15 Years Of Dishoom - From Bombay With Love

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:03]Last year I went to Bombay for the first time. I didn't realize quite the extent to which Bombay is a melting pot. The penny did drop about what Dishum is trying to achieve. And what was really emotional was sort of deconstructing that and experiencing the Muslim food on Muhammad Ali road going for an incredible vegetarian thali or going to an Irani cafe.

[00:00:29]Iranian cafes were started around the early 20th century when Iranian immigrants came from Iran to Bombay and they set up street corner cafes. There were 400 by the 1960s. They sort of became Bombay's greasy spoon and they became beautiful places slowly spinning fans, bentwood chairs and marble tables and sepia portraits. And by virtue of I suppose the Iranis being outsiders, they had to let everybody in by consequence of everyone having to rub shoulders together. They also had a function of breaking down barriers. There are so many different strands to food and culture in Bombay that come together under one roof at Dishim. It's like a microcosm of Bombay in a UK restaurant.

[00:01:10]Growing up in South London, Indian food meant one thing and it was takeway.

[00:01:15]AngloIndian curry houses from any number of places that all had very similar menus. When Dishum came onto the scene, suddenly all of these other flavors and all of these other regions of India were represented because it was a restaurant that was of Bombay.

[00:01:31]>> The food of Bombay just makes you feel alive. It's so vibrant. It's tasty. It's accessible. It's full of flavors that you can relate to. Lime, lemon, chili, garlic, and whatever you enjoy and you put it in your mouth, it just makes you smile. We take the beauty of being in Bombay, the food, the stories, the smells and the tastes and we pull that together into a restaurant. All the dishes the dishroom have, it definitely connects with my childhood.

[00:01:54]>> The omelette that we have for breakfast is exactly the way my mom makes it at home. The black thal is one of the best black thals I've had. But at the base of it, I think we get the food so right that no matter which part of the country you're from, it all just feels very familiar and very much like home.

[00:02:10]>> Dash, isn't it? Is it?

[00:02:12]>> Oh, >> I like a dish breakfast.

[00:02:15]>> Dash. Bacon and egg. Naan, bottomless chai.

[00:02:17]>> Oh, dishon. And dash.

[00:02:20]>> I say dash. I love dish.

[00:02:21]>> Dash is good.

[00:02:22]>> I'd go with their chicken ruby from Dash.

[00:02:29]>> Dash is world famous. Everybody wants to go there. So, of course, I'm no different. The food is extraordinary. My favorite thing I've ever had for breakfast is that bacon naan. Dishum is about more than catering exceptional food and drink. It's the layers of storytelling that they weave into everything that they do. For something to truly succeed, it must have a little poetry right at the heart of it that somehow creates an emotional connection.

[00:02:55]That's when you can create something beautiful.

[00:02:57]>> That means that every single piece of creative has to exist with warmth and generosity and openness and a big heart.

[00:03:03]>> All that detail, I think, impacts people in a way that they may not even know is impacting them. We never open a new restaurant unless we think we've got a story to tell that's better than the last one.

[00:03:13]>> The restaurant in Carnaby is a young man who came to London from Bombay in the '60s and instead of being an accountant or a lawyer as his parents intended became a songwriter and so the restaurant is full of artifacts of the Bombay rock scene in the ' 60s and ' 70s. We released a record of all the music. We met all the musicians from that period. Our story in Kensington is of a gangster who went straight and bought a jazz club and turned it into a restaurant. Our story in Batisy is of a young girl who threw some dice in 1953 and appeared in 2023 which is our excuse to do a retrofuturistic restaurant.

[00:03:43]>> It just means we have to be so steeped in Bombay in its history to be able to convey moment of time to our guests.

[00:03:51]>> It is about doing things for the sake of creativity and love and joy and excitement. Something that's really key to us is bringing people in and showing them sever, which is looking after them with a really big heart in a truly first class way.

