KT Kavi Thakrar On The Go To Food Podcast

“We may be the most blogged about restaurant, I think, in history because we opened in 2010. And I think 15 months later, blogging was dead because Instagram was invented. And so we invited all of the bloggers in London in, and they all very generously said lovely things about us. And then they all died because they probably all started Instagram pages.”

The Go To Food Podcast · Food & Beverage · October 2026

Context

Thakrar remembering Dishoom's launch, when the restaurant invited London's food bloggers in early. He says the goal hasn't changed since: give people a brilliant time and, if they loved it, get them to tell others.

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Transcript

The Go To Food Podcast Around 51:01 into the episode

Kavi Thakrar

…and the dish. So he's right and not make an Instagram. It's a spectacle. And so for me, I see lots of people doing stuff just for the theatre of it. And is it making the dish more tasty? Is it making the experience more tasty? Or am I just looking at my cell phone, not my friends? You want to

Ben Benton

facilitate the human theater of the world? We've been going quite early on, more than anyone, in sort of 2010 to getting bloggers in and stuff like that. We may

Kavi Thakrar

be the most blogged about restaurant, I think, in history because we opened in 2010. And I think 15 months later, blogging was dead because Instagram was invented. And so we invited all of the bloggers in London in, and they all very generously loved the lovely things about us. And then they all died because they probably all started Instagram pages. So yeah, I think it was really important. We wanted people to experience what we did and if they liked it, right about it. And that's what we want all of the time, whether it's you with word of mouth or a podcast or quite frankly, Instagram. We want people to have a brilliant time. And B, if they loved it, tell people about it. Like, that's it. Like, that's what hospitality is. It

Ben Benton

must be incredible because the amount of people we spend on this podcast who go, like, we want to take that Dishum model with our national dishes.

Kavi Thakrar

Yeah.

Ben Benton

You must see that the whole time. They go, like, you know, I can't remember who speaking to you recently. I think maybe Maimai and Mayme in Baron Market, she was going, I want to take my food and offer it in that kind of style. Yeah. Which must be just an incredible compliment.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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“I think matcha just generally as an ingredient is on too many menus. And the other thing that I'm seeing is caviar bumps. Like caviar on everything is an upsell. Like, here's a chicken nugget, let me put caviar on it.” — Kavi Thakrar, The Go To Food Podcast

“Deepen, don't dilute. And that's really important because if you're just going to grow for the sake of growth and chase money or dollars or sites, then you're losing the connection with your team and your guests. … If you wake up every morning thinking your job is hospitality and making it better, and that growth is fundamentally the enemy of hospitality, and you're trying to reconcile those two, then you can grow at a pace that allows you to deepen what you're doing.” — Kavi Thakrar, The Go To Food Podcast