Dishoom Battersea

The brief

Every Dishoom café begins with a founding myth, and Battersea’s is one of the most imaginative: a young girl from 1953 Bombay finds herself in a futuristic 2023, where she discovers she has superpowers. Macaulay Sinclair brought the story to life across a 235 cover restaurant, with futuristic Hindi lettering on the walls and more than a hundred vintage pieces of furniture brought from Bombay.

Behind the story, Dishoom needed bars built for relentless, high volume service that would fit the way its bartenders already work. At Battersea there were two of them, a Dispense Bar and a Permit Bar, and the Dispense Bar’s unusual footprint added a challenge of its own.

Built on the Dishoom station

At the start of our relationship with Dishoom, we worked with the bar operations team to develop a standard Dishoom station, designed around their menu, their workflow and their service. Both bars at Battersea are built on it.

Using the same station on every site keeps the bars consistent from one opening to the next. Training is simpler, a bartender can move between restaurants and find everything where they expect it, and each new bar improves on the last as we learn from it together.

Designing around the footprint

Because our bars are fully bespoke, we could design the Dispense Bar specifically around the shape of its space, using every available millimetre and leaving no dead space behind the counter.

Every element has a clear purpose. Spice and herb storage, blender platforms and specialist chopping boards are all placed to keep the bartender’s movements short, so service stays quick however busy the room becomes.