Karan Gokani: “There isn’t a restaurant in central London that truly does regional Indian food”

It’s been six years since Hoppers, the Sri Lankan-focused group backed by JKS, opened its last London restaurant, in King’s Cross, but don’t for one minute think its co-founder and creative director, Karan Gokani, has been resting on his laurels. Indeed, as he notes early on in our conversation, set up ostensibly to chat about Hoppers’s new opening in Shoreditch: “A lot has happened in that time.”

He’s not wrong. From a personal standpoint, recent years have seen Gokani release not one, but two cookbooks - Hoppers: The Cookbook in 2022 and Indian 101 in 2025. He’s also effectively bolstered his profile both through social media, where his Instagram recipe videos reach a following of 665,000, and TV appearances on the likes of Saturday Kitchen and This Morning in the UK and Today in the US. Last year, he was even invited to Chequers, the UK Prime Minister’s country house, to celebrate the new UK–India trade deal alongside Sir Keir Starmer and Narendra Modi.

There’s also been charity work. Since 2022, Hoppers has run a charity initiative called ‘Feeding the Future’ in partnership with Hemas Outreach Foundation. A response to the severe economic crisis that hit Sri Lanka, it has so far raised around £350,000 to provide nutritional food to preschool children and their families in the country’s poorest districts. The charity has since launched a trio of preschools and now provides early years education to 148 children.

“Honestly, the biggest achievement for me hasn’t been the restaurants or the cookbooks, it’s been the charity work,” says Gokani, who opened the first Hoppers restaurant on Frith Street in Soho in 2015. “It’s been one of the most rewarding things. Those kids will grow up and determine the destiny of the country and go on to do great things.

“You can give a person a great meal, until the next restaurant comes up. But to be able to use that platform and connect these dots makes you much more than a restaurant. That’s where we’ve come to.”

A change in culture

Perhaps the most significant project Gokani has undertaken in those interim years, though, is his overhaul of the Hoppers senior team; a process he discusses with a refreshing frankness. “The culture was just not where we wanted it to be,” he explains. “We had never set the culture and allowed it to flow, and I saw that a lot of that was down to certain people I had hired. So we cleaned out.”

By ‘cleaned out’ Gokani means a complete overhaul of the senior team ‘from the top down’. “We really questioned every little thing and looked at it with a fresh pair of eyes,” he says, describing the process as the hardest thing he’s had to undertake since launching the business.

Part of the motivation was driven by struggles at the King’s Cross restaurant. “It never really had the opportunity to find its rhythm. There were constant stop starts during the pandemic and coming out of that it wasn’t close to reaching its potential.”

Part of this was down to the size of the restaurant. The original Hoppers in Soho holds around 40 covers, while King’s Cross has space for 130 across its dining room and terrace. “We weren’t used to operating sites that big. It was literally like tying our laces while running a race. And we couldn’t stop for a second because we lost so much during Covid.”

With the support of JKS, it was decided that changing up the senior team would take precedent over further expansion in the immediate term. “It was a conscious move,” says Gokani. “Hoppers will never have 15 or 20 sites across London. We’ll have five, six, maybe seven if we find something in the right area. But we’re never going to have more than that so there’s no hurry to grow quickly, we can go methodically and invest our time.

“All three restaurants had their challenges, so we looked at the numbers and chose to extract the profits of a fourth site out of our existing estate. It gave us the ability to focus and really trim down the fat. Get the right people in and build for the future.”

Today he credits those changes with improving efficiency across the business and supercharging the brand. “Hand on heart today I think we have such a deep culture from the bottom to the top. I see a reflection of my values in all my team. We’re a close unit, there’s a kindness I’ve always wanted to create, and it’s supercharged us.

“The minute you make a decision, whether it’s easy or challenging to administer, it’s mirrored by your team, which is very empowering.”

‘Where Sri Lanka meets South India’

All of which brings us to Shoreditch where Hoppers has just opened its fourth location, taking on the site that previously housed renowned Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant Lyle’s – also part of the JKS portfolio. While King’s Cross was more than three times the size of the original Soho site, Shoreditch is only slightly bigger, holding 55 covers.

The size of the restaurant may be smaller, but Gokani hopes it impact will be big. “I wanted it to feel like a Hoppers Soho opening. And so I went back and I thought about what we did right the first time.

“With hindsight, it worked because the intentions were right. It was bringing something to central London that it hadn’t seen before.”

While Hoppers has always been primarily positioned as a Sri Lankan concept – its eponymous hero dish is a staple of the country’s street food scene – the brand has always taken inspiration from South Indian cuisine too. With the Shoreditch restaurant, this fusion is more overt with the tagline being: ‘Where Sri Lanka meets South India’.

“There’s a natural overlap between the food but still clear distinctions,” explains Gokani. “It’s one of the things we nailed earlier on that they can sit side by side on the menu. It gives diversity to both cultures.”

