You may not know Kishore DF, but you’ve definitely eaten at one of his restaurants

At a time when five of the six spots that open in Mumbai every week are trying to be an izakaya, a speakeasy or a specialty all-day, ingredient-forward, technique-led, high-energy something or the other, Miss Margot brings back a description that we have not heard in almost two decades. The sexy, sophisticated laidback room is simply ‘an intimate cocktail lounge’. It’s all soft textures with deep-green walls, velvet tufted sofas, and pools of light on dark tables that make you want to speak gently. In the midst of what appears to be the Age of Maximalism in restaurant design, Miss Margot’s only flourish is its cluster of 15 crystal chandeliers. And a bookshelf. 

Most elder millennials from Mumbai will see how Miss Margot is an ode to the city’s nightlife circa 2005. Its setting evokes a time when they were starting to grow up, dress up, and slink over to stylish rooms for late-night conversations and canoodling, and to be seen at lounges anywhere between Juhu’s Rain, Aurus, and Vie, Indigo’s Black Lounge and Busaba in Colaba, and Bandra’s Seijo & The Soul Dish.

A truism about Kishore DF, the F&B veteran whose tally of restaurants and bars includes erstwhile millennial haunts like Seijo, Pot Pourri and The Big Nasty, is that all his places possess this winning combination of good food at accessible prices in an atmosphere with personality. Even so, Miss Margot, Kishore’s month-old cocktail room in Bandra, is not nostalgic but firmly set in the now. It’s a lounge for Mumbai in 2025. 

It starts with a strikingly crafted beverage programme that ticks every cocktail trend around with spirit-forward, savoury, omnivorous drinks. Miss Margot’s immensely browsable cocktail menu has an immensely sippable take on the Gibson with gin, dry vermouth, radish pickle, and crab. (It is not as funky as you’d think.) Another, called Prestige Protocol, has dry vermouth infused with sweet creamy basil and umami-laden capers, and finished with morel tincture that gets a chocolatey finish from the maceration. Alongside this drink is a little icy bowl with pickled kiwi and kumquat to snack on, for balance. The classics are there, but there are also riffs on them, such as a pina colada spun with pistachio ice cream, an Old Fashioned with toasty barley and saffron, and a Paloma with prawn-infused Aperol. 

All of these make sense when we find out that ace mixologist and beverage consultant Dimi Lezinska is a partner at Miss Margot. At the top of each of his four cocktail pages is a martini, from the classic to the adventurous. Each page is classified by an unspoken mood: celebration, appreciation, adventure, prestige. Sit with Lezinska for a drink, and he’ll chat about the ‘weight’ of the various elements and flavour compounds of the drink, and how they have been calibrated to play out much like notes in a bottle of luxury fragrance. “For me, it’s always been about the sequence of flavours on our palate,” he says. “Our philosophy is to do things with intelligence, using techniques smartly. There are no gimmicks, no theatrics.”

It’s something that spills onto chef Parth Purandare’s menu—a series of drink- and date-friendly portions that can be eaten with chopsticks, fork or fingers. Baby tomato discs with parmesan cream cheese, fermented garlic and black truffle are really fun, fresh, tarts. A billow of hummus slightly spiked with wasabi comes with grilled miso mushrooms, shiso shards, and togarashi-dusted lavache. There is silky hay-smoked salmon swirled on a pool of gentleman’s relish and citrus soy. Confit chicken wings have a smidge of buffalo sauce and grated frozen Roquefort on top, and confit duck rendang comes with peanut salad and brioche. It’s not big food, but it is sating—clean, fun, with crisp and zesty elements to it. “Miss Margot is primarily a bar, so the food is here to support that,” Purandare says. “Every [serving] is very individual, so there is no double dipping. It’s food that feels comfortable on a date, with the right amount of familiarity that challenges your perception of your dish.” 

What Miss Margot does hold on to from a vintage ago is the promise and anticipation of going somewhere for a few hours and coming away transformed by the night, a little bit more connected to the people you just spent an evening with, more enlivened than exhausted. It takes guts to open a place that chooses to be slower and quieter, somewhat against the grain in the age of Bastian on Top. But Kishore DF is not worried. Miss Margot is only the latest in a long line of restaurant and bar concepts he’s experimented with and built, each defining a specific era in Mumbai’s dining and drinking scene.

