Dishoom founders savour prospect of US expansion

To say that Shamil and Kavi Thakrar were not keen on the idea of offering deliveries from their upmarket Indian restaurant chain Dishoom is something of an understatement. “It was like, over our dead bodies,” said 53-year-old Shamil, who launched the first Dishoom in Covent Garden in 2010 alongside his cousin Kavi, 42.
But when Covid closed hospitality venues, like many other restaurants Dishoom started offering delivery for the first time. It was supposed to be a temporary measure to help the Thakrars keep their promise of retaining all 980 members of staff, made before the government’s furlough scheme was announced on March 20, 2020. Offering takeaway did not sit well with the entrepreneurs whose restaurants aim to emulate the warm, welcoming ambience of Bombay’s Irani cafés in the 1960s.
So when restrictions were lifted, the cousins had a choice to make. “We were like, ‘Should we keep this [takeaway] business? It’s pretty good,’” Shamil recalled.
Today delivery accounts for about 15 per cent of Dishoom’s revenues, which stood at £116.8 million in 2023, with a pre-tax profit of £7.5 million. The business has grown from six restaurants at the onset of the pandemic to ten today, with three smaller Permit Room cafés also opening in Brighton, Cambridge and Oxford.
The Thakrars have their sights set further afield. Reassured by a successful two-week pop-up at the New York restaurant Pastis this summer, the pair are cooking up a US expansion plan and have appointed advisers to help raise the cash needed to finance the move.
Dishoom’s sites are sprawling, with one of the largest, near Manchester’s Spinningfields, able to seat 220 people, and prime American retail estate comes at a heavy cost, both for the rent and fit-out. Will Beckett, chief executive of Hawksmoor, the successful British steak chain which recently expanded stateside, told The Sunday Times earlier this year that his 16,500 sq ft Chicago restaurant cost $10 million to build.
Shamil says the decision to take outside investment for the first time is not one they will take lightly. The pair, whose family owned the Tilda rice brand until it was sold to Hain Celestial Group in 2014 for £217 million, have used a combination of their own money and a small amount from private individuals to fund Dishoom so far.
“We’ve been looking at the US for a while and we’re really sure that our brand can go far [there]. But at the same time, we’re pretty humble about needing to learn. It isn’t an easy thing to get right, so … it’s useful to have somebody who will bring some expertise and capital as well. We’re not in a massive rush — we’d like to launch in the US in 2026 — so we’re looking at our options,” said Shamil, adding that they were taking a cautious approach to choosing an investor.
“We’ve been quite thoughtful about how we manage the business and we’ve always said we want to deepen, not dilute what we do. We want to use our scale to make the business better, so that every meal you have, every team experience, is better than it was yesterday or six months ago.
“We need somebody who can work with us on that and it’s really clear not all investors will think that way,” he said, alluding to the tendency of some private equity investors to focus on reducing costs and beefing up margins.
They have previously learnt the lessons of cutting corners. A Dishoom pop-up on London’s Southbank in the summer of 2011, where staff wore “very cool” Frankie Goes to Bollywood T-shirts, went awry after the tandoor broke. Rather than turning away customers, they put minced lamb in burger buns bought from the local Tesco. The next day a blogger posted a review. “He described how he came in and it was beautiful … but then he ate the food and it was terrible. He wrote, ‘Frankie went to Bollywood… and shat in a bun.’
“That was an important experience because we realised that the idea that people are out there and there’s food in the kitchen, and our job is to make that exchange, is not true. Hospitality has to come first — making sure the food is wonderful, making sure the guests are really, really happy and making sure the team are happy too. It was a real turning point.”
One of the areas where the Dishoom founders would be reluctant to curb their spending is on the employee perks that have helped win them a cabinet full of trophies in their tastefully decorated Shoreditch HQ, which also hosts a garlanded bronze statue of Ganesha, the Hindu god. In 2021, Dishoom was named the fourth-best large company to work for in the UK by the Best Companies ranking, and it was judged the best hospitality company to work for in the UK by Glassdoor, the employee review site, in 2022 and 2023.
It says it pays above market rates for hospitality wages, and perks include a music and food festival in the summer to which employees are invited with their families, as well as an all-expenses trip to Mumbai after five years’ service.
Kavi is responsible for the itinerary, which is an increasingly onerous task. The first time they ran the trip in 2013 they took a handful of staff; next year they will take 200. “What we love doing is sharing the stories of Bombay, sharing the people and the food — we spend days eating on the beach, in cafés, and trying the delicious street food,” said Kavi.
They also spend a day with a charity partner, Magic Breakfast, through which Dishoom has provided 23 million meals to hungry schoolchildren since 2014. “It’s something we talk about a lot but when you sit at a school with 100 kids, talking to the teachers, it really brings that to life.”
They also invest heavily in staff development and training, and prefer to promote from within. “We all spend a lot of time at work and it’s not that easy running restaurants, or being a server or a chef. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we train people well. We have a philosophy that we want people to be the best they can be,” said Shamil, pointing to Dishoom’s Babu Masterclass, a six-month management training programme for front-of-house managers. “I can’t relate to this idea that [hospitality] is a temporary career.”
He says Dishoom is “socially mobile” because the company’s growth means there are always opportunities for people to develop and move into bigger jobs, regardless of their background. “We were asked the other day how many graduates we employ and we don’t even collect the data, I have no idea. So long as you’re ready to work hard and treat people well and look after people … within a few years of starting as a food runner you can be managing a team, managing guests. It’s not just a transitionary job — it’s one of the best careers for rising up [the ranks] really quickly.”
Dishoom’s investment in its teams paid off post-pandemic, when a combination of Brexit and a lack of staff meant other restaurant and hospitality businesses struggled to recruit but Dishoom was sitting pretty. “That whole period was hard for the industry, but I think it was less bad for us. I remember thinking that the investment we made looking after our team during Covid … paid back in buckets,” said Shamil.
A former consultant at Bain, and a director at Tilda before founding Dishoom, he said that the chancellor’s recent budget, where she announced significant increases to employers’ national insurance contributions (NIC) and a rise in the minimum wage, will not change Dishoom’s approach to how it rewards staff. But he joined other hospitality companies in criticising the government for not doing enough to promote growth.
“Clearly, the incoming government … has effectively created significant headwinds for hospitality through the budget, the NIC employer increase being an example,” he said. “We really would like them to make some tangible moves to spur business growth.”