The City’s hot new curry pub
New gastro pub from the Gymkhana people is set to be all the Raj
First there was Trishna in Marylebone (Michelin star in 2012), then came Gymkhana in Mayfair (voted Britain’s best restaurant in 2014), followed by Hoppers in Soho (two-hour queues when it opened in 2015).
This month, the family behind Britain’s best Indian restaurants — brothers Jyotin and Karam Sethi, and sister Sunaina — launches Brigadiers, an Indian barbecue restaurant and upscale pub, at Bank in the City of London. Inspired by colonial army mess bars where off-duty soldiers went to unwind, there will be pool tables, on-demand live sport, beer and food spanning nuts, crisps and paratha rolls to whole roast suckling lamb biryani for around £60 per head.
“Our grandfather was a Brigadier in the 4th Gurkha Rifles Regiment,” Karam Sethi tells Esquire. “We’ve channelled this experience of the mess taverns across the seven rooms in Brigadiers. It’s as much about the drinks as it is the food: beer and whisky. We worked with Derbyshire’s Thornbridge Brewery to create a session pale ale called 4th Rifles.”
There will also be two cocktails — on tap. “A nitroespresso martini, served like a milky stout, and a caskhandled Buffalo Trace Old Fashioned. The Pool Room is going to have a fine whisky vending machine,” he says. “It’s going to be a lot of fun.”
At Brigadiers, you can pop in for pint and a snack and spend a tenner, or hire the private dining room and spend considerably more. “Brigadiers is going to be somewhere for all people and all events, which is an approach that’s completely new for us,” Karam says.
Then again: beer, sport, curry — it’s a no-brainer, right? “We’re quietly confident it’s going to be received well.” Yup, us too.