In 2005, Kishore launched Seijo & The Soul Dish, a lounge started on Waterfield Road, Mumbai, that even today—with its egg-shaped pods, film and cultural references, and manga art—would have made it to Architectural Digest. Somewhere in the middle, after lounges became ubiquitous in the city, in 2010 Kishore created WTF!, a place where young (and kind of broke) partygoers could go for a drink without breaking a fixed deposit but also without “grunging it out” at any of the city’s dive-y low-cost bars. (Drinks at WTF! Khar were about half the price of those in Bandra’s new bars then but nothing about the vibe suggested it.) 

But really, Mumbai’s story with Kishore truly began with Pot Pourri in 1994, when five-star culture was at its peak. Pot Pourri, which he launched with chef and best buddy Nitin Tandon, was cafe-like, curbside and alfresco, offering continental food and European desserts, or what Kishore calls “pasta on the street” instead of at a fancy spot like the neighbouring Shatranj Napoli. “Pot Pourri was the place to be seen at, forget eating there,” says Kishore. “If you were there, it meant you’d arrived. The culture then was different. Bollywood wasn’t as big, and the guys who ruled the roost were the agency guys, and at the top were the supermodels. Channel V and Ogilvy were right by our place, so these guys were always there.” 

After Pot Pourri had run its course, and continental food became all too ubiquitous across the city, Tandon and Kishore replaced it with another iconic eatery in 2011—Lemon Grass, a popular Asian spot that became such a landmark, it was common to tell autorickshaw drivers “Pot Pourri /Lemongrass pe turn marna hai” at the Turner Pali Road junction in Bandra. 

Here is something very, very few people in the industry today know about Kishore DF. He used to work at the Parsi-owned Burger King in Pune as a student (yes, the same spot that got sued by the multinational chain and won). He also ran a ‘very cool restaurant’ in Hong Kong’s party district, Lan Kwai Fong, before he became a restaurateur in Mumbai at 27 with Pot Pourri. After continental and Asian eateries, and iconic bars like The Bombay Bronx, The Big Nasty, and WTF!, Kishore DF started turning homeward as he approached 50. 

“This was in 2017,” he says. “Yes, I was getting older; I’d just turned 50, and in a very natural, evolving sense, I was going back home in my head. That’s what happens to human beings, right? When you’ve traversed and you’ve done all that shit, then you start to, you know, unwind. Everybody goes home. At some point, you make a U-turn.”

So, he decided to get a whole bunch of recipes from his mum, aunts, and extended family, and create Tanjore Tiffin Room (TTR), a Parisian-style room where you can have Kishore’s family staples—mutton cutlets, and rasam rice with vatha kolambu—alongside a well-crafted Enna Rascala cocktail made with Luxardo limoncello. “Making the food was the easy part. But that’s not all I wanted. I wanted my place to be like any other fucking bistro. I want French music, I want to speak in English, I want to see myself here, having a couple of cocktails and taking a break.”

Today, TTR has three outlets in Mumbai and one beautiful spot in Goa. And Miss Margot is his second homecoming in this journey.  “The category of restaurants that anybody does is just an extension of their personality,” he says. “Bandra needs a lifestyle place, and not everybody wants to be where everybody else is. Again, it’s very personal. In my head, I had to go back to Seijo.”

For three decades, he’s successfully cracked Mumbai’s appetite. He sees the urban affluent in Mumbai today as unselfconscious and uninhibited in expressing who they are and in the way that they dress, but also boldly discerning in the life choices they make, the culture they inhabit and consume. “I found a gap in the market again,” he says. “I said, can we do something not necessarily [only] for 30-year-olds? Can it be a place that starts there and morphs into something for a 40-, 45-, or 50-year-old?” That’s how Miss Margot, Bandra’s quiet, cool, sophisticated spot to get a drink through the week, came about.

Already, on the weekends, it sees a jump in energy “without going crazy apeshit commercial”. In place, as always, is Kishore’s philosophy that has guided him since 1994—to keep things friendly, both in atmosphere and in the pocket.  “I don’t want to be that late-night place where I take permission to be open until 4 am,” says Kishore. “It’s quality over quantity.” Here, guests are not assigned a table by the host but instead encouraged to stroll through and find a spot that appeals to them, from the community table to the lounges. “I tell my team, ‘Guys, don’t try and tell people where to sit. You have to just let them go where they’re going.’ We don’t have to lead you; places talk to you. I have an hour and a half, two hours max, of your time. God knows how far you’ve come from. The least I can do for that little time is make your heart glow.”