As I write, Dishoom’s restaurant doors are still shut. So far I’ve ignored the elephant in the room. and India through their charity partnerships with Akshaya Patra and Magic Breakfast. They have just passed reached the milestone of donating 10 million meals to children in the U.K. Since 2015, for every meal served by Dishoom, the team donate a meal to a child that might otherwise go hungry – a meal for a meal.
And eventually, people start feeling like that's what we do.”Ĭharity is also important to Thakrar. While top processes are essential, Thakrar says “culture is what you fall back on when no one is looking.” A big part of his job has been “coming up with a definition of it, and then just repeating it till I'm blue in the face, then repeating it again, and then finding new words for it, and then repeating it again. Thakrar thinks after you have the strategy and business model, there are two main levers: processes and culture. “It is a very sensible template – most business people have it – which is revenue, costs, profit, capital, return, right – and that's how the world works and returns are really important because that's a percentage and it's probably about 15 or 20 if you're lucky and, you know, happy days.” “When you come into business from somewhere like management consulting, you have a template in your head,” the former management consultant explains. If you see it as a cold, sterile business then I think it’s harder.” When you fall in love with the idea and you really get focused on what it is that makes people love restaurants. But in the end we made it work, but paradoxically I think you make it work when you treat it non-commercially.
Perhaps ironically, given Dishoom’s runaway success, Thakrar doesn’t recommend the restaurant business for anyone looking to make a quick buck. But initially he also thought it would be a good way to make money. His love of Indian food and culture inspired him, of course.
Thakrar wanted to build something beautiful: “I want to feel a sort of mood when the music and the typefaces and the design and the colour of the wall and the pictures and the food and tastes and people rushing around and the lighting all come together to just make me feel like I want to be here.” Thakrar and his cofounders felt there was more to say about the food and culture – specifically paying homage to the food, architecture, vibe and culture of Bombay’s Irani cafés to communicate something fresh about India (which is eloquently covered in his book). But when you know someone well over centuries, the relationship can turn into cliches and I think Brits would think of India in terms of Bollywood, cricket, curry houses, days of the Raj, Maharaja – those sort of cliches." Pointing to a copy of William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy, which recounts the rise of the East India Company in the second half of the 18th century, Thakrar explains that the deep history between the two countries “left us with a feeling that we know India well.