"New" Dishoom Covent Garden coming soon

The Dishoom team are delighted to announce that they will (at long last!) be raising the curtain on the newly redesigned Dishoom Covent Garden in late autumn 2020. 

Dishoom Covent Garden, the team’s very first restaurant, opened in July 2010, and was their first attempt to capture the wistful poetry of the Irani cafés of Bombay, drawing inspiration from beloved Bombay institutions such as Britannia & Co., Olympia Coffee House and Kyani & Co. The restaurant closed in January 2020 to undergo a major redesign to mark the café’s 10th anniversary. The team are delighted to announce that the new restaurant will now reopen at its old home on Upper St Martin’s Lane later this year. The café will pay loving homage to its Irani café heritage, whilst also bringing to life the stories of Bombay’s theatres, which were reincarnated in the 1940s as all-singing, all-dancing talkie houses. Please kindly read on for a little detail about the new designs and story – further particulars, including launch dates, will be released in due course. 

Designing Dishoom Covent Garden 

Each Dishoom is a love-letter to Bombay – a way of sharing the team’s love of the city’s culture, heritage and people. Every Dishoom restaurant has its own unique story – a sort of founding myth. Imagining each new space as an Irani café rooted in some specific seam of Bombay history, this myth is something of a whimsical riff, bringing together stories of proprietors and patrons both real and imagined. This myth explores the connections between Bombay and the neighbourhood in which the café will take shape, and informs all aspect of the café’s design (no detail too small), weaving together both fact and fiction in unexpected and hopefully fun and charming ways. 

Inspired by Covent Garden’s rich heritage as a landmark for theatre, cinema and the performing arts, “New” Dishoom Covent Garden will tell the story of Bombay’s theatrical journey from Parsi theatre, to silent film, to the thrill and amazement of the Talkies era. In the 1930s and 1940s many of Bombay’s foremost theatres were reincarnated as state-of-the-art cinemas, adopting fresh monikers to denote their modernity – popular theatres were reborn as “New” Empire and “New” Excelsior. Dishoom Covent Garden’s story and design will draw on this heritage. 

The café’s new founding myth transports us to an age of rapid evolution and reinvention. In the ‘30s and ‘40s, cinema became a reflection of, and a catalyst for, the exhilarating transformations of the age. The advent of film heralded a wave of female liberation, with the arrival on screen of bold, outspoken and feisty heroines. Audiences were introduced to actresses with a different kind of edge – women who swung from chandeliers, jumped off cliffs and fought atop speeding trains. The early Bombay Talkies were a thrilling and novel experience, representing a world of modernity, glamour and freedom. Exuberant, emotional filmi music began to define the sound of the era. Cinema introduced Bombay to an intoxicating world of adventure and liberty. 

Last year, the Dishoom team, along with their long-term design partners, Macaulay Sinclair, made their customary sojourns to Bombay, immersing themselves in the architecture, history and stories of the city’s early cinemas. They visited the finest talkie houses, including Aurora, Edward Theatre, New Empire Cinema and Palace Talkies. Many of these buildings began life as theatres, and some, such as Aurora and Palace Talkies, are, to this day, showing screenings in auditoriums that now express a faded elegance and a grandeur that is much age-worn. As spaces that evolved over many decades, Bombay’s early cinemas offer eclectic design references, bearing the imprint of numerous owners and the influences of many ages and aesthetic movements. Art Deco flourished in Bombay in the ‘40s and its influence can be found throughout the cinemas of the same era, yet these spaces were also layered with history and the design remnants of earlier epochs. 

As such, at “New” Dishoom Covent Garden, Deco grandeur meets with the relaxed elegance of earlier influences, including the Beaux Arts style, characterised by a decorative and ornamental aesthetic. The team were also inspired by visits to The Willingdon Club, Bombay Yacht Club and numerous private residences, which expressed an understated glamour typical of the era – painted shutters, cane and rattan furniture, and light, airy verandah spaces sit alongside elevated detailing, including decorative ceilings and ornate chandeliers. As always, the team frequented many remaining Irani cafés, met with the owners, and spent much time sourcing furniture and artefacts from the Bombay of the era. 

“New” Dishoom Covent Garden will bring together these stories to create a new-and-improved café from which to serve Dishoom’s much-loved menu of Bombay comfort food and award-winning tipples. The café has also undergone a significant expansion as part of the redesign, making it a first-rate flagship restaurant for the Dishoom team. The café will reopen at its old home at 12 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane, part of The Yards, the series of newly redeveloped, interconnecting courtyards and streets including St Martin’s Courtyard and Mercer Walk. The restaurant will soon be open daily, providing patrons with everything from breakfast and mid-morning chai, to lunch and afternoon tipples, right through to evening feasts and late-night snacks, served across both floors of the café, and in the restaurant’s Permit Room bar. 

Introducing Dishoom Covent Garden’s leading ladies, Yasmin and Ruby 

Bombay, 1949. A sultry June evening. Lights glow golden. Candles flicker in the warm breeze that arrives gently through the large open windows of the café. 

I watch, entranced, as Ruby brings the last bars of her song to a wistful close. Cheers erupt from the audience. She stands at the microphone, grins bashfully. Her sari, draped and perfumed, is bottle- green and gold. The glamorous of Bombay, members of the band, old friends, wayward sailors all clap and shout their praise. She bows slightly. 

Ruby seems to float off the stage. A gramophone clicks and crackles to life and music starts again. She glides between tables, past where I am sitting, making her way to the bar. Gin and lime with ice only. “Come beti, sit with me,” suggests her mother, Yasmin, at the bar, drink in hand, strikingly beautiful in deep blue chiffon. They begin to gossip and laugh conspiratorially, as they often do. 

Yasmin loves these evenings in her café-cum-club like nothing else. Each performance a hit, attended by all manner of Bombayites and revellers passing through this slightly wild port city. The obviously wealthy hobnob with the beautiful, the rakish and the occasional ne’er-do-wells. Jazzmen, languid on rattan chairs, unwind to 

swing and jazz sounds. Cine stars, at home on the page 3 society photos, chatter self-importantly about the latest talkie showing in the new cinema next door. 

To read Ruby and Yasmin’s story in full please see www.dishoom.com/covent-garden 

Careers at Dishoom 

Dishoom are dedicated to being a truly big-hearted and first-class place to work and the team were humbled to have been ranked #20 in The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For 2020. They care deeply about looking after their team, and creating an environment where people can learn, grow and develop, and where jobs turn into satisfying and long-lasting careers. 

When the restaurant closed in January, all members of the Covent Garden team were offered roles at alternative cafés. Dishoom are pleased to have kept everyone’s jobs through the subsequent disruption brought about by coronavirus, and look forward to warmly welcoming their first-rate team of Dishoom-wallas back to their old home at Dishoom Covent Garden. 

The re-opening will also create over 100 new jobs. To further support their team, Dishoom are focused on offering internal transfers and promotions for the opening, as well as encouraging team referrals for friends and family. They have also launched a new Front of House foundational training course, allowing current team members to fast-track their training and development ahead of the relaunch. 

For further information about careers at Dishoom kindly visit www.dishoom.com/careers 

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