Reflecting on 2024, by Shamil Thakrar

Words by: Shamil Thakrar

20th December 2024

SOME OF YOU MAY REMEMBER that it is my habit at this time of the year to sit and to brood in one of our bars and to try to reconcile myself with the 12 months that have passed. You might perhaps have noticed me in years past, scruffy and slouched on a bar stool, jaw slackened, and gazing into space, or perhaps just downwards into the dregs of my strong drink, nursing my tangled head.

This year, I will be different. Sober. Straight backed. Facing bravely into 2025. Alcohol suits me a little less these days. It makes my 6am sun salutations creak and taints my 9am resolve to get things done. Accordingly, I am in fact here, 8.53am in the bar in our Shoreditch restaurant. I feel fresh and ready after my brisk cycle through London, north to east, cold air and winter sun my kindly companions.

In front of me is our Teetotal Menu. It extols the benefits of sobriety, promising (amongst other things) recaptured youth and fortified health, permanent rejuvenation, improved balance and gait and increased joie-de-vivre. Who can say no to this?

Thus inspired, instead of a stiff bloody mary or even a Dhoble, in front of me is a glass of chai and some bun maska. The simplest of things. A soft bun, halved through by a slice of salty butter and cut into three fingers, ready to be dunked gently into my waiting cup. I enjoy the richness of the butter and bun spiced and warmed and melted together by the soft heat of the chai. I pause, wiping a little chai from my chin, as layers of memory usher themselves present. Of early childhood, when Sundays would be announced by that same aroma of chai seeping into the rooms of our house from the small kitchen where my grandmother would be presiding over the morning. Of my father, who loved nothing better than dunking his bread and butter into his chai. Of times in Bombay, taking respite from the city in cafés Yazdani or Kyani. And of course, memories these years past in one or another of our restaurants, dunking, inevitably wiping chai from my chin. The simplest thing, and yet so powerful.

Behind me, on the slightly crumbling wall above the old Indian printers’ cabinet and next to the odd flashing light rupee coin-operated scales (which once also gave you a horoscope), are pictures of my family, among them one of my father. In this picture, taken in the early 1950s, he’s a young boy of perhaps six years, with his two little sisters. The expressions on their faces are very serious, all the more so in black and white, as if my grandmother has just told them off.

That young boy with the sulky expression would grow into the wisest man I have ever known. I am so very proud to have called him father. It took me many years (decades, even) to really listen to him, but when I did, the piece of wisdom that stayed with me the most was his idea that “for something to truly succeed, it must have a little poetry at the heart of it.”

Over time, I think I’ve come to understand this better. I believe this idea guides us to start with the beauty in something, the emotion it evokes, whether some sort of joy, or even sadness or pain, perhaps a strong pang of nostalgia, something that moves you. Then, to find a way to channel this mood, to create something from it and to communicate it. In the end, and without denying the importance of reason, it is without doubt emotions that move us to do anything.

Food is so deeply emotional, woven into the fabric of who we are. It can bring comfort during times of difficulty, spark joy in celebration, and even express love when words fail. Sharing a meal is an act of connection; a mother feeds her child, friends gather around a table, strangers break bread together. And of course, food connects us to our families, to our cultures and histories and memories. Every dish carries with it a lovely cargo of context, the story of where it came from, how it was made, how it evolved. It is a delightful (and surely, poetic) thought that that the food in front of us might only be the very top layer, the culmination of generations of cooking, of recipes or techniques devotedly handed down.

Of course, then, the question. What do we do with this? How do we respect this, be true to this? We’ve been worrying about this for the decade and a half since we first opened Dishoom. The first thing, I think, is to know a dish deeply, beyond recipe and technique. At a historical, even poetic level. To find the loveliness and the romance in it, to respect it, to be grateful to it. Perhaps, if you are lucky, you will fall in love with it. Then, naïve as this may sound, I think our job is to express this love. As restaurateurs, we can cook the most delicious version of a dish we can manage. And we can tell you a little about what you are eating even on a menu or in a short interaction. We can take people from our team to Bombay every year. We can write books of recipes and history.

This year, we spent time in both Bombay and further afield in India tasting food. On some days, we literally tasted a hundred dishes. We asked good friends for their lists, returned to places of which we had fading memories, sought out mythic back alley food stalls and ate and ate. The result, after much tasting and even more cooking and more tasting was the update we did for our menu (much credit Arun, Rishi and Kavi!). We tend not to make radical change to our menu since so many of our dishes are such classics and we’ve worked slowly and carefully to evolve the menu over so many years. However, our food trips and tastings produced so much inspiration that we couldn’t hold back. We added dishes; a sublime and aromatic Goan fish curry, a lip-smacking warm aubergine chutney, a fish Amritsari which goes swimmingly with a drink, and many others; and we up-to-dated our Pau Bhaji and Keema Pau (both changes involving very heated debate.) We also managed to feed quite a few of you at our little supper clubs to introduce the new menu. They were a joy! Honestly, they were one of the very best parts of our year – to meet some of you and to get to know you over much food and drink and much storytelling.

My father passed away some years ago in 2017. In a way that I can only aspire to, he un-self-consciously cared about everyone’s story, whoever they were, wherever he met them. He was interested in narratives in people’s lives, in history, in mythology and fiction. Without us really noticing, I think this all seeped into what we do at Dishoom. He was certainly our most joyful and ardent cheerleader, and finder-in-chief of obscure nuggets to turn into fully-formed ideas. He took joy in the fact that we designed each restaurant as a story involving some fiction or some character grounded in a specific aspect of Bombay history. We investigate each story deeply for months, write it, understand it, document it, and express it in design (and sometimes even immersive theatre, or a comic book, or even an LP); whether it’s the history of Indian independence in our King’s Cross restaurant, the swadeshi movement in Birmingham, or the jazz history of Bombay in Kensington or post-independence Bombay retro-futurism through a comic book character.

