the dying irani cafes of mumbai (2026)

tldr: mumbai once had over 350 irani cafes. in 2026, fewer than 25 survive. this is the story of how an entire food culture is disappearing - the zoroastrian families who built them, the bentwood chairs and checkered floors that defined them, the bun maska and kheema pav that made them legendary, and why the next generation is choosing to close rather than continue. if you care about mumbai’s food history, read this. then go eat at one before it’s too late.

there’s a particular kind of silence in an irani cafe at 3 pm on a weekday. the bentwood chairs creak when nobody’s sitting in them. the mirrors on the walls - some cracked, most cloudy - reflect a room that looks exactly the way it did in 1953. the guy behind the counter, usually third generation, isn’t on his phone. he’s just there. staring at a door that opens less and less frequently with each passing year.

i grew up around these cafes. not as a regular - i was too young for that - but as a kid dragged along by adults who treated their morning chai at the local irani as a non-negotiable constitutional right. the cafe wasn’t a choice. it was infrastructure. like the local train. like the bmc tap water. you didn’t think about it. it was just there.

except now it isn’t. or won’t be, soon.

if you’re looking for street food in mumbai, i have a separate guide for that. this one is different. this is an obituary written while the patient is still breathing.

the history nobody teaches you

the story of irani cafes begins not in mumbai, but in iran. specifically in the qajar dynasty era of the late 19th and early 20th century, when zoroastrian persecution in iran pushed thousands of iranians to emigrate. many ended up in british india, particularly in bombay and pune, following the path carved out centuries earlier by the parsis (who had fled iran a thousand years before).

these newer immigrants - called iranis to distinguish them from the older parsi community - needed a livelihood. many gravitated toward what they knew: tea, bread, and hospitality. the irani cafe format was born out of economic necessity. low startup costs. simple menu. high foot traffic locations near railway stations and busy intersections. the formula worked.

by the 1950s and 60s, mumbai had over 350 irani cafes. they were everywhere. every major railway station had at least two within walking distance. every neighborhood had its own. they served as the living rooms of a city where actual living rooms were too small to host anyone. business deals were struck over kheema pav. heartbreaks were nursed with brun maska. political arguments that should have ended marriages somehow didn’t, because the chai kept coming.

the cafes had rules. famously arbitrary, occasionally hostile rules. “do not comb hair here.” “do not sit long if you have no work.” “children will be charged full price.” these signs, hand-painted in english that was technically correct but spiritually unhinged, became as iconic as the food itself.

the anatomy of an irani cafe

every irani cafe in mumbai follows roughly the same template, and this uniformity is part of the point. walk into one and you could be in any decade from the 1940s onward.

the furniture. bentwood chairs, usually thonet-style, painted and repainted so many times the curves are soft with layers. burma teak tables, scratched to the point where the scratches have become the aesthetic. the good cafes never tried to replace these. cafe de la paix in girgaon still has its original painted wood chairs from the 1930s, and the owner told me directly - they’ve never tried to change the decor because “it’s beautiful on its own.” he’s right.

the mirrors. large, sometimes floor-to-ceiling, always slightly foxed with age. these weren’t decorative choices. they made small spaces look larger. and they gave every customer the ability to watch the entire room without turning their head. in a city of gossip, this was essential technology.

the counter. glass display cases with mawa cakes, shrewsbury biscuits, khari biscuits, and sometimes a lonely slice of plum cake that has been there since before you were born. the cash register behind it is either a mechanical antique or a remarkably old electronic one. there’s no pos system. there’s no qr code.

the kitchen. small, visible (or at least audible), and run by two to four people who can produce an astonishing range of food from a space smaller than your bathroom. the irani cafe kitchen is a masterclass in constraint-based cooking.

what they serve (and why it matters)

the irani cafe menu is not large. this is deliberate. these aren’t restaurants trying to impress you with 14 pages of options. they’re cafes with a focused repertoire.

