SodaBottleOpenerWala opened in Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex earlier this month, repackaging Mumbai to itself. Serving Parsi dishes in a décor that riffs off famous Irani cafes, the restaurant represents, depending on who you ask, either the death or the rebirth of one of Mumbai’s most enduring cultural institutions.
SodaBottleOpenerWala combines Irani cafe kitsch with Parsi domestic fantasy. Adorning one large, uninterrupted wall is a floor-to-ceiling photograph of a Mumbai street scene, a weathered Irani café sign, and a tongue-in-cheek list of rules such as “No loud talking,” “No flirting,” and “No feet on chair.”
The opposite side is decorated with a quirky family tree of the fictional SodaBottleOpenerWala clan, pictures from a family album, a reproduction of a clock and another of a nineteenth-century Parsi gentleman. The space is cluttered and deliberately eccentric. A jukebox rests against a wall while a model train trundles above diners’ heads. The menu includes a wanted ad for a “1979 Parsi owned Ambassador…with fan on dashboard.”
The tables are covered in glass and checkered tablecloths. The chairs are wood with curved armrests and thin back slats. Desserts are prominently displayed in a quaint rectangular glass case to keep away non-existent flies, dust and sweat.
Tricky terrain
Opening an Irani cafe-themed restaurant in Mumbai, the city where the Irani café was invented, seems to be asking for criticism. Predictably, some reviewers have been quick to point out how SodaBottleOpenerWala is but a Disneyfied version of the original: too loud, too sterile, too air-conditioned, too expensive and overall inauthentic.
Its location in Bandra Kurla Complex, an oasis of office buildings in the heart of the city, seems to support this critique. Hiding away in this corporate enclave only to recreate the delightful verve of the streets inside its rarified space and invoking the real while simultaneously distancing itself from it.
These commentators are concerned not only about the Irani cafe, but the entire heritage of the city that these iconic landmarks represent: a heritage that is cosmopolitan, and in which migrants came together to make the hodgepodge, multilingual city of Bombay.
But in recent decades, the demise of working class culture around the erstwhile textile mills and their replacement by elite spaces of consumption, along with the cynical politicisation of religious identity – for instance in the recent beef ban and the cancelling of the Ghulam Ali concert – have sometimes made it feel like the old cosmopolitan Bombay has been lost.
From this perspective, access to the city’s cosmopolitan heritage has been restricted to carefully packaged consumer experiences. Thus, behind SodaBottleOpenerWala’s opening lie uncomfortable truths about the city itself.
An idea of the past
But is this restaurant only one more symptom of the oft-repeated story of the city’s demise? Or alternatively, might it offer a new way of seeing Mumbai’s changes? Unlike other knockoffs that dot the city – TGIF, with its hokey Americana theme, is one example that comes to mind – SodaBottleOpenerWala’s purposeful mix of kitsch and copy doesn’t try to fool its customers, but inadvertently questions the meaning of originals, fakes and authenticity in the first place.
What does a real Irani café consist of and who determines what elements make the cut? Everyone can agree on wooden chairs and checkered tablecloths, for instance, but what about surly waiters and chipped wall paint? And if we can agree on the elements that make a real Irani cafe, where did it originate and who owns it now?
Must one have a certain lineage or relationship to the city to open an Irani cafe? Go down this road and soon the embrace of the city’s heritage sounds a lot like the desire for cultural purity it was meant to contest.
Concern over the authentic Irani cafe is especially ironic considering its history— which is defined by cross-cultural borrowing, innovation and travel. Zoroastrian immigrants from Persia in the 19th century, who were struggling to eke out a living alongside their more wealthy Parsi compatriots, recreated Ottoman-style cafes throughout the city.
By the early 20th century, Irani cafés, as they become known, were rare spaces where people from different communities could mingle in public. Simin Patel, who has exhaustively documented their history, explains that each Irani cafe made small innovations, so over time the institution changed significantly.
Simple tea and brun maska were supplemented with dishes drawn from the Parsi culinary repertoire. Bastani and Co. invented the famous long list of rules. Britannia and Co. created the beloved Persian-Mughal hybrid dish, the berry pulav. Chilia Muslims from Gujarat took over the management of many of the cafes.