Our work, then, is to combine these layers of meaning – the meaning which comes laced through the food, and the meaning which we try to bring through storytelling in our design – with heartfelt and generous hospitality. Indeed, I would say there is yet more poetry in the hospitality itself. At its heart, hospitality is about looking after others with care, warmth, and thoughtfulness. It’s about making people feel seen, valued, and comfortable—whether they are a guest in our restaurants or a member of our team. And I would argue too that the giver of hospitality can be as much a beneficiary of it as the recipient. (If you have time, watch The Bear and remember this idea when you get to Season 2, episode 7. Breathtaking.)

I’m conscious as I write that I’m in danger of sounding like a hopeless idealist. To take poetry and use it as the basis of a business sounds like a naïve undertaking. Perhaps it is. What I do know is that – since we launched Dishoom fourteen years ago – trying to deliver this idea of poetry faithfully, consistently, and well has worked us all so very hard. I see it particularly in our teams at this time of year. Just writing these words is making me tired. The kindly bartender – with excellent timing – has just seen me, noticed my slouch and is making sure my chai is topped up. The sugar and caffeine do me good.

These last fourteen years we’ve managed to open thirteen restaurants and we have just over two thousand team members. I think about the people who I am – and have been – fortunate enough to work with. I am in awe of them. So many have had real poetry and feeling in their hearts, and yet carry out their work with determination and discipline. The work of managing the precise service steps front of house, of preparing complex dishes back of house, and supporting all of these activities to produce what I’d call poetry in fact takes enormous dedication to process, to rigour and measurement. And as we learned – and indeed keep learning – through our many mistakes (some more humbling than others) we discovered various touchstones, important beyond the commercial, to guide our work, to channel the processes in the service of poetry.

We call these our ‘articles of faith’ – ideas that are fundamental to the way we try to run our business. It is our belief, too, that adherence to these will make our business that much more successful. For example, one lesson we learned was that whilst we were clearly running a business, elevating profit to the key focus wasn’t serving us. Instead we formulated a principle: ‘obsess over awesome food and drink, awesome service and a happy team, and control the costs. Then, revenue and profit are the applause that follow.’ Written here, perhaps it is obvious, but for us it was transformational and is now embedded in everything we do and every way we measure it. Later, we came to believe that hospitality and growth were natural enemies, albeit ones that could live uneasily together. Their reconciliation was the principle ‘deepen, don’t dilute’. As we grew, we were fiercely determined not to let growth dilute the quality of our food, drink, service or the happiness of the team.

Time is slipping through my hands. I’m grateful you are still here with me, reader. Thank you. It may actually be time for a drink. I’m going to resist (at least for now) given my good intentions earlier in the day. I think I should be bringing my reflections to a close.

Perhaps I can finish on a note of pride. These past fourteen years we have found much that is important to us for its own sake that we wanted to keep deepening, but didn’t necessarily seem to be an obvious part of a profit and loss ledger. We found we cared about breaking down barriers, creating beautiful shared spaces that brought people together. We had ideas about contribution and community. We had beliefs about what it meant to be at one’s best. This year we wrote our first impact report as part of our B-corp certification. We’re delighted to have gained this certification, but bringing together the report was in some ways its own reward. You can read more here. We’d like to think that we’ve become one of the very best employers in hospitality; we’ve won many awards for this work and this year we ranked in the Sunday Times Top 10 best workplaces list. We’re also proud that we have reached the milestone of having donated 20 million meals to children at school who would otherwise have gone hungry. Meanwhile, over the years our many events have created community over culture and food and have broken down barriers; with hundreds of non-Muslims partaking in Eid festivities, and hundreds of non-Hindus partaking in Diwali festivities, difference a source of joy rather than judgement. Finally, I’m glad we now understand our carbon footprint, and that we’ve begun to reduce it, and that we are working with some good projects on carbon reduction outside Dishoom as well, equivalent to at least the amount of carbon we are emitting.

There is much we didn’t do that we should have done and I know that there are things that we didn’t do quite right. These have made for a fresh to-do list.

Reader, I’ve been writing for some hours now. It’s late in the dwindling winter afternoon. There is a new bartender here who seems not to know that I’ve been sitting here all day. She smiles and sees that I might benefit from a drink. An old fashioned, I think. Just the one, I promise, just to take the edge off the exhaustion of the year. Sober resolve will start for sure on January 1st. I sip, and the strong sweet liquid tastes good.

My only remaining task here is perhaps my most important: for me to express heartfelt gratitude. First, and surely foremost, to our teams, who put up with us in this idealistic project – to join poetry with process – which asks too much. You all work so hard and conscientiously to serve our guests and support each other. You have my humble and profuse thanks and sincere apologies for all of those times when we don’t get things right. To our suppliers, so many of you so long-standing, you too have our deep gratitude for tolerating our quirks these past years and still wanting to work with us. To our families, we are not really much without you, and we acknowledge here your deep support for what we do and your love. And of course, profoundest thanks are owed to our guests, both in our restaurants and at home to whom we have sent food. You are the treasured patrons of our livelihoods and without you there would literally be no Dishoom. Thank you and thank you again for allowing us to serve you. Finally, reader, I’d like nod my sincere thanks to you for still being here with me late this afternoon.

Here's to 2025. I think it will be a disciplined and sober sort of year. I can feel it. I now invoke Ganesh-ji, the elephant-headed deity of new beginnings and the remover of obstacles. May he make your 2025 both poetic and straight-backed. May he bless you with warm and loving relationships. And - may he help you to find the beauty in the emotions of both joy and sadness that are so much part of being human.

With much love and gratitude to you all. Goodnight. And happy new year!