Shamil Thakrar has a vivid way of describing the industry he chose. “The restaurant business is like the first 10 minutes of the movie Saving Private Ryan,” he says, “where you all get on the beach, 10 minutes later, everyone’s dead except a few of you.”
Dishoom made it off the beach. Now it is preparing for what Thakrar calls “a second beach landing”. After a breakfast pop-up at Pastis in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District drew queues around the block on a weekday, the team signed a lease in New York’s Flatiron District, with the restaurant due to open in the first half of next year.
In this episode of the Business Leader podcast, he tells Sir Richard Harpin why profit should be the applause rather than the goal, why Dishoom only grows “at a rate consistent with the deepening of quality” and what a borrowed umbrella taught him about culture.
In our interview, you will learn about:
Thakrar’s approach to opening his first restaurant outside the UKThe four ‘W’s to help you find the right investorHow a failed pop-up taught Dishoom a valuable lessonWhy he’d rather let demand outstrip supply than grow too fast
The UK has long been a nation of curry lovers. There’s an Indian restaurant on nearly every high street. Entrepreneur Shamil Thakrar was inspired by Wagamama, and what it did for East Asian cuisine in the 1990s and 2000s, to create something entirely different.
Since 2010 he’s been patiently scaling a chain of restaurants which offer a more ‘boutique’ experience. Inspired by the Irani restaurants of 1960s Bombay, his ‘not-curry-houses’ have ornate décor with a modern twist and they serve breakfast and lunch rather than just the typical beer-fuelled curry dinner. Welcome to the colourful world of Dishoom and its 13 stylish restaurants.
Before Covid struck, Thakrar said that Dishoom would offer takeaway food “over my dead body”. Thakrar believes his success in building an empire that turns over more than £130m annually lies in something much more profound.
“Food needs to be put into its cultural context,” says Thakrar. And that cultural context is explained through storytelling, because “the way we relate to the world is not facts and logic, but stories.” He wanted to use the restaurants to recreate memories from his childhood visits to Bombay.
Poetry on the menu
“For something to truly succeed, there has to be a little poetry right at the heart of it,” according to Thakrar. That sentiment comes from his father, also a food entrepreneur. Rashmi Thakrar ran the family’s Tilda rice empire, Britain’s best-selling rice brand. His son followed him into the business in the mid-1990s, having previously done stints at management consultants Bain & Co and the investment bank Goldman Sachs. But to chart his own course, he decided to take the entrepreneur’s path and set up Dishoom in 2010 with his cousin Kavi Thakrar and brothers Amar and Adarsh Radia.
Location was key for that first statement restaurant. Thakrar found the financial backers using his contacts book and fell in love with a 5,000-square-foot space in Covent Garden in the heart of London. But he had to get hold of the lease. His challenge was to persuade Simon Quayle at Shaftesbury, which owns large parts of the West End, to take a chance on this upstart restaurant idea. As they waited for an answer, it was Thakrar’s father who gave him some vital advice: “Do something! Invite them home, cook for them!” It worked.
Thakrar describes that Covent Garden flagship branch as a “love letter to the food of Bombay”, inspired by his “childhood memories of the city”. There is a theatrical playfulness to every site. Indeed, this is hinted at in the name: Dishoom refers to the sound effect used in old Hindi movies when a hero lands a dramatic punch.
On a bacon naan roll
“I had a cultural agenda,” recalls Thakrar. “I felt that India and the UK have a long relationship, but it was seen in terms of a few cultural clichés [like] Bollywood, cricket, curry house, days of the Raj.” Thakrar wanted to bring some “poetry and beauty” through his restaurants. He was copying a style that he had seen in Bombay, the relaxed Irani cafés with their wonderful décor, but he was doing something radical by transplanting this to the UK.
The focus on the breakfast menu, backed by marketing, signalled that this was not your typical Indian restaurant. Today, 20 per cent of revenues still come from breakfast meals, Thakrar says. And one particular dish was conceived to capture customers’ imagination: the signature bacon naan roll.
This ‘poetry’ in Thakrar’s approach also had a deliberate business logic to it. He was influenced by the books of marketing guru Seth Godin, he explains. The key lesson for him from those, says Thakrar, is “build remarkability into your product so it markets itself”.
