Magic Places (1)
This note is about a restaurant built on the love and memories of a city. It reminds us of the powerful potential of great third spaces. Welcome to Dishoom.
By The Empty Square
Photo: Atul/Unsplash
This note is about a restaurant built on the love and memories of Bombay, the most cosmopolitan city of India, so “startlingly full of accumulated difference”.
Chaotic may be the word that spontaneously comes to mind, but “once you have found your places of refuge, Bombay first becomes human and then – without you noticing exactly when – it completes the seduction and becomes delightful.”
Building a business on delightful memories of human, even seductive, places of refuge is an inspiring idea.
And remembering the magic of great shared spaces is valuable.
As the founders explain, “shared spaces beget shared experiences and shared experiences mean that people are more likely to tolerate each other’s differences, less likely to hate and less likely to explode into violence towards one another.” When people break bread together, barriers break down. Simple and true.
For the founders of this particular restaurant, the Irani cafés of Bombay were a significant part of the seduction. From the beginning of the 20th century onward, the cafés were set up by Parsi immigrants. They quickly became an irreplaceable Bombay institution.
Contrary to other eateries at that time, they welcomed all kinds of people and earned a fond place in the hearts of Bombayites, regardless of caste, class, religion, or race, by providing a cheap snack, a decent meal, or just a cup of chai and cool refuge from the street.
Photo: Yogesh Rahamatkar/Unsplash
The Irani cafés played a significant role in enabling women and children to participate in eating out by incorporating family rooms or cabins (which also had the unintended benefit of sheltering illicit liaisons). In this way, these cafés set up by immigrants became Bombay’s first real public eating and drinking places as well as meeting and relaxing places for the great number who lacked the luxury of space at home (or even those, like prostitutes, who were shunned elsewhere).
The Irani cafés became “places for growing up, and for growing old, whoever you were.”
On the beautiful memories of these places, the Indian restaurant, Dishoom, was established in London (2010) – by immigrants, who have taken the idea of great, welcoming, and bonding third spaces to a new global level.
Among other practices of charity, for every meal they serve at Dishoom, they donate another to a hungry child. A meal for a meal. Millions of meals have by now been donated to children in the UK and India.
Quotes are from the inspiring book “Dishoom – From Bombay with Love. Cookery book and highly subjective guide to Bombay with map” by Shamil Thakrar, Kavi Thakrar & Naved Nasir (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019). Hereby recommended.