As a result, the menu at Hoppers Shoreditch features an array of new dishes and the omission of some signatures, which reflect this slight shift in focus. The lamb kothu roti, a Sri Lankan street food staple, doesn’t feature here despite being served at all of the group’s other restaurants. New options, meanwhile, include a Madurai-inspired crab curry omelette served with a flaky thread parotta, podi-coated soft shell crab and crab gravy; a Bangalore-style dosa filled with a pulled lamb shoulder masala and pickled onion; and Dindigul-style beef short rib biryani with a tarka fried egg, onion raita and lime pickle.

Staying true to the regionality of South Indian cuisine was a crucial element for Gokani, who himself originally hails from Mumbai on India’s west coast. “I don’t think there’s a single restaurant in central London that truly does regional Indian food,” he says, bluntly. “There might be menus that lean slightly more heavily on certain regions, but there isn’t one that doesn’t play it safe and do a pan Indian menu with rotis and naan bread and butter chicken. In that sense, we’ve been one of the only restaurants that has stuck to a regional cuisine with no dilution.”

He adds that had Hoppers chosen to put such dishes, all of which hold a fundamental familiarity with Western diners, on its menu then sales across all sites would have been higher. However, he’s glad the group has stood its ground. “Hoppers is still a very respected brand for bringing a micro cuisine to central London and I feel now we’ve got the armoury to broaden a little bit more and stray into different regions.

“As an individual, I’ve done all I can to showcase Sri Lanka and there’s a limit to what I know. I think South India and India deserves more. It’s a moment of great pride to showcase my country to people.”

Hungry for more

Despite only just getting the doors open on the fourth restaurant, Gokani is already hungry for more. “I get scared when I’m reaching the end of the project wondering what I’ll do next,” he says. “Now more than ever before we are hungry to grow. If you ask me, I think we could do a new site at the end of this year. We might not, because obviously sites take a while to find and build. But the team is ready. The excitement, the momentum and energy are there.”

As well as further openings in London, Gokani sees the prospect for the brand to establish a greater presence internationally. It already has a foothold in the Middle East, having launched a restaurant in Doha, Qatar, ahead of the FIFA World Cup in 2022. The restaurant, which operates under franchise, continues to trade and, like the London estate, holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand.

“It was a good financial opportunity and an exciting creative one,” he says. “A chance to explore a different avatar of Hoppers.” The offering at Hoppers Doha is described as ‘more upscale’ than in London, a reflection of the city’s highly wealthy population. “It was new, but kept the DNA of the brand,” Gokani continues.

“You want to have the synergies of scale and standardisation, but not replicability, because it’s not a McDonald’s. It was a way of getting that model right. I would love to do more. I think Middle East has huge potential and Hoppers could do phenomenally well with the right partner.”

Certainly, there is an international appetite on the JKS side with the group having expanded its Berenjak and Gymkhana brands into the Middle East with the latter also recently launching a US outpost in Las Vegas. Later this month JKS will add a second site to its US estate with the opening of its Punjabi-inspired restaurant concept Ambassadors Clubhouse in New York City.

On the flipside, though, recent years has also seen JKS, led by siblings Jyotin, Karam and Sunaina Sethi, the latter of whom is married to Gokani, divest itself of elements within its group. Its stake in Taiwanese restaurant group BAO was sold to the Singapore-based The Lo & Behold Group last summer, while its three-strong London pub business was sold to a US-based private investor in December and now trades under the moniker, Ardent Pub Group.

With that in mind, does Gokani expect Hoppers’s future to always be within the JKS stable? “There isn’t any immediate intention of moving out,” he responds. “At the end of the day, we do what’s right for the business. As long as the support is there, which it is very much.

“The beauty of JKS is each brand is boutique and led by someone different with their own cultural identity. And they’ve all been allowed to shine. There’s never been a moment where I felt like they’ve held Hoppers back. We’ve been fairly independent, but they’ve always had that oversight. It’s a great relationship.”

‘The price you pay’

There are, of course, plenty of challenges for Gokani and Hoppers to contend with. He describes the staffing situation as ‘fucked’, adding: “It’s a massive problem.”

The impact of inflation is also proving difficult on the group’s bottom line. “Two years ago, we’d be up 5% across our sites, but there’s a real squeeze right now.”

Maintaining an accessible offer remains a key focus with Hoppers continuing to offer a wide-ranging ‘experience’ set menu across all sites for under £40 per head. “Straddling accessibility at a time when inflation and price hikes are so ridiculous poses a real challenge.” Prices have had to go up, Gokani admits, but not across the board with the group retaining plenty of good value core dishes pitched at around the £10 to £15 mark and then installing some more premium dishes with a higher markup of between £25 and £35.

“We opened at a time when things were cheaper. If we’d opened today, we would have done things very differently. We would have combined dishes, done smaller plates and made them more expensive. But you can’t retrospectively reengineer that because we’ve gained so many regulars down the line who we can’t disappoint.

“There is an element of heritage holding us back, but we’re also very proud of that. It’s the price you pay.”