Permit to fly: how Dishoom is looking to conquer America

In August Indian restaurant group Dishoom headed to New York to run a 10-day pop-up in partnership with restaurant Pastis, serving New Yorkers its famed bacon naan rolls and The Big Bombay, the group’s take on a full English breakfast. The pop-up, which served some 7,000 people over three hours each day, sold out in just four-and-a-half minutes, had a waiting list of a further 20,000 people, and led to lines around the block of the Meatpacking District restaurant. You can move a restaurant concept 3,500 miles, but some things never change.

When Dishoom first announced its albeit short sojourn Stateside a knowing eyebrow would have been raised by many in the industry. Murmurings that the group, led by cousins Shamil and Kavi Thakrar and newly promoted CEO Brian Trollip, were eyeing the US had been doing the rounds for the past few years and the pop-up looked as if the group was dipping its toe across the pond before fully taking the plunge. So it has proved to be, with Restaurant revealing last month that the group is actively seeking an investor to help fund a move onto US soil.

“It’s a big step for us,” says Shamil. “With the Pastis pop-up we feel like we’ve got an interesting validation of some of the demand we might experience. We’ve got a lot of US customers. We’re super excited about the States.”

American dreaming

Making the move to America is not one that any restaurant group takes lightly, and in Dishoom’s case it’s a decision that has been a number of years in the making. Back in January 2020 the trio went on an exploratory expedition visiting a few different US cities, including Boston, Chicago, New York, and Washington DC, but any plans were eventually put on hold by the pandemic. Five years on and they will be back scouring US locations, with New York having now emerged as the front runner in the list of potential cities.

“Now that thinking has kicked off again, we’ve got a lot better insight over that time that will help us,” says Trollip of the gap. “We’re grateful we didn’t open in the US in 2020, we have learned so much since then.”

“What we learnt from Pastis is that the US has changed a lot from our time there in 2020,” adds Kavi, who will be going out to New York in the new year to find a site. “Some of the demographics of the cities have changed, the sentiment has changed.”

What hasn’t changed is the company’s considered approach that has seen it open 10 Dishooms as well as three under its more drinks-led Permit Room brand in the past 14 years. Outside of London the group only operates three Dishooms, in Edinburgh, Manchester and Birmingham, and has been circumspect in how it expands.

New York will be no different. “It’s exciting and daunting,” says Trollip. “We’ve built something here that we love, and thankfully it’s been successful, but you can’t guarantee that you can just go over to the US and make it work. We’d be really naïve to treat our journey in the US as an extension of what we’re doing here.

“We need to start again on a number of things. We know who we are, we know what we care about and want to do, but we will go in with absolutely no airs and graces - we need to build every bit of love and respect from the ground up. We had a stack of love from Pastis but when we go in there and do it properly, we will be every bit as paranoid as we are about everything we do here.”

Babu House

I meet Shamil, Kavi and Brian at Babu House, Dishoom’s Shoreditch-based head office that has been decked out in a similar style to its restaurants - comfy sofas, wooden vintage furniture and joss sticks smoking away. The two floors of the building that the company occupies contain several cabinets brimming with trophies and awards that Dishoom has picked up over the past decade or so, recognising everything from its distinctive branding and stylish restaurants to its status as one of the best companies to work for in the UK.

The company’s financial performance tallies with its groaning trophy cabinets. In its most recent results revenue to year ending 31 December 2023 hit £116.8m across its then 11 operating venues, meaning an average turnover of more than £10m per site, with EBITDA up 41.9% to £13.3m during the period. It now employs nearly 2,000 people and as well as its Dishoom and Permit Room brands it operates an online store selling things from meal kits, food and drink, and gifts to homeware and clothing.

Its attention might be on America, but the founders insist that UK expansion is still very much part of its plans. “One virtue is that we don’t build that many restaurants,” says Shamil. “I think we are good for quite a few years. I can see us opening about one a year, and if we were to continue like that there’s still room for five, six, seven years’ growth. We are not going to run out of growth opportunities in the next few years.”

Glasgow could well be the next location for a Dishoom. The company has reportedly submitted plans to combine two units in Scotland’s second city within the former Glasgow Stock Exchange building.

Permit Room is the obvious growth brand. Launched in Brighton at the tail-end of 2023, it is a standalone extension of the Permit Room bars found in Dishoom’s restaurants and takes its name from the bars that could sell alcohol to people in Bombay who had a permit following the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949 that made it illegal to sell or consume alcohol in the state.

Occupying a smaller format than the much larger Dishoom restaurants, and with a more casual, drinks-led, all-day focus, Permit Room has been designed to be more accessible and local and can go into smaller towns and cities where demand for the Dishoom product might be high, but which might not be able to sustain a 250-cover restaurant.

Since launch, new Permit Rooms have opened in the university towns of Oxford (where Shamil graduated) and Cambridge, and it is towns such as these - affluent with a high student population - that seem likely targets for future expansion.

“We’d always wanted to open a bar and really love the stories and the spaces of permit rooms in Bombay,” says Trollip. “We spent a lot of time in permit rooms when over there, drinking far too much, and thought it would be a really interesting thing to explore.

