Love And Loneliness In Mumbai’s Irani Cafes

Gustad Irani, 51, has the gentlest, most smiling face I’ve ever seen in any Irani restaurant in Mumbai, legendary safe spaces for grumpy men and lengthy lists of prohibitions. Nissim Ezekiel had a guffaw at these in his poem, Irani Restaurant Instructions. 

Gustad, the owner of Girgaum’s Cafe De La Paix, just down the road from the Royal Opera House in south Mumbai, began coming here to help his parents run the restaurant during his school days and, when he grew up, he opted to stay put. The third generation restauranteur of the 90-year-old establishment focused on the cafe over marriage or a corporate job. He calls himself “socially defunct” and is at peace sitting behind the counter, largely forgotten except in the Instagram reels of social media influencers.

He has tried to reinvent his workplace as an adda of ideas and artistes—the cafe at Prithvi Theatre is his dream—but it is hard to go beyond the occasional events hosted here. Coming up is a journalling workshop and a trivia event. The collection of books he meticulously put together for customers lies largely ignored in one corner. “People don’t want to read actually,” he says. Gustav is articulate and philosophical—and doesn’t want me to tell you more of his story.

His is one of the 25 or so Irani restaurants that still hold valiantly onto the egalitarian bun maska past of a city that flirts with everything from tapas to tapioca. “My sense is that people like us go to these cafes to get a glimpse of an imagined Mumbai past,” says Naresh Fernandes, editor of Scroll and author of City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay. 

Fernandes says he’s amused when restaurateurs recreate the “fantasy Irani” such as AD Singh’s SodaBottleOpenerWala chain or UK chain Dishoom, that doffs its hat to the Irani cafes that made Mumbai “more welcoming, more cosmopolitan”. Fernandes also recalls the many “Irani-like” city restaurants that recreated the vibe of the original with a more mainstream Chinese-Mughlai menu.

They inspired writers, painters and poets and even today any critique of Irani restaurants, like the one I read recently, still results in a show of support for them. The Instagram post I saw criticised one of Mumbai’s most successful Irani restaurants, Leopold Cafe, and complained that the servers at the south Mumbai landmark that was one of the targets of the 2008 attacks in the city, interacted differently with tourists and locals.  

“The staff’s behaviour towards me, an Indian, was nothing short of appalling,” the popular user who goes under the name of @andheriwestshitposting wrote. “While they showered a foreign couple nearby with smiles and attentive service, I was treated with indifference and even rudeness. Where is the equality in that?” 

Those who replied in the comments agreed on certain points. That Leopold was overpriced and served middling food. That the food was more authentic across the road at Olympia, another Irani restaurant. That social media influencers had contributed to keeping alive the popularity of Irani restaurants which were largely living on past glory. That Indians have a legendary reputation for discriminating against their own. How much of this is a display of our inherent racism and casteism and how much it is about the way we behave when we eat out and travel is a topic for another column. 

The culture of brusque servers is prevalent across Irani restaurants (many regard that as a USP, if you ask me). The server at one such restaurant recently refused to let me sit at the boss’ table (one of the regular tables in the restaurant) while I waited to interview him. Under the Instagram post, some people spoke about exceptions such as Gustad, which is why I went to meet him.

Most articles about Irani restaurants talk about a world where time has stood still. Only those running the business and the grandfather clock that has kept time for three generations over the last century know how much things have changed. The Polish Bentwood chairs, marble-topped tables and wooden shelves lining the space may have been around for 100 years but the regulars you could once set your clock to, who ordered the same thing every time they visited, now exist only in memories. To renovate and revamp menus for higher margins can often backfire—Leopold’s is one of the few that switched gears successfully. It is also one of the few Iranis that got an alcohol licence. 

Over the decades, the neighbourhoods around most of the cafes fell away dramatically. Kayani and Sassanian, both in south Mumbai’s Dhobi Talao area, once buzzed with moviegoers from the throbbing art deco cinemas nearby and with Goan migrants who lived in residential clubs in the neighbourhood. Now the theatres serve frothy coffee, Hindi films don’t have splashy premiere shows and those residential clubs no longer exist. The diamond businesses that were once Cafe De La Paix’s staple customers moved to the suburbs and unlike his father, Gustad doesn’t know the neighbours—mostly retailers of automobile accessories. Most importantly, the next generation doesn’t want in on this business. This is likely the last generation of restaurateurs who are keeping alive our link to a different world.

“It’s a spartan living and you have to meet your expenses,” Gustad says. Near him is a fridge stocked with Rogers Raspberry Soda, launched by Henry Rogers who likely set up western India’s first aerated water factory in the 1800s. In the time Gustad and I talk, there are no customers for it or for anything.

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of NDTV Profit or its editorial team.