So it should come as no surprise that SodaBottleOpenerWala itself is a product of the travel of ideas.
Roots and routes
In 2010, a restaurant called Dishoom opened in London’s Covent Garden. Borrowing the Irani Café aesthetic, it steered clear of the exotic decor of elephants and garish colors popular in British Indian restaurants in favour of an open room filled with checked tablecloth-covered tables and wooden chairs.
The walls were adorned with prominent old-looking wooden clocks, and a ceiling fan swirled above diners as they tucked into classic Parsi breakfast items as well as new concoctions like bacon and egg naan wraps.
Dishoom’s success spawned others like it, such as MG Road, in Paris, which serves a pan-Indian menu in a spartan, light-filled room dominated by marble-topped tables. Likely inspired by the concept’s success abroad, the restaurateur AD Singh opened SodaBottleOpenerWala, an Irani Café themed restaurant serving Parsi food, in New Delhi. Following its wild success there, it arrived in Mumbai.
So SodaBottleOpenerWala, now at “home” in Mumbai, is a re-creation of a Mumbai cafe that is a 19th-century immigrant’s memory of a Persian café likely inspired by Ottoman styles borrowed heavily from the French. As cultural theorists James Clifford and Paul Gilroy write, whenever you search for roots you come up with routes instead. Far from denying this truth, SodaBottleOpenerWala seems to embrace it.
SodaBottleOpenerWala packages and sells not an original Irani Café experience, but a reinvention of it. The frothy raspberry sodas, the succulent mutton chops, and eclectic décor contribute to an experience that takes place at many sensory levels, and cannot be reduced either to a narrative of gentrification, nor of the city’s decline. It invokes the diner’s imagination without trying to determine exactly what her experience will be.
Thus, in Delhi, a diner who has never been in an Irani cafe will react differently than in Mumbai, where the delightfully grumpy Kyani & Co. might remain the paradigm. But that difference is the point. This is a new hodgepodge, and even though it looks different than the old, it makes its own claim to contest the purity of experience that many Mumbaikars feel is a perilous sign of the times.
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SodaBottleOpenerWala combines Irani cafe kitsch with Parsi domestic fantasy. Adorning one large, uninterrupted wall is a floor-to-ceiling photograph of a Mumbai street scene, a weathered Irani café sign, and a tongue-in-cheek list of rules such as “No loud talking,” “No flirting,” and “No feet on chair.”
The opposite side is decorated with a quirky family tree of the fictional SodaBottleOpenerWala clan, pictures from a family album, a reproduction of a clock and another of a nineteenth-century Parsi gentleman. The space is cluttered and deliberately eccentric. A jukebox rests against a wall while a model train trundles above diners’ heads. The menu includes a wanted ad for a “1979 Parsi owned Ambassador…with fan on dashboard.”
The tables are covered in glass and checkered tablecloths. The chairs are wood with curved armrests and thin back slats. Desserts are prominently displayed in a quaint rectangular glass case to keep away non-existent flies, dust and sweat.
Tricky terrain
Opening an Irani cafe-themed restaurant in Mumbai, the city where the Irani café was invented, seems to be asking for criticism. Predictably, some reviewers have been quick to point out how SodaBottleOpenerWala is but a Disneyfied version of the original: too loud, too sterile, too air-conditioned, too expensive and overall inauthentic.
Its location in Bandra Kurla Complex, an oasis of office buildings in the heart of the city, seems to support this critique. Hiding away in this corporate enclave only to recreate the delightful verve of the streets inside its rarified space and invoking the real while simultaneously distancing itself from it.
These commentators are concerned not only about the Irani cafe, but the entire heritage of the city that these iconic landmarks represent: a heritage that is cosmopolitan, and in which migrants came together to make the hodgepodge, multilingual city of Bombay.
But in recent decades, the demise of working class culture around the erstwhile textile mills and their replacement by elite spaces of consumption, along with the cynical politicisation of religious identity – for instance in the recent beef ban and the cancelling of the Ghulam Ali concert – have sometimes made it feel like the old cosmopolitan Bombay has been lost.
