The Sethi siblings on their growing London restaurant empire

As they get set to open in their most ambitious location yet, Frankie McCoy learns the secrets of their success...

22 March 2018

A late February snowstorm is battering Marylebone but inside Trishna on Blandford Street, Karam Sethi has just handed me a mango shandy and I’ve perked up.

It’s a delightfully boozy Innocent smoothie of a cocktail, beer blending creamily with fermented mango juice and ginger. This drink is representative of the Sethi siblings’ restaurant empire: familiar enough for mass appeal, yet unique enough to enchant London’s proudest food snobs. From Bubbledogs to Bao, Gymkhana to Hoppers, every restaurant that Jyotin, 38; Karam, 34; and Sunaina Sethi, 30, touch turns to gold. And they’ve touched a lot. Their restaurant empire is vast and about to get vaster with the mango shandy-serving Brigadiers, a huge Indian barbecue pub-restaurant with bar, pool room, private dining rooms and, er, shoeshine opening in the Bloomberg Arcade in May.

So the Sethis are busy people. Their PR (from one of the three PR companies employed to guarantee Brigadiers’ successful opening) warned of the difficulty of getting all the siblings in a room together. Even though we’ve managed it, Karam — the younger chef prodigy brother — takes calls between photos. During our interview, both he and Jyotin — the older ex-banker brother in charge of the ‘boring stuff’ — tap away on their phones whenever someone else answers a question.

Only Sunaina, the sommelier sister about to go on maternity leave, is serene. Even conversation is a well-oiled machine, articulate north London confidence gliding from one to another without overlap or interruptions. Do they have family tiffs? Jyotin: ‘You come to a resolution quicker being siblings. If you’re discussing something to do with the business you just fight about it and reach a decision much faster.’ Karam: ‘Between the three of us there are no politics.’ Sunaina: ‘And there’s no tip-toeing around anything.’ Back to Jyotin: ‘You tell it as it is. That’s the most straightforward thing about it.’

Taste of Hoppers: it's all on the menu

Restaurants weren’t exactly what the Sethi parents had in mind for their kids. Theirs was a solidly privileged middle-class upbringing in Finchley, with the boys attending the £19k a year independent Haberdashers’ Aske’s (alumni include Sacha Baron Cohen, David Baddiel and food critic Jay Rayner). But while Jyotin followed the Cambridge uni-banking career path and Sunaina was finishing her business degree at Nottingham, Karam had different ideas. When he was 23, he flew to Mumbai to strike a ‘brand agreement’ with the owner of Trishna — a celebrity hotspot of a seafood restaurant, beloved by Bollywood stars and heads of state — whereby Karam could use its name while owning the London restaurant 100 per cent. A year later he opened Trishna in Marylebone.

How did a 24-year-old with minimal restaurant experience — a gap year working at the Sheraton in Delhi, a short stint at Mayfair’s swish Zuma — convince backers to fund his first restaurant? Thank goodness for family fortunes. His dad, a chartered accountant from Delhi, and Jyotin, by then a venture capitalist at Barclays, took a leap of faith to back the prodigal son’s dream. ‘Karam was single-minded; he wasn’t going to follow in the usual, well-behaved Indian kids’ path of banking and finance or law,’ smiles Jyotin. ‘He decided he wanted to do that and nothing else and convinced himself that he was backable.’

What might have been a vanity project, bailed out by indulgent relatives until it quietly shut down, turned out to be a huge success thanks to Karam’s gastronomic wizardry. After initial mixed reviews, Karam took over the kitchen from his head chef in 2010; within two years his guinea fowl tikka and duck seekh kebabs — ‘not toned down for the European pallet, not Anglicised’ — had gained Trishna a Michelin star. At this point Jyotin left Barclays to join his siblings full-time and supervise the finances; Sunaina had been working front of house at Trishna for two years on a summer job which never ended, her graduation from Nottingham University having coincided with the existing GM leaving. ‘I didn’t see it as long-term!’ she laughs. ‘I definitely didn’t want to go into banking but then after a few days here...’ She sailed through her sommelier exams and is now in charge of drinks across the Sethis’ own-brand restaurants.

So far, so family-run Indian joint, albeit with some clout from Michelin’s little red book. But Gymkhana’s opening in 2013 propelled the Sethis to restaurant royalty. A Raj-themed restaurant in Mayfair named for the gentlemen’s sports clubs in India, critics from Fay Maschler to Giles Coren spontaneously combusted over Karam’s wild muntjac biryani and duck egg bhurji with lobster and Sunaina’s snappy wine list. Within nine months it had been voted the UK’s best restaurant and nabbed a Michelin star.

