Cafe Spice Namaste closes after three decades in London

Cyrus and Pervin Todiwala have closed Cafe Spice Namaste, their Parsi-Indian restaurant in London's Royal Docks, describing it as a step ahead of a "new venture."

A statement on the restaurant's website calls the closure "for now" and the start of a "fresh, exciting new chapter," without naming what comes next. The couple has asked guests to follow its social media accounts for updates.

Cyrus Todiwala was head chef at Namaste on Alie Street in the early 1990s before joining restaurateur Michael Gottlieb in 1995 as executive chef and partner at a new restaurant, Cafe Spice Namaste, inside a Grade II-listed former magistrates' court on Prescot Street in Whitechapel. Cyrus and Pervin became sole owners in 2005, and the restaurant held a Michelin Bib Gourmand continuously from the award's creation in 1998.

Three decades of Parsi cooking in London, paused rather than ended.

A Parsi menu that outlasted one postcode

The kitchen built its reputation on dishes rarely found on other London Indian menus: Goan prawn curry with unpolished red rice, smoked cured duck breast, and Parsee lamb dhaansaak, the slow-cooked lentil-and-meat dish traditionally served at Sunday lunch in Parsi households. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, the restaurant left Whitechapel for a new site at Royal Albert Wharf in the Royal Docks.

Cafe Spice Namaste built a following well beyond curry-house regulars: political lunches, food-writer retrospectives, and a reputation, in a city with hundreds of Indian restaurants, for cooking a cuisine — Parsi — that almost none of its competitors served at all. It is the latest long-running London kitchen to fold into something else rather than simply shut, a path also taken recently by Gobind Chona's expansion of Oorja into a second site.

What the Todiwalas haven't said yet

Neither the restaurant's statement nor the Todiwalas have specified a timeline, a location or a cuisine for the next venture. For a chef who has spent three decades arguing that Parsi food deserved a fixed address in London, the open-endedness is itself a message: Cafe Spice Namaste is pausing, not disappearing.