“We are restaurateurs at heart and enjoy the fact that food is the heart of permit rooms in Bombay. Permit Room is different to Dishoom, it is a really fun all-day eating and drinking space - there is definitely a Dishoom feel to it but it is a distinct experience. It’s a relaxed all-day space whereas Dishoom is quite curated - every single part of your journey is managed, whereas Permit Room is much more guest led. You can pop in and use it as you want at any point of the day.”

“It’s more relaxed,” adds Shamil. “It has a casualness that we haven’t achieved at Dishoom. One of our jobs is to bring you into our world and creatively Permit Room is in the same world.”

‘Deepen, don’t dilute’

With a potential growth brand in Permit Room and eyes on the American market for what will likely be more than just the one restaurant, there is still plenty of mileage for expansion at Dishoom. Yet the trio are acutely aware that growth can come at a cost if not done properly.

“One of the key things we talk about as a business is that hospitality and growth are enemies,” Shamil says. “We’re growing but our job is not to be focused on growth but to focus on hospitality and then growth will come. We need to make sure that hospitality is always a dominant part of the business.”

He says the business follows the mantra ‘deepen, don’t dilute’. “How do we only grow at a rate that is consistent with deepening the quality? That gives you a specific steer and also keeps you up at night worrying how you’re going to do that.”

This mantra will be put to the test when the business forms an investment partnership to fund its US endeavour. Any partner will need to share the founders’ views of putting hospitality before business.

“Both myself and Kavi come from a non-restaurant business background,” says Shamil, referencing their previous roles as a business consultant and investment analyst respectively. “When you’ve been in consulting the whole world is profit and loss, revenue, cost, capital, return, and everything fits into that. I think that’s the wrong piece of software to run a restaurant.

“It’s much better to think about it as being our job to provide value to customers and give them something they really love, and ensure the people are working in the restaurants are really happy. If we do all that right and our business model is right, then you’re entitled to make some revenue and profit. That’s a really different way of thinking about it - we all learnt that together a couple of years in. Thinking about hospitality first means you can grow on a much more sure-footed basis.”

Instead, Shamil talks about Dishoom having “two levers” - one being culture, the other process. “We are very disciplined operators. You have to work on both [levers] like crazy.”

That said, any partnership will be symbiotic, and the trio are aware that their approach in the UK might not exactly be what is required in the US. “Equally, we acknowledge that someone will bring value to that and help us with the journey,” he adds. “We’re confident that we can make it work but know we’ve got to be humble and learn things so for that reason we think it’s pretty helpful to have some good expertise on board.”

This means having an open mind, adds Trollip, who acknowledges America Dishoom will inevitably not be a carbon copy of the original. “We may end up in a similar place, we may end up in a really different place in certain areas, we just don’t know. But we have got to make it right for the people who will be our guests in the US.”

15 years and counting

Next year Dishoom will celebrate a decade and half since it opened its first Irani-inspired café in Covent Garden (which it has since expanded). Restaurants in Kensington, King’s Cross, Soho, Shoreditch, Canary Wharf, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Manchester have followed, each with their individual style and story rooted in Bombay history and culture (Soho celebrates Bombay’s brief love affair with rock music in the 1960s and 70s, the stylistic muse for King’s Cross the struggle for Indian independence).

The most recent Dishoom is in Battersea Power Station, which tells the story of Choti Dishoom, a comic character growing up in Bombay in the 1950s who is transported to an imaged 2023. Was this vision of how the company would evolve right there from the very beginning, or has it been an organic process?

“We do have some early plans that I can look back at, but it was definitely not this,” says Shamil. “But some of creative spark has carried right the way through and that’s maybe one of the things of which I’m most proud.

“The energy in our brand and our business has always been about expression - we love the food of Bombay, we love the culture and looking after people and creating these stories and that’s what I can see in the original work we did. Some of the seeds were there and some of the ambition there was expressed, but we’ve taken it to places that I couldn’t have even dreamed of.”

Some aspects of running the business have certainly been beyond any credible prediction, the most obvious of which being Covid. Having suffered but survived it, the trio say they are the wiser for the experience.

“Covid has made us much more resilient, we are stronger as a team and a business,” says Trollip. “We’ve had to pull together and tighten up and work through that adversity. There have been [business] headwinds since 2016, you just become a lot stronger and have to rely on each other. Now there is no space for weaknesses, you can’t have that many chinks in your armour.”

The prospect of another pandemic might be too remote to have front of mind, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to lose sleep over. One of Dishoom’s hallmarks – namely its queues (or lines, as they will be called in the US) thanks to its policy on only accepting bookings for groups of six or more at the majority of its venues – turns out to be a source of anxiety.

“I look at the queue and find it daunting that people are willing to wait for what we do,” admits Shamil. “I’m embarrassed about people having to wait and would like to seat them more quickly, but at the same time a lot of people come because they know they can get a seat.

“We’ve got to earn these people every time, and if they come and place their time and trust and spend their money with us the onus is on us to make sure it’s better every time - not just consistent or the same, but better. That really works you hard.

“The paranoia that tomorrow if we’re not better we’re not going to have people who want to take up our hospitality, I find that quite scary and more daunting as we build more restaurants.”