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Start free trial →The Go To Food Podcast · Food & Beverage · October 2026
The Dishoom co-founder was asked how hard it is to turn down the expansion offers that come with a famous restaurant brand. He frames growth and hospitality as in tension, and says the pace of new openings has to serve the second.
…easier than if you have a bigger restaurant or two restaurants or three restaurants. And I think that as a team, we're very focused on making sure that we know that hospitality is our job and not growth. And we kind of have promised ourselves we will only grow if we think we can deepen hospitality.
Nice.
And we call that deepening, not diluting. So, 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 that's you're losing the connection with your team and your guests. And that's not what we're in the business of doing. So, saying no, of course, in theory is hard. But 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.
Yeah, yeah. How do you, what are the criteria then? Like, for instance, opening here, boroughs become the hospital, like, you know, like Freddie said, a center of hospitality in London. Do you then look at that and go, like, we want to be a part of that? Borough needs a Dashum? Like, what are the…
Yeah, that's a great question. I think that, so for us, I mean, you know, where we have Dashums, and we have a few in London now. And for us, it's where people want to spend time. Yeah, yeah. We're all pretty central in terms of where our restaurants are, but it's where people live close to or can…
yeah. For your soft launch, you had over a three-hour queue last week, which is quite incredible. It's a mad. People are