About Permit Room
All-day bar cafés
About Permit Room
Permit Room: an all-day bar-café. Delicious breakfasts, seriously good bar snacks, moreish curries and plates for sharing (alongside Dishoom favourites). Cocktails! Short, boozy, twisted, glorious – to wash it down with. Dishoom’s tribute to the way Bombay kicks back and cuts loose.
Damn good, all day
A salute to the Permit Rooms of Bombay
1949. Two years after India gained Independence, the Bombay Prohibition Act was passed. All liquor in the city was banned. Bombayites – inventive, tenacious – still found ways to whet their whistle. Rigorously. Bootlegging Aunties deftly served drinks from their living rooms. ‘Aunty Bars’ soon became a riotous fixture. Moonshine guzzled.
1970s. Laws loosened up. Permit-holders could get a drink for ‘the preservation or maintenance of health’. Permit rooms were born.
2022. Bombay to Brighton. The first Dishoom Permit Room opens – breakfast, lunch, dinner, cocktails! Next Cambridge, then Oxford, now, London’s Portobello Road. Neighbourhood spots, open to all.
Charity
A Meal for a Meal
For every meal we serve, we donate a meal to a child who would otherwise go hungry. A meal for a meal. We work with two charities – Magic Breakfast in the UK and the Akshaya Patra Foundation in India – that provide nourishing, free meals to children.
A hungry child cannot concentrate. A hungry child will not absorb information. When hunger is a barrier to education, it also becomes a barrier to social mobility. A child who is not fed can become a teenager who did not learn and an adult who stays in poverty. We care about breaking down these barriers.
To-date, we’ve donated over 150,000 meals. We couldn’t have done this without you! A huge thank you for your support.
B-CORP
People, Community, Planet
Our ‘Dharma’ – reason for being – shapes everything we do. It voices what we care about: creating shared spaces where people come together, breaking down barriers, looking after our team and providing long, satisfying careers. Caring for people, community and the planet. Happily, the Dharma has led us to being B Corp certified.
We took a good look at our carbon footprint across Dishoom and Permit Room and have reduced our emissions per meal. We also support great carbon-reduction projects outside of Permit Room to remove more emissions than we produce.
There’s still work to do, but we’re ready for it.
Careers
Join our team
Let’s work together – we’re always on the lookout for great people (Front of House, Kitchen and everything in between). There are brilliant career opportunities (not to mention the perks and benefits), and we were voted ‘Best Employer’ in Casual Dining Awards, 2024.