From this perspective, access to the city’s cosmopolitan heritage has been restricted to carefully packaged consumer experiences. Thus, behind SodaBottleOpenerWala’s opening lie uncomfortable truths about the city itself.
An idea of the past
But is this restaurant only one more symptom of the oft-repeated story of the city’s demise? Or alternatively, might it offer a new way of seeing Mumbai’s changes? Unlike other knockoffs that dot the city – TGIF, with its hokey Americana theme, is one example that comes to mind – SodaBottleOpenerWala’s purposeful mix of kitsch and copy doesn’t try to fool its customers, but inadvertently questions the meaning of originals, fakes and authenticity in the first place.
What does a real Irani café consist of and who determines what elements make the cut? Everyone can agree on wooden chairs and checkered tablecloths, for instance, but what about surly waiters and chipped wall paint? And if we can agree on the elements that make a real Irani cafe, where did it originate and who owns it now?
Must one have a certain lineage or relationship to the city to open an Irani cafe? Go down this road and soon the embrace of the city’s heritage sounds a lot like the desire for cultural purity it was meant to contest.
Concern over the authentic Irani cafe is especially ironic considering its history— which is defined by cross-cultural borrowing, innovation and travel. Zoroastrian immigrants from Persia in the 19th century, who were struggling to eke out a living alongside their more wealthy Parsi compatriots, recreated Ottoman-style cafes throughout the city.
By the early 20th century, Irani cafés, as they become known, were rare spaces where people from different communities could mingle in public. Simin Patel, who has exhaustively documented their history, explains that each Irani cafe made small innovations, so over time the institution changed significantly.
Simple tea and brun maska were supplemented with dishes drawn from the Parsi culinary repertoire. Bastani and Co. invented the famous long list of rules. Britannia and Co. created the beloved Persian-Mughal hybrid dish, the berry pulav. Chilia Muslims from Gujarat took over the management of many of the cafes.
So it should come as no surprise that SodaBottleOpenerWala itself is a product of the travel of ideas.
Roots and routes
In 2010, a restaurant called Dishoom opened in London’s Covent Garden. Borrowing the Irani Café aesthetic, it steered clear of the exotic decor of elephants and garish colors popular in British Indian restaurants in favour of an open room filled with checked tablecloth-covered tables and wooden chairs.
The walls were adorned with prominent old-looking wooden clocks, and a ceiling fan swirled above diners as they tucked into classic Parsi breakfast items as well as new concoctions like bacon and egg naan wraps.
Dishoom’s success spawned others like it, such as MG Road, in Paris, which serves a pan-Indian menu in a spartan, light-filled room dominated by marble-topped tables. Likely inspired by the concept’s success abroad, the restaurateur AD Singh opened SodaBottleOpenerWala, an Irani Café themed restaurant serving Parsi food, in New Delhi. Following its wild success there, it arrived in Mumbai.
So SodaBottleOpenerWala, now at “home” in Mumbai, is a re-creation of a Mumbai cafe that is a 19th-century immigrant’s memory of a Persian café likely inspired by Ottoman styles borrowed heavily from the French. As cultural theorists James Clifford and Paul Gilroy write, whenever you search for roots you come up with routes instead. Far from denying this truth, SodaBottleOpenerWala seems to embrace it.
SodaBottleOpenerWala packages and sells not an original Irani Café experience, but a reinvention of it. The frothy raspberry sodas, the succulent mutton chops, and eclectic décor contribute to an experience that takes place at many sensory levels, and cannot be reduced either to a narrative of gentrification, nor of the city’s decline. It invokes the diner’s imagination without trying to determine exactly what her experience will be.
Thus, in Delhi, a diner who has never been in an Irani cafe will react differently than in Mumbai, where the delightfully grumpy Kyani & Co. might remain the paradigm. But that difference is the point. This is a new hodgepodge, and even though it looks different than the old, it makes its own claim to contest the purity of experience that many Mumbaikars feel is a perilous sign of the times.