Bulbul brings micro-regional Indian cooking to London
Twinkle Keswani and Rohan Dsouza spent two years travelling India's home kitchens before opening a basement restaurant near Blackfriars.
Bulbul, a new micro-regional Indian restaurant from Twinkle Keswani and Rohan Dsouza, has opened in a basement site a few minutes' walk from Blackfriars station in central London.
The pitch is specific: not a single national cuisine, but dishes traced to particular states, communities and even towns. Keswani and Dsouza spent two years travelling across India, visiting home kitchens and markets, before drawing up the menu.
Six regions on one menu
We're trying to bring true micro-regional Indian food to London.
Smaller plates include bohri lamb kheema with truffle butter pao, a Gujarati Muslim community dish, and a Tamil Nadu forest pepper crab dosa served with coconut chutney and gunpowder spice mix. Larger dishes run to Vasco da Gama pork sorpotel, a Goan Catholic recipe, with crackling and fermented Goan rice cakes, and Mewari laal maas, a Rajasthani mutton curry built on Mathania chillies. A South Indian-style, short-grain biryani closes out the mains. London has seen a wave of single-region Indian openings this year, including Gobind Chona’s second Oorja in Marylebone.
Most mains sit just under £30, in line with the wider rise in London fine-dining pricing this year.
The restaurant keeps a research and development chef based in India, who sources lesser-known regional dishes and trains the London kitchen on technique. UK staff travel to India quarterly to keep the menu current rather than static.
“We’re trying to bring true micro-regional Indian food to London,” Keswani said of the concept.
A basement built for the long haul
The dining room is low-lit and deliberately opulent: rust and burgundy tones, dark wood, patterned carpets, animal prints and softly lit ceiling panels replace the pared-back look common to recent London openings.
That look was not cheap. “It’s the fit-out that costs at least four times as much,” Keswani said, pointing to the gap between a basic build-out and a room meant to hold its own against the capital's established Indian dining rooms.
The team has already introduced itself to most of the roughly 500 offices within a ten-minute walk, betting on a weekday lunch and after-work crowd to carry the basement through its first winter.