the chai

irani chai is not regular chai. it’s brewed differently - the tea is made with more milk, sometimes with malai, and has a distinctive color and sweetness that regular tapri chai can’t replicate. every cafe has its own ratio, its own timing, its own idiosyncrasy. the chai at kyani & co tastes different from the chai at britannia, which tastes different from the chai at cafe de la paix. these aren’t branding exercises. these are 80-year-old recipes that nobody wrote down and everyone memorized.

a glass of irani chai runs rs 25-40 depending on the cafe. it’s the cheapest therapy in mumbai.

bun maska

the irani bun is not a pav. it’s denser, slightly sweet, with a particular crumb that comes from a specific dough recipe. sliced open, smeared with an absurd amount of cold butter (maska), and served alongside your chai. this is breakfast. this is a 4 pm snack. this is what you eat when you’re heartbroken at 11 pm and the cafe near your house is still somehow open. rs 30-50 depending on the cafe and the year.

kheema pav

minced mutton cooked with onions, tomatoes, green chilies, and a masala that varies by family. served with fresh pav. this is where irani cafes cross from “tea shop” into “restaurant” territory. a good kheema pav at an irani cafe is different from kheema you get anywhere else. the masala is simpler. the meat is not drowned in gravy. it’s drier, more concentrated, more direct. rs 80-150 for a plate.

salli boti

mutton cooked in a sweet-sour masala - tomatoes, jaggery, vinegar - topped with crispy potato sticks (salli). this is a parsi-irani dish that you won’t find at your average mumbai restaurant. the combination of tender meat, tangy gravy, and crunchy salli is one of the great textural experiences in indian food. rs 150-250.

the bakery items

mawa cake (rs 30-50), shrewsbury biscuits (rs 60-80 per box), khari biscuits (rs 40-60), and if you’re lucky, an apple pie that tastes like 1972 in the best way.

the cafes that remain

here’s an incomplete list of irani cafes still operating in mumbai as of early 2026. i say incomplete because by the time you read this, one more might have closed.

cafe de la paix: a case study in survival

the name is french. the food is parsi-irani. the location is girgaon, facing opera house. the cafe has been running since approximately 1936-37, which makes it nearly 90 years old.

the owner told me the story of the name himself. “in paris there is a cafe de la paix that faces the opera house. we also face opera house. so please, the name should be cafe de la paix.” i’m not making this up. a zoroastrian immigrant in 1930s bombay named his cafe after a parisian institution because both faced an opera house. this is the kind of delirious confidence that built mumbai.

the decor has never been changed. the painted bentwood chairs, the burma teak, the old mirrors - all original. the current generation running it learned the recipes from the previous generation, who learned from the one before. no cookbooks. no culinary school training. just decades of watching, tasting, adjusting.

their kheema pav is excellent. mutton kheema, spiced with a garam masala that leans warm rather than hot, with a tanginess from tomatoes. the pav is fresh, served hot. rs 100-120 for a plate. their salli boti uses a masala that’s sweet and sour - jaggery and tomato doing the heavy lifting - with potato salli on top that shatters when you bite through it. 8/10 for the kheema. 8.5/10 for the salli boti.

the kolmi no patio (parsi prawn patio) is unusual for an irani cafe and worth ordering if you want something different. tangy, with a sweetness from onion and tomato that balances the spice. the parsi-irani influence on this dish is unmistakable - it’s not like any other prawn curry you’ll eat in mumbai.

what to order: mutton kheema pav, salli boti, kolmi no patio, chai

verdict: this is what an irani cafe is supposed to be. 8.5/10 overall.

britannia & co: the most famous one still standing

everyone knows britannia. it’s in every “places to eat in mumbai” list. the berry pulao - basmati rice cooked with barberries imported from iran - is the signature. it’s served with salli boti or dhansak and the combination is legitimately one of the great meals in mumbai.

