In the 10 years since, Dishoom has proven the power of the story of the Irani cafés, and its co-founders’ multi-faceted means of telling it, time and time again. It’s a story of a warm welcome – tables groaning under the weight of food, charismatic and wilful proprietors cajoling their customers – and a wistful goodbye. “And then they disappear.” From zero to 400 Irani cafés, to the 25 or so remaining today, all in the space of a single century. “Gradually, over the decades, they become beautiful institutions in the city,” Shamil continues. And then the cafés became places that everyone could come to – taxi-wallas, prostitutes and common people could all eat out, for the first time.”įrom the late-19th Century onwards, the Irani cafés sprung up like little democratic refuges on Bombay’s street corners – sites which were superstitiously avoided by enterprising Hindus – serving people of all faiths, castes, creeds and kinds and allowing the city’s diverse populations to mingle, breaking bread together. “Immigrants from Iran, or Persia as it was then, coming to Bombay to escape religious persecution, set up these cafés. “A lovely story,” he says, leaning forward. He, his cousin Kavi and chef Naved Nasir had recently opened the very first outpost of Dishoom in Covent Garden, London – a restaurant inspired by the great and democratic Irani cafés of Bombay (a colonial name which has stuck, despite the official change to Mumbai in 1995) and all of the history, gossip and cosmopolitanism wound up in them. Around that time Shamil was knee-deep in design himself.
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