Dishoom Leeds opened on 14 August at 68–78 Vicar Lane, its interior built around the fictional Café Flamingo and the residential Art Deco of late 1950s and early 1960s Bombay — specifically the apartment buildings of Marine Drive and The Oval.

Edinburgh-based design studio Macaulay Sinclair, which conceived the project, grounded the restaurant in an invented narrative that begins with a real event. On 14 April 1944, the SS Fort Stikine exploded in Bombay's docks while secretly carrying gold bullion and explosives. In Dishoom's imagined backstory, Café Flamingo's owner Samir unwittingly becomes entangled in a plot to steal the gold. After the explosion scatters gold across the city, Samir finds gold bars in the rubble of his café and uses the fortune to finance its transformation.

That story sent the design team to Bombay for extensive research, focused on the everyday expressions of the period's emerging modernism in the residential buildings along Marine Drive and The Oval.

Ian Roome, director at Macaulay Sinclair, said: 'The story gave us a really specific world to explore. Café Flamingo sits at the base of this modern apartment building overlooking Back Bay, so we spent a lot of time looking at the residential architecture of Marine Drive and The Oval and the details that give those buildings their particular character. A lot of what you see in the restaurant came directly from time spent in Bombay, exploring and documenting those buildings and sourcing original pieces. We're never looking to recreate a historic interior. The research gives us an architectural and material language to work with, which we can then reinterpret throughout the space.'

Palettes, patterns and provenance

At street level, the restaurant presents a gloss pink timber shopfront with a curved glazed entrance. The ground-floor bar combines pink marble, fluted detailing and polished sapele panelling.

The design references specific structures documented during the research trips. A painted geometric pattern wrapped around the staircase and ground-floor columns derives from a decorative motif on the facade of Shiv Shanti Bhavan on The Oval. The connecting staircase incorporates custom metalwork based on the balustrades at Court View. The timber panelling takes its cue from the family room of Regal Restaurant & Bakery, a 1930s Irani café.

On the first floor, tall arched windows frame the dining space across three elevations, with leaded stained-glass screens informed by window grilles at Court View. The first-floor bar pairs green marble and timber beneath a canopy carrying inlaid marquetry based on geometric patterns from Rajjab Mahal.

Forty pieces sourced from Bombay

To anchor the interior in authenticity, Macaulay Sinclair sourced and restored more than 40 original vintage furniture and lighting pieces directly from Bombay. These antiques sit alongside reclaimed mahogany, geometric terrazzo flooring, handmade rattan blinds and vintage bentwood chairs.

Shamil Thakrar, chief executive of Dishoom, said: 'What makes our long-standing partnership with Macaulay Sinclair so special is their ability to take our whimsical stories, research them deeply and turn them into beautiful spaces that speak our narratives. For Leeds, they've distilled the architecture, textures and everyday Deco details of Bombay's Oval and Marine Drive into a space that feels breezy, soulful and beautifully lived-in.'

The Leeds site extends a partnership between the restaurant group and the studio that has now produced several narrative-driven interiors, each built on months of primary research rather than pastiche. For Macaulay Sinclair, the project demonstrates how a documented architectural language — down to a single facade motif — can carry a fictional story into built form.