boman kohinoor, the legendary owner who ran britannia for decades and became a cultural icon in his own right, passed away in 2021 at the age of 97. his son now runs the restaurant. the berry pulao is still made the same way. the barberries still come from iran, though the supply chain has become increasingly difficult.

a meal at britannia runs rs 400-700 for two depending on what you order. the berry pulao with salli boti is rs 350-400 a plate. it’s more expensive than other irani cafes because britannia has become a destination. tourists come here. food writers come here. it’s on the map in a way that most irani cafes never were.

the question is whether fame is enough to keep a place alive when the economics of south mumbai real estate are stacked against it. the ballard estate location is prime commercial property. the rent math doesn’t work for a restaurant serving rs 35 chai. it works only because the family owns the space, and because they’ve chosen this over redevelopment.

my rating: 8/10 for food, 9/10 for cultural significance

why they’re dying

the math is simple and brutal.

real estate. most irani cafes are in south mumbai - fort, girgaon, marine lines, colaba. these are among the most expensive commercial real estate zones in india. a cafe occupying 500 sq ft in fort is sitting on property worth crores. the annual revenue from selling rs 30 chai and rs 100 kheema pav doesn’t justify that land value. not even close.

the next generation. the iranian-zoroastrian families who started these cafes in the 1920s-50s are now in their third or fourth generation. the grandchildren and great-grandchildren have engineering degrees, mba programs, careers in tech and finance. running a cafe that earns rs 50,000-80,000 a month in profit while sitting on property worth rs 5-15 crore is not a rational economic decision. it’s a sentimental one. and sentiment has a shelf life.

redevelopment. mumbai’s redevelopment boom has swallowed entire neighborhoods. old buildings that housed irani cafes on the ground floor get torn down for new towers. the cafe doesn’t get a spot in the new building. the family takes the buyout and moves on.

demographics. the parsi-irani community in mumbai is shrinking. birth rates have been below replacement for decades. the customer base that treats an irani cafe as a cultural necessity rather than a novelty is getting smaller every year.

changing tastes. younger mumbai wants third-wave coffee shops with oat milk and sourdough. they want instagrammable interiors and craft cocktails. the bentwood chairs and foxed mirrors that i find beautiful, a 22-year-old finds depressing. this is not a judgment. it’s a demographic reality.

what we lose when they close

this is the part that’s hard to write.

when an irani cafe closes, you don’t just lose a restaurant. you lose a living room. you lose a place where an 80-year-old man has been having his morning chai for 55 years. you lose the recipe for that specific kheema pav that the family never wrote down. you lose the hand-painted sign that says “do not bring outside food here.” you lose the bentwood chairs that have supported a hundred thousand conversations. you lose a particular silence - the silence of a room that has heard everything and judges nothing.

you lose the physical evidence that mumbai was once a city of immigrants from everywhere - iran, gujarat, maharashtra, kerala, goa - and they all somehow figured out how to share the same neighborhood. the irani cafe was proof that this coexistence wasn’t just tolerated. it was delicious.

mumbai without irani cafes is still mumbai. but it’s a mumbai that has forgotten something about itself.

mumbai irani cafe tips

• go on a weekday morning if you want the real experience. weekends after 11 am are tourist hours at the famous ones.
• cash is still king at most irani cafes. some have started accepting upi, but don’t rely on it.
• the chai is non-negotiable. even if you’re not a chai person, order one. the irani chai recipe is different from anything else in the city.
• don’t photograph the owners without asking. they’ve been photographed by every food blogger in mumbai. some are tired of it. some love it. ask first.
• if a cafe is empty at peak hours, it might be closing soon. eat there. tip well.
• the best time to visit is between 8-10 am or 4-6 pm. lunch hour is for the office crowd and feels different.
• if you’re visiting only one, make it kyani & co or cafe de la paix. britannia is more famous but also more touristy.

if you found this useful, check out these other mumbai guides:

• best street food in mumbai
• mumbai food guide