What: An 8,000sq ft restaurant that occupies a double-height building overlooking the water at Canary Wharf’s Wood Wharf. Paying homage to Bombay’s Irani cafés, but this time with a nod to its more-focused location, it is home to a main dining room, a Permit Room cocktail bar in the atrium, several spaces for all-day dining, and an outdoor verandah that can cope with the weather of all the seasons.
Who: It is the latest opening for Dishoom, the Indian restaurant group, founded by Shamil and Kavi Thakrar. It is the group’s ninth site in total, joining five sites in London and three regional restaurants in Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh.
The food: As with the group’s other restaurants, Canary Wharf will serve a menu devised by Dishoom executive chef Naved Nasir. Its now famous bacon and egg naan will be in attendance as part of the breakfast offer followed by an all-day sharing menu of Bombay comfort food that includes a decent range of small plates, grills, biryanis, salads, rolls and curries. Like all other Dishoom cafés, Canary Wharf has its own signature dish, in this case a Malai lobster, sourced from Billinsgate Market and marinated in creamy malai sauce with the tail meat grilled and finished with butter, lime and chilli.
To drink: Cocktails, beers. lassis, coolers and chai dominate the drinks list rather than wine, of which there is a small but sensible selection. In a nice nod to the banking hub location of the restaurant, Dishoom also channels a Gordon Gekko ‘lunch is for wimps’ vibe with its three Martini lunch offer - although asking the waiting staff to bring you them every five minutes until you pass out, a la Matthew McConaughey’s Wild Man broker character in Wolf of Wall Street, is optional.
The vibe: The Thakrars like to tell a story with each of their restaurants and Canary Wharf is no exception. This time its founding myth takes it to 1970s South Bombay in a café imagined to be next to the Bombay Stock Exchange on Dalal Street with a modern style that is intended to evoke a fast and glitzy scene in which financiers and industrialists mixed with Bollywood stars. As part of this process, the design team and architect Macaulay Sinclair spent a lot of time discovering Bombay’s best examples of a mid-century design period, focusing on the architecture and interiors of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Interior wise, there’s low-slung soft furnishings, the now trademark slowly rotating ceiling fans, and rattan panels with an overall design that features geometric patterns and bronzed mirrors with tones of ochre, vibrant green and orange.
And another thing: Attention to detail is everything at Dishoom. The colour palette in the restaurant’s ‘family room’ reference the stairwell at the Parsi Lying-In Hospital in Bombay - a building was styled in the gothic revival manner - while The Permit Room’s green gloss wall is based on the terrace doors near the pool at the Willingdon Club in south Bombay. Split terrazzo colours at the café staircase replicate the steps found at The West End Hotel.
13 Water Street, Canary Wharf, London, E14 5GX
Canary Wharf is a sound place for the Indian restaurant group. But where will it go next?
Dishoom is likely to fly at its new docklands location, but there seems to be few other places that can sustain its large, ambitious restaurants, says Stefan Chomka.
Canary Wharf is Dishoom’s first opening in London for five years, but the Indian restaurant group hasn’t been entirely inactive in the capital during this time. Ahead of the group’s 10th anniversary in 2020 it took on the former Jamie’s Italian site that neighboured its original Covent Garden restaurant, knocking through to create a much bigger site that put it more in step with its subsequent openings.
Dishoom’s choice of Wood Wharf means that it sits near steakhouse Hawksmoor as well as the Californian-inspired Feels Like June and Emilia’s Crafted Pasta and there are more restaurant openings on the cards next year that will further cement the area as a place in which to go out to eat. Playful nods to its banking location - namely the decor as well as its lobster special and three Martini drinks offer notwithstanding, Canary Wharf is very much business as usual for Dishoom and is likely to prove an instant hit for it’s all-day menu that genuinely brings something very different to the area, whether it be for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
However, the opening in London’s Canary Wharf feels significant, not least because there doesn’t feel like there are too many more places in the capital in which it can expand in its current model - Battersea Power Station being one area that springs to mind and Borough Yards in London Bridge another place it looked at before deciding the site was unsuitable. A city such as Glasgow or Liverpool would be suitable for a group that likes to open such large restaurants but there are scant other obvious places in the UK. It is understood that it has considered a move stateside but has so far decided that such a move would not be propitious in the current climate. One option might be to look at opening smaller restaurants in secondary cities but history tells us that a move away from the original concept isn’t always a good idea, as the cautionary tales of CAU, Foxlow, and M Bar & Grill illustrate.
One thing that is clear is that demand for the brand has not waned in the 12 years since its launch, with it still hard to bag a table at its restaurants at peak times. Canary Wharf is likely to keep this alive, with the new restaurant unlikely to cannibalise business from its other venues and instead bring in a new cohort of diners.