How Dishoom scaled from Covent Garden to 13 restaurants
Dishoom set off on a period of steady, controlled growth. Another showpiece restaurant opened in King’s Cross, London, in 2014, with huge queues round the block on its launch. The company now has 13 restaurants and employs around 2,500 people. The chain’s empire has expanded beyond its eight restaurants in London to Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds and Manchester.
Five smaller ‘Permit Rooms’, which are more geared towards drinking and late-night socialising and are based on Bombay’s notorious ‘dive bars’, have also been rolled out in places with smaller populations like Cambridge and Brighton. The pandemic was tough, but led to an acceptance of home delivery as another route to people’s stomachs, which is why you can now order Dishoom (like I do) on Deliveroo.
The pop-up disaster that taught Dishoom to put food first
It took a small disaster early on for Thakrar to learn that the food must come first. While still in its infancy in 2011, Dishoom was invited to take part in a pop-up at the South Bank in London. The opportunity was in an old shipping container and the price for the prime placement was extremely compelling.
Thakrar was at first reluctant but “imagined an old café having an acid trip” on a Bombay beach. His team created the ‘Chowpatty Beach Bar’. It looked great aesthetically, serving drinks in coconuts, but the reality turned out to be “dodgy equipment” including “an old tandoor, which didn’t really work”. The team on the ground developed a recipe called the Keema Frankie, Thakrar recalls, with a wince.
On one busy day the tills were ringing, but the tandoor had broken and an employee had to run to the supermarket to get last-minute replacement bread. An influential food blogger reviewed this lamb creation and referred to it as “shit in a bun”.
“I remember experiencing this physically,” says Thakrar, “and the lesson there was that actually what we should be doing is producing fantastic food. If you’re too focused on the money, it will be a problem, and it took us a while to understand that.”
Dishoom’s pop-up was vital in a negative way, showing them what they had ‘not to do’. No amount of good storytelling or poetry could get them out of that situation, where the food was substandard.
Founder succession and choosing the right investor
After 14 years Thakrar stepped down as CEO in 2024, handing over to Brian Trollip, an internal candidate who had risen up the ranks. “He deeply understands what makes the mission work,” says Thakrar of Trollip. “We built the cultural values together.”
“He has deep respect amongst the whole team and he gets it. Perhaps we could have done that [succession] earlier, you know.” “I’d urge all founders to think hard about that,” says Thakrar. “Succession is really important [and] a home-grown candidate can be ideal. My instinct has always been to hire people who would grow with the business.”
With a successor in place, Dishoom decided to take on external investment for the first time. Thakrar embarked on a kind of ‘tasting menu’, sampling lots of different potential investors. “An investor who didn’t get the poetry and magic was going to mess up this business,” he realised. “I think it’s not possible to evaluate that until you see the whites of people’s eyes,” he adds.
“Then it begins to be clear who you can work with and who you can’t, who you have chemistry with, who shares some philosophical beliefs.” L Catterton, which is connected to French luxury group LVMH, passed the test and came on board as a minority investor in the summer of 2025. The deal reportedly valued Dishoom at around £300m.
Shamil Thakrar’s four lessons for leaders
Grow only as fast as quality allows. Dishoom’s growth principle commits it to growing “at a rate consistent with the deepening of quality”. Too many boardrooms start with the hockey-stick plan and treat quality as an afterthought, Thakrar argues, when it should be the other way round.
Build culture for the moments no process covers. “Culture is what happens when there is no process, when no one is looking, or when there isn’t a way to measure something,” he says. Staff need to know that nobody will reprimand them for giving away an umbrella on a rainy day.
Never be greedy on price. Thakrar sets prices so that more people want to come than Dishoom can serve, then relies on the business model to convert that into good EBITDA. “Our job in business, in my strong view, is to give excess value to the customer and excess value to the team member.”
Make every new idea earn its place. When a new dish goes on the menu, another usually comes off, to keep complexity out of the kitchen. Thakrar points to research by Sheena Iyengar showing that people buy more when given a well-curated choice rather than an endless one.
Watch the full conversation with Shamil Thakrar on YouTube.
Dining and Cooking