Since then, any pie containing the Sethi fingers has been an instant hit. When they opened the casual, no reservation Sri Lankan restaurant Hoppers in 2015, it was impossible to get a table without queuing for two hours — it still is, two years on. And in between opening cult Indian restaurants, they were using profits to invest in some of London’s most exciting places to eat: Bubbledogs, the Fitzrovia hotdog and champagne restaurant, which is located in front of chef James Knappett’s Michelin-starred Kitchen Table; and Lyle’s (the Shoreditch modern British restaurant that sits at number 54 in the World’s Best). They also had the foresight to back three design students serving Taiwanese steamed buns in a Hackney car park; when the first Bao restaurant opened in 2015, Soho ground to a halt as clamouring queues choked Lexington Street. A second Bao and a posher sister restaurant XU followed, although they were no easier to get into, as did a second — bookable, and permanently full — Hoppers. Their most recent conquest is Sabor, currently crammed with London’s food scenesters knocking back vermouth and octopus empanadas and providing free advertising with their Instagram snaps.

Who needs one, let alone three, PR companies when cult dishes such as the namesake pork-filled steamed bun at Bao or the egg string hopper at Hoppers create such social media furore? Karam insists this isn’t deliberate — dishes ‘naturally become a cult, we don’t think about it’ — but easily namechecks the Brigadiers’ dishes that will shortly be dominating our social feeds: ‘whole suckling lamb biryani, the tandoori dry masala rib-eye, the tandoori club sandwich’ — the same blend of familiar, exotic and wholly enticing that London laps up. When Sunaina suggests Persian as the next cuisine to hit the mainstream, you know it’s time to start spell-checking your #khoresh and #koftas.

Not that the Sethis’ fan club is just twenty-something Instagrammers searching for a cheap bite to rack up likes. Gymkhana, where a pork vindaloo costs £22 and the average spend is £80 a head, is booked up weeks in advance for dinner — often by A-list fans like David Beckham and Ben Affleck. Ed Sheeran is a regular, visiting twice in a week for his birthday and after the Brits in February (he’s apparently a fan of the chicken butter masala).

Even with Sheeran’s seal of approval, surely opening a new 170-cover restaurant, entirely self-funded, in the middle of the City — where trade is notoriously quiet at weekends — must have them waking in a cold sweat at night? ‘We opened Trishna in 2008, in the middle of the Lehman Brothers going bust and the financial crisis,’ Jyotin shrugs. ‘Everybody said to us what the hell are you doing backing or opening a restaurant at that time. Every restaurant we open we’re anxious because you never know how it’s going to go but we’ll nail it if we’ve got good service and drinks. All you can focus on is that there are enough people in London who eat out.’ And Brigadiers really will provide everything to everyone. ‘You can go in for a pint and a paratha roll and spend 10 quid, or you can have the private room and spend £150 per head.’ It helps, perhaps, that rent at Bloomberg Arcade has been waived for most restaurants for the first 12 to 18 months, prioritising the right mix of vendors above profit.

Their point of difference, reckons Jyotin, is precisely that. ‘People now are fussy and demanding and have so much choice: they want different. Byron, Prezzo and Jamie’s… those guys had their time, they’re probably still good businesses in their way but not at the scale they ended up being. People want to go to the second Hoppers for something different from the first Hoppers,’ he points out. ‘We would never open 300 Baos and when we do open more, we will always innovate. Cut and paste just isn’t the way that we operate.’

Like the Sethi sibling unit, Brigadiers will be a slick operation designed to optimise service. I’m shot down when I suggest the novel whisky vending machines (self-service with a credit-loaded card, with glasses and ice below) and the ‘bottoms up’ beer taps that use magnets to fill your glass from the bottom, rather than the top, might be a gimmick. ‘The biggest thing in the City is how quickly can you get your drink. Bars are normally 10-15 deep,’ says Karam. These taps enable a six second pour. ‘So it just means if that room orders 16 pints, you’re not going to be waiting an hour or half an hour to get one, it’s there in 10 seconds. Absolutely no gimmick at all.’ All efficiency, no gimmick and the full force of Instagram behind you: that’s the Sethi recipe for success.

(brigadierslondon.com)

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