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KT Kavi Thakrar On 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.”

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

“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

Context

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.

Transcript

The Go To Food Podcast Around 08:13 into the episode
Kavi Thakrar

…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.

Ben Benton

Nice.

Kavi Thakrar

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.

Ben Benton

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…

Kavi Thakrar

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…

Ben Benton

yeah. For your soft launch, you had over a three-hour queue last week, which is quite incredible. It's a mad. People are

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

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