Industrial chic with the soul of an Irani café

I am sitting in a quaint back-to-the-future Irani café. The fans whir slowly, suspended from high ceilings. Upside-down steel glasses wait on blue-chequered tablecloths. Faded family portraits clutter the walls. There is Keema Pau and Nalli Nihari on the menu, and, of course, there is chai and Bun Maska, but intriguingly there is also Naughty Chocolate Chai (with a shot of Bourbon) and Bacon Naan Roll. There are nutty instructions such as “No cutting of nails” and “No making eyes at Daru-Walla” to follow. There is a big fat clock that looks like it has been plucked out of Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and hung up here, and as if that wasn’t enough, there is a replica of the AH Wheeler & Co. bookstall two-timing as a bar, dishing out cocktails with names such as Bollybellini (raspberries, lychees, rose and cardamom with Prosecco) and The Dhoble (a gin and orange juice concoction named after Mumbai’s former assistant commissioner of police, best known for his moral policing sprees).

This is Dishoom, the London restaurant that has been voted the UK’s best on the Yelp Top 100 List for two years running, a fact you find hard to swallow until you walk into its packed premises—the King’s Cross branch I am at can accommodate 400 persons—and see a long queue snaking outside, everyone being kept warm and happy with a steady supply of cutting chai. Later, I go to Dishoom’s Covent Garden branch—for pudding and more chai—and it’s the same story: packed inside and a patient chai-sipping queue outside. In what is a cultural hotchpotch, Irani specialities that came to Mumbai a century-and-a-half ago are now being lapped up by British diners.

What makes Dishoom such a sensation, I wonder, and promptly use it as an excuse to have a food meltdown, ploughing through the equivalent of three meals in one sitting. We have arrived a tad too early for lunch—the kitchen is being cleaned up after breakfast and turning halal for lunch—so Claudia, our Italian server (the cultural hotchpotch continues), gets us nibbling on Far Far (multicoloured, salted, tube-shaped crisps) and a hearty mango lassi topped with sugar-coated saunf sprinkles. We use the time to look around. The table on our left has a group of young professionals and an adorable blonde toddler nibbling on a toy giraffe. They are Sunday regulars here, the mom tells me. She leans over and says the food is amazing, totally different from the British version of Indian curries she grew up on.

A few minutes later, the kitchen seems to have got its act together and the dishes appear thick and fast. We go for a bunch of small plates. Okra Fries—crunchy, lightly coated in a masala batter, very nice. Bhel—it’s the real deal, the Mumbai version, with pomegranate seeds for added crunch. Chole Bhatura—not sure if that fits into Irani or Mumbai food, but it’s thoroughly soul satisfying. Pau Bhaji—we are beginning to burst, but keep going. Chicken Berry Britannia biryani—true-blue Irani café fare with little cranberries, comes in a dough-covered pot, exceedingly good. Claudia, in the meantime, is having her own silent meltdown because we haven’t ordered raita or dal to go with it, so we buy peace—the Black House Daal turns out to be thick, dark and evil.

The food hits the spot—it’s yummy but homey, spice quotient dialled down a notch, more like what mom would make rather than the Juhu Beach bhelwala who can set your insides on fire—but for an Indian this is all staple stuff, so you wonder what the fuss is about.

It is the context, of course. Far removed from what’s happening in India, British-Indian food—or simply “curry”—has evolved into a cultural institution on its own steam, very tightly defined by dishes such as Chicken Tikka Masala. The 2014 Top of the Poppadoms poll results are instructional—the top two curries are “Madras” and “Balti”, as voted by Chaat! Magazine readers, the in-house magazine of the British Curry Club. I have no idea what a Madras or Balti is, but that is exactly the point; these curries exist on some other planet with irrevocably altered DNAs. The curry habit, in the meantime, has become deeply embedded—the UK has around 12,000 curry houses with annual sales of £4.2 billion (around ₹ 39,480 crore), according to a January Financial Times report. Almost all of the curry houses are run by Bangladeshis, almost all of them have a similar menu, and if I am to believe the blonde toddler’s mom at the next table, almost all the curries taste almost the same, although they have different names.

In other words, an industry ripe for punching, which Dishoom seems to have done rather vigorously. Its theme of Mumbai’s Irani cafés is distinct from the blurred sameness of the curry houses. Its menu is refreshingly different, the rendition of Mumbai fare is authentic, with fun twists of innovation such as the Bacon Naan Roll. It giggles at colonial connections—the Memsahib’s Mess is crushed meringue, fresh cream, strawberries, rose syrup and gulkand, “what the Memsahibs of Malabar Hill used to serve at their fancy parties”; and a Viceroy’s Old Fashioned is a muddle of bourbon, bay leaf reduction, green tea, “the sort of drink in which Lord Mountbatten may have found welcome repose”.

What makes Dishoom tick goes beyond the food and the whimsical copywriting. It manages to create a really cool urban experience, converting a former railway transit shed from the 1850s into a tongue-in-cheek industrial-chic space. In the process, it has somehow managed to transport the soul of an Irani café of yore and recreate it for the modern age.

Radha Chadha is one of Asia’s leading marketing and consumer insight experts. She is the author of the best-selling book The Cult Of The Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair With Luxury.