PASSAGE TO INDIA
London restaurant group JKS has built and backed a flurry of the capital’s favourite eateries, from Bao and Hoppers to Michelin-starred Gymkhana. Latest opening BiBi, an Indian restaurant that calls on the soulfulness of comfort food, is jostling with the latter in Mayfair.
It’s a personal affair for Chet Sharma, previously the group’s development chef, who has named his restaurant after his own grandmothers – BiBi is Urdu for ‘lady of the house’. In a former life he was an Oxford-educated physicist, and there’s a sense of precision to his menu of bar snacks, chaat small plates and sigree grill dishes, which draw on an eclectic heritage of roadside cafés and carts. While Indian flavours are centre-stage – see Lahori chicken paired with cashew and whey yogurt, or the four-pepper lobster – Britain is well represented in everything from Orkney scallops to paneer produced in the New Forest.
It is housed in a Georgian building that features richly layered interiors in mango wood and sandstone, and Rajasthani architecture has inspired details such as the curved mirrors that flank the open kitchen, while an abstract artwork by Laura Wickstead is appropriately named ‘Mother’ (bibirestaurants.com).