Dishoom

Beautiful restaurants, happy and engaged teams, evangelical customers and queues around the block… There was certainly nothing broken at Dishoom, but the Babu House team was keen to run a review of the all-day menu to identify ways to improve it even further.

One thing we learnt early on was that it’s not a numbers game at Dishoom – ‘big-hearted hospitality’ beats GP every time – so our goals for this review were more qualitative than on other projects: deepening the connection with the brand, strengthening the proposition and user experience, and keeping customers happy and excited by what the restaurants offer. They wanted to move slowly and cautiously, looking for little wins without rocking a perfectly steady ship.

The science behind the menu was really important to Dishoom. Were they making good decisions on its evolution, or could it serve customers better? We started, as always, with research, gathering feedback from customers and restaurant teams, plus sales figures and customer psychology, before analysing the data and presenting a series of recommendations to the Babu House team.

The team then decided which of our recommendations they wanted to take forward, and amended the restaurant menus to test a handful of hypotheses over a set period. We reported back on the sales figures on a monthly basis, before a final presentation with recommendations on which changes to implement on the menus.

The tests in A/W 19-20 generated some great results – simple recommendations like making the cocktail menu’s section headers clearer, for example, has made ordering easier for customers and increased cocktail orders.

Learning how to make informed menu changes independently was super important to the team at Dishoom. We coached them through the process as we went along so they can take their menu testing in house from now on.