[00:04:04]>> The queue at the Sh definitely did not grow uh intentionally. Early days, we'd find that in busy periods, there'd be a big scrum at the front door. It'd be slightly chaotic. People be getting annoyed that they couldn't get in and get a table immediately. So, we decided to really intentionally manage the queue to greet you, to give you a cup of chai, and to look after you as well outside the restaurant as we did inside the restaurant. Every restaurant takeaway bag has a handle, except you guys. And I never knew why. And then you guys told me, you want the rider to hand you the food. They're giving you something, right? As opposed to tossing something to you. And it's little details like that, but it makes a giant difference. I also think about the environment we provide for our team members and it's impossible to create poetry for our guests if we can't create it for our team and I think poetry has to carry through there. If people stay for 5 years at Dum we take them to Bombay boot camp. So far we've taken six or 700 people. Another example is we do the family me where we invite all of our team members all of their families all of our suppliers and we basically create a festival in a field. We have the DPL which is a Dishon Premier League where all the restaurants compete against each other to play cricket and there's great rivalry.

[00:05:17]>> If you want to be the most big-hearted place for somebody to come and work for, it's actually about enabling them to deliver service that feels unique to them and do as much as you can to support them, develop them, nurture them, give them all the tools and make sure that they have the best experience while they're in Due. So we launched the kitchen academy back in 2013 and from 2012 till 2019 we didn't hire any head chef from outside all homegrown I'm really proud of that >> honestly to me it doesn't feel like a job it's like I'm working with a big amazing family >> when I started at the entire team was about 25 people were a bunch of people who were really aligned on the way that we wanted to do things but we're figuring it out and building it step by step and I can't quite believe that we're a team of 2,000 people now.

[00:06:07]>> It's sort of quite deep in our DNA to think about breaking down barriers. We started early days to celebrate Eid. We held ifas, we celebrated Diwali, we celebrated Holi. And it was the idea that we're taking religion and culture as a way of celebrating each other's differences.

[00:06:23]>> I don't think there is another restaurant that has resonated with so many different groups of people in the same way as Dishu. an Indian restaurant where everybody is welcome. It really does feel like it transcends hospitality.

[00:06:38]>> For the 75th anniversary of independence and partition, we brought actual survivors of partition into the restaurants, talked about their experiences. For me, the reason to do that is partly because we won't hear their voices again. And I think we have to just make sure that we are bringing people together to share those stories and create understanding of those events so that we don't forget that memory. We thought why don't we do bigger riftars?

[00:06:59]Why don't we do a bigger eat celebration? And we came up with the idea of why don't we donate a meal to a child in the UK and also a child in India who may not be getting any food.

[00:07:08]We made that permanent. We have fed 25 million children around the world. Kids who wouldn't otherwise be fed who would go to school and would be hungry. And I'm really really proud that we've done that.

[00:07:22]One principle that we've had is that we would only ever grow at the rate which is consistent with the deepening of quality. We keep making sure that a meal today is better than a meal yesterday, maybe 6 months ago or 5 years or even 10 years ago. In the struggle between hospitality and growth, hospitality should always be the dominant partner.

[00:07:40]We're working really, really hard to understand how best we can think about our impact on the planet, on society.

[00:07:47]Just trying to impact the world more and more positively.

[00:07:50]>> Some of the exciting plans that we have at the moment, we're opening Portoello Road as a permit room, which is very cool. And also we're opening at Dashum in Glasgow. So it'll be our second site in Scotland. And as we think a bit further into the future, we really feel that we could tell the Dashroom story in the US, hopefully opening in New York sometime soon. And equally the Middle East, we'd love to find a home there, too.

[00:08:09]>> I got what they were trying to do. I realized this is more than just a restaurant. Back then what I and lots of people might have thought was, how were they going to scale this? This isn't scalable. There's too much detail here to make this into anything more than a couple of restaurants in a couple of square miles of London, but they've done it.

[00:08:29]>> We want to tell lots more stories. We want to keep doing everything that we do better and better and better. And I think you'll see lots of things that you might not expect from Dash in the future.

[00:08:39]>> To be honest, the future, who knows? But as long as there's a good food, good people, I'm in the right place. I think yeah here >> I walk in the front door the music is right the lights are glowing golden it smells beautiful there are ramali rotis whizzing in the air you can smell the grills and customers are smiling at each other you know tucking into their food and just boom that moment is just pure poetry it's beautiful it's hospitality it's what we [Music]