December cold. It has calm, and green, and water, and ducks, yet is so very urban – dishevelled and crumbling – so much an expression of post-industrial London. I’ve long treasured the canal as one of my places of comfort.
I am now seated, gloves and helmet beside me, my hands gratefully cupped around a glass of hot chai. I confess to feeling lust for an old-fashioned, but I will resist. Cycling in London is risky enough without further addling my mind with alcohol. A turmeric shot will do, and my doctor would approve. I look around me at the restaurant so full of aromas and music and life and warmth, and then above the elegant wooden bar and past the busy kitchen and into the rafters where old warehouse lights glow golden. I’m taken back, almost thirteen years, to when we first set foot in this building.
I close my eyes and remember that it was set up as a fashion pop-up. The old brick is there at the back, but the space is vast and cold, walls icy white, floors bright concrete. There were dazzling stage lights and mannequins and confident air-kissing people. Barely anyone was passing by, save the odd curious student from Central St. Martins. We found out that this building had been a goods shed, built in the 1860s with stables on the lower level for horses (troughs still downstairs today, as it happens). Goods had been transported to and from the empire, exploiting the interchange of rail, road and canal at King’s Cross. Our good friend Nick Lander (then the Financial Times food critic) had asked us to look at it and to see if we might build a restaurant there.
Mostly people thought we were nuts. It was too big, too weird, too isolated. We were too inexperienced as restaurateurs. That part of King’s Cross was still undeveloped and lonely. And yet, we could see it, taste it even. We knew where the kitchen should be, up in the rafters. We closed our eyes and imagined a restaurant full of happy guests being looked after so very warmly and eating their fill of delicious food. We wanted to figure out how to operate it. We came up with a story, perhaps slightly fanciful, that would bring it all together, that we would use to guide all aspects of the build and design and artwork, even the ethos. We imagined a young man, an immigrant to Bombay in 1928, who wanders into a similar goods shed behind Victoria Terminus (a madder gothic cousin to King’s Cross station). He sees opportunity, sets up a chai stand, then a kitchen, and then over the next two decades, he gradually takes over the whole place and fills it with his big-hearted hospitality. The years 1928–48 were heavy with the events of Indian independence, and this history becomes the backdrop in the restaurant. We tell – with delight – the story of a nation gaining its freedom, juxtaposing anti-colonial graffiti and artefacts against the walls of an old empire goods shed. It was a joy (albeit a financially risky one!) to build that story and that restaurant. I remember how very proud we were to open Dishoom King’s Cross in 2014.
A sip of the hot chai cuts gently through my remembering and brings me back to now. I know why we used and still use stories to create restaurants, but I think I’m beginning to understand what they meant to me. Certainly, the stories guided and still guide the mood we create, whether pre-Independence India, as in this case, or the exuberance of the ’60s or even a brave retro-future. But if I may speak personally, I believe these stories were a way of making sense of myself.
I grew up with my head in the clouds. As a boy, even a teenager, I could often be found sitting in a quiet corner with my nose in a book, lost on some adventure. Perhaps I was with Tintin and Haddock, or alongside a valorous Rajput prince, or just through the wardrobe with the Pevensey siblings in Narnia. Stories just made more sense to me than the real world. Dots were connected in stories, the loose ends tidy.
I wonder, perhaps I’m sort of like Thurber’s Walter Mitty. If you’ve come across the old New Yorker short story, you’ll know he’s a fantasist, always imagining himself to be braver, more rugged and generally cooler than he is. (The story starts in Mitty’s imagination: “We’re going through! The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one eye.”) I don’t think Mitty is delusional – he’s just unexpressed, his fantasies compensation for a life that hasn’t yet found form.
If Mitty’s imagination was peopled with dashing naval commanders, brave fighter pilots and heroes nonchalantly disdainful of firing squads, mine had handsome jazz-loving ex-gangsters (like Carlito from Carlito’s Way or Rick from Casablanca) buying old Art Deco cinemas, sparky immigrant entrepreneurs, and hip songwriters returning home to Bombay from London to look after their family’s café business in Churchgate. These particular characters formed the basis of our restaurants (in this case, Kensington, King’s Cross and Carnaby.
