Night at the Bombay Roxy, Dishoom Kensington, review: 'a delicious night out'

An immersive Indian noir launches a new Dishoom restaurant, and while the show may be less memorable than the food, the evening adds up to more than the sum of its parts

Vikash Bhai in Night at the Bombay Roxy (Helen Maybanks)

This is something of a first: a new restaurant launching with its own themed immersive theatre show. It’s a neat fit: branches of Dishoom, the London chain of massively popular curry restaurants, are always given a character and backstory that helps inform their design. Here, that’s taken a step further, with the fictional owner Cyrus Irani, and his brushes with corrupt Indian police, brought to life around diners as we eat. It makes for a hugely enjoyable evening – even if the food may be more memorable than the plot.

The restaurant is housed in the Art Deco Barkers building, and so the restaurant gorgeously recreates a Bombay Art Deco building of the 1940s, all curved glass and vintage brass. The story goes that Irani, a petty criminal nonetheless unjustly banged up for crimes he didn’t commit, is now out and trying to make a fresh start by opening a restaurant-cum-nightclub, serving up hot curry and hotter jazz. But the police are still on his tail, there’s an escaped criminal on the loose, and his wife, who sings jazz to customers, might also be singing to the police…

The pleasing thing here is that this is no flimsy pop-up: the restaurant itself is sumptuously designed, and these guys know exactly what they’re doing when it comes to serving up a generous, gut-stretching three courses of delicious Bombay dishes. A tight band may make chatting over your black dahl a slight challenge, but they leave the joint jumping.

The show itself, created by Swamp Studios adapting Naresh Fernandes’s novel Taj Mahal Foxtrot, isn’t equivalently sure-footed, however. The action takes place between courses, with the audience occasionally split up, given tasks or taken off into other rooms. Piecing together who might be double-crossing who with your dinner date is all part of the fun. But the total action must be less than an hour and, fragmented throughout the evening, doesn’t allow much time for character development or investment.

Vikash Bhai plays Irani as an appropriately charming rogue, and there are nice little bits of audience interaction while we chow. But within the main thrust of the story, there’s some pretty 2D characterisation, especially in the bristling, boo-hiss bad cops. The show flirts with being full-blown Noir pastiche, but never quite commits; director Eduard Lewis could do with leaping one way or the other.

And while there’s some spicy mid-dinner commotion – who doesn’t enjoy rubbernecking at breaking glass and brawling over tables? – the atmosphere is a bit bright: danger is cartoonish, and there’s not much sense of a seedy underbelly. This “Indian noir” is more soft-centred than hard-boiled.

As an experience, however, it adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It feels absolutely right to spread out eating such food luxuriously across an evening, as a narrative slowly unfurls, and if the theatrical elements are hardly going to win a Pulitzer, it is all entertaining stuff. Night at the Bombay Roxy makes for a happy marriage of venue and story, where one genuinely enhances the other, coming together to form a delicious night out.

‘Night at the Bombay Roxy’ is at Dishoom Kensington till 14 December