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TL;DR – The Dishoom Effect
- Dishoom is a London-based restaurant group inspired by 1960s Bombay cafés, founded in 2010.
- Valued at £300 million in 2025, after investment from LVMH-backed L Catterton.
- Each restaurant has a unique fictional backstory that shapes its menu, design, and tone.
- Growth has been slow and deliberate, avoiding franchising and standardisation.
- Dishoom prioritises culture over speed, paying above living wage and training staff in storytelling.
- Its brand strategy is built on narrative, detail, and emotional consistency.
Few restaurant brands get the attention of LVMH. Fewer still do it without franchising, fast scale, or a celebrity founder. But Dishoom, now valued at £300 million, has built something different: a business powered by atmosphere. With its first U.S. opening planned for 2026, the cult London brand is now being studied not just for its food, but for the architecture of its story. This piece breaks down what Dishoom actually protects, and why it matters.
How a Cult London restaurant built one of the most carefully engineered brands in hospitality
Earlier this year, a restaurant group best known for slow queues, long menus, and handwritten postcards secured a valuation of £300 million.
Dishoom, the Indian café-inspired chain founded in London in 2010, sold a minority stake to L Catterton, the private equity firm backed by LVMH. It was the company’s first outside investment. The deal, which includes plans to open a U.S. location in 2026, comes after more than a decade of expansion carried out on its own terms: deliberately, often slowly, and always with a story.
Each Dishoom restaurant draws from a fictional backstory set in 1960s Bombay, narratives that guide not just the décor but the tone of the menus, the music, and even the marketing emails. Locations don’t open with ribbon cuttings; they arrive with novellas. The voice across every touchpoint, slightly arch, full of affection, never rushed, feels less like brand copy than a character in the room.
To many in hospitality, Dishoom is a standout. To some in private equity, it’s a puzzle: a business that rejects operational shortcuts yet continues to grow profitably, with £116.8 million in annual revenue and a 56% rise in pre-tax profit last year. To the people behind it, the logic is simple. The brand is the story. The story is the product.
This is a case of strategy by other means.
The restaurant as story
Dishoom’s restaurants are not identical. Each one begins with a fictional story set in 1960s Bombay. The Covent Garden location is imagined as a defunct cinema. Shoreditch was once a printing press. The Canary Wharf site belongs to a wealthy modernist patron with eccentric taste.
These stories are written before design begins. They shape the music, layout, wall text, even the tone of the copy. Every menu is written in a consistent narrative voice, slightly formal, lightly amused, and emotionally specific. It sounds like someone who’s lived the story - not marketing copy.
This isn’t branding in the conventional sense. There are no slogans. No Instagram sets. Just a tone that holds steady across space and time. Guests don’t need to know the backstory to feel it. But it’s there, in the way a dish is described, or how a napkin is folded.
The approach feels closest to what Ace Hotel once pioneered, giving each site its own identity, shaped by imagined local figures and soft design constraints. But Dishoom takes it further. Ace built from place. Dishoom builds from fiction.
Complexity, preserved
Most restaurants that scale do so by reducing complexity. Menus are standardised. Interiors are replicated. Operations are templated for speed and consistency. But Dishoom hasn’t done that. You'll find slight variations in menu items from one location to another. Layouts are built from scratch. Copy is rewritten per site. Food is prepared to order. Even the music is adjusted.
The result is a system that resists flattening. It's harder to train, harder to manage, and harder to replicate. It also creates something that guests remember.
Internally, Dishoom has never pushed for speed. Things take the time they take, and it seems to work. Growth has been steady. Staff stay longer than average for the sector. The product improves with time rather than volume.
And none of it feels casual.
Inside the brand
At the centre of Dishoom’s culture is a term the team calls “big-heartedness.” It shows up in staff training, service rituals, and the way decisions are made. New employees are briefed on the fictional worlds. Training is emotional.
Dishoom pays above the London living wage and holds an annual all-hands festival for employees and suppliers. Promotion paths are clear. The tone of internal language mirrors the public one: generous, slightly old-fashioned, and precise.
Most guests won’t notice any of this directly. But the feeling is legible. The service is consistent without being robotic. Staff often stay through multiple openings. Many move up through the business. The result is a brand where the external tone is matched by the internal structure.
What makes Dishoom work
The Dishoom model, slow, narrative-led, resistant to simplification, shouldn’t work in a category driven by logistics and turnover. But it does, in part because the story isn’t a layer added on top. It’s the thing being sold.
The menus, tone, and even merchandise (candles, aprons, tins of chai, postcards) are expressions of a fictional world that just happens to serve breakfast, lunch, dinner, puddings and drinks.
None of this is scalable in the traditional sense. But it turns out not everything needs to be. Dishoom has grown by making places people return to, and remember.
NYC 2026
Dishoom opened its first restaurant in 2010. Its eleventh will open in 2026, the brand’s first in the United States.
It never franchised. Never chased dark kitchens or delivery-first scale. Instead, it spent 14 years building rhythm, atmosphere, and tone, slowly enough that people noticed.
For brand leaders, the takeaway isn’t about moving slowly. It’s about knowing what not to rush. Dishoom didn’t grow by flooding the market. It grew by giving people something to return to, and giving itself time to get it right. Not nostalgia. Just precision.
For agencies and brand leaders, Dishoom’s trajectory offers a useful lens. It raises a fundamental valuation question:
- If a private equity firm assessed us tomorrow, what would they identify as protected strategic assets, not just visible outputs?
In Dishoom’s case, the answer is clear: narrative consistency, cultural coherence, and brand control across time and geography. For others, it’s worth asking whether what makes you valuable is truly being preserved, or simply performed.
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