Looking back over the past two decades, I think these stories joined the dots for me – perhaps even allowing me to make sense of myself, not least as an immigrant. Some might say that I’m not really from here. I was born elsewhere (Kampala), and my family were twice migrants in the 20th century, from dusty Gujarat before that. I grew up here, in Pinner, then Leicester, travelling back to India as a boy. I was never quite sure where I belonged, neither here nor there. Race riots and ambient casual racism in the ’70s and ’80s in the UK were displacing. Yet I never felt entirely Indian either. Perhaps this is just the story of people moving around.
Our stories, though, are of people who – unlike me – know where they are and who they are, even in the midst of their displacement, which they handle with style and confidence. They aren’t lost at all. Their adventures give them meaning. They are awesome. They all create restaurants or cafés and fill them with life. And I have come to realise that our writing these stories, our building these places, our creating this business called Dishoom, and our looking after our many guests these past decades have allowed me, at last, to figure out who I am.
Reader, I’m conscious that you are still with me – thank you. For the last time today, I rein in my imaginings and bring myself back here to Dishoom King’s Cross. I decide to walk around. Up to the kitchen in the rafters, then all the way back down to the bar in the basement. The place is packed full of people who, to my eyes today, look particularly happy – guests enjoying their food and drink, our team busy cooking and serving. On the walls, there are sepia photos of my ancestors (my grandfather is a handsome boy in ’34), of the key figures of Indian independence, and of those who have worked at Dishoom for more than a decade. There are places where the walls are worn, where managers have stood for years watching the restaurant. I find myself smiling unself-consciously – a wide involuntary smile of gratitude.
I was speaking to someone just a few days ago about the story in King’s Cross, of the man who had come from somewhere else and gradually built a restaurant over twenty years. They said, almost in passing, that the story reminded them of me. It took me a few days to hear what they had said. Back in 2004/’05, I had gone through a bout of depression. I don’t think I lacked ambition then, but I definitely lacked coherence. I couldn’t see how the different parts of me belonged together. Not long after that, the idea for Dishoom began to gather momentum. We came together as a team, we started cooking and sketching and recruiting and eventually building restaurants and serving our guests the most delicious food and drink we could muster with the warmest hospitality that was in us. Now, I can see that playing my part in Dishoom over these past decades gave me a language – a way to be useful, a way to understand myself, a story big enough to live inside.
I remember T.S. Eliot from the Four Quartets:
“We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
I take a last sip of chai, put on my helmet and gloves, and get back on my bike.
As ever, a note of sincerest thanks.
This year has been full, busy, and joyful. Together, we opened Dishoom Glasgow (home to Miss X), a Permit Room in Portobello with Lodgings upstairs for overnight stays (belonging, fictionally, to Parvez Rustomjee), and held a DishoomLoves Market. We shared meals across faiths with the Ramadan Tent Project (RTP) at Iftar, and were honoured to welcome RTP volunteers back to feed Hindus with us at Diwali. We are also nearing thirty million meals served to children through Akshaya Patra and Magic Breakfast.
This is our fifteenth year since opening the first Dishoom. It is hard to do justice to the profound gratitude we feel for all those who have put so much of themselves into this over the years, helping make Dishoom a story that we can all live inside. You have brought all of your care, your intelligence, your creativity and your love.
And to you, our guests – treasured patrons of our livelihood – who leave us with your wallets a little lighter and your stomachs a little fuller – thank you and thank you again. We are literally nothing without you.
As ever, I end by invoking Ganeshji, the big-hearted elephant-headed remover of obstacles. May he help you find your language, your voice, and your stories.
With love, light, gratitude, and good wishes for ’26.
THE REFLECTIONS CONTINUE
