The year was 2007. Gauri Devidayal, a tax consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Jay Yousuf, who ran a telecom business in San Francisco, crossed paths. They married three years later, weeks before they opened The Table, despite no background in hospitality. Fifteen years on, they have turned it into one of Mumbai’s most formidable names in food and beverage.
The award-winning restaurant refuses easy categorisation: Its “community table” is so popular that an Argentine consulate official ate there every night for years and left with real friendships to show for it. The Table Farm in Alibaug, supplying around 1.5 tonnes of produce a year, including the kohlrabi (turnip cabbage) surplus that became one of Table’s most-loved dishes. Magazine Street Kitchen (MSK), a 2,500-sq ft kitchen-on-hire that hosts regional chefs and serves as a residency for expat chefs alongside workshops and pop-ups. Mag ST., an all-day diner; Iktara, a delivery-only Indian kitchen; and the barely-a-year-old French sister of The Table, Kaspers.
None of it, they say, was ever planned further than a year or two out. “It’s almost always driven by real estate,” Jay says.
Jay first thought of a cafe and bakery, inspired by the patisseries he loved in San Francisco. The idea died quickly when a visiting chef, after spending four days assessing Mumbai’s flour, water and equipment, delivered a flat ‘no’.
Jay then pivoted towards what he had actually been missing — standalone, chef-led, ingredient-forward restaurants of the kind he frequented abroad. “Most fine dining in Bombay and Delhi is inside five-star hotels,” he says. Those outside were serving Italian or Mediterranean or continental. Their dating-era was a loop of Indigo, Olive and Indian-Chinese standbys like Nanking. “It got repetitive after a while,” says Gauri, who tried talking Jay out of the idea, before coming on board herself.
The Table opened in 2011 by word of mouth, to what Gauri calls “the foreign hangover” catered to by an expat chef. It also opened into a vacuum: nothing new had launched in the city in six months.
The real test came in 2017, when Alex — whose food had defined The Table for seven years — left. “The team knew how to run the kitchen effectively but a lot of image management needed to be done,” recalls Gauri. Roughly six months later, the arrival of John Solari settled the narrative. The Table has since cycled through two more expat chefs: Luke Robinson, whose precision Gauri viewed as stylistic detour from the restaurant’s casual-but-technically-serious DNA. It returned with Will Aghajanian in 2023.
Walk in on any day and the room tells its own story — families at the community table, couples on dates, regulars who don’t need the menu. The food matches that duality: precise enough for a special occasion, unpretentious enough for a Tuesday — chicken wings and a soft shell crab sandwich alongside a rotating pasta programme — from a sourdough cacio e pepe named after Shannen Alexandra (head chef, Mag St. Bread Co.), who is obsessed with sourdough, to a lamb ragù pappardelle.
Unlike The Table, which had its own small odyssey, MSK fell into their laps. The space belonged to Gauri’s family — a stainless-steel manufacturing estate set up after Partition. A portion of it had been sitting empty since her father’s business outgrew it. He had asked Jay to take a look.
Drawing on the underground pop-up dinner scenes they had experienced abroad, they launched a multi-purpose space for visiting chefs, workshops and one-off dinners in 2016. The early years brought in a wave of foreign chefs — including Will and Luke, who both first appeared in Mumbai as pop-up guests at MSK before joining The Table’s kitchen. The space also spawned Mag Street Bread Co. Once bread production scaled past what Table needed, it grew into a B2C brand during Covid, before folding back into supplying the group’s own restaurants, including Mag Street, now an all-day diner that began as a café.
Covid changed how they saw MSK. With the lockdown and freeze on travel, Gauri and Jay pivoted to hyper-local, regional Indian chefs. Today, “MSK 2.0” holds space for both: regional Indian talent alongside expat chefs. Kaspers, too, began as a lease — a small high-street space that sat unused as a warehouse. They call Kaspers their biggest creative risk yet, crediting an unlikely source for the confidence: the failure of an earlier venture, Miss T. “Knowing that a restaurant not working out isn’t catastrophic,” Gauri says, “removed some of the fear of attempting bold new things.”
Gauri’s parents had warned her that going into business with your spouse was a recipe for disaster. So it would seem. She is logic-driven to a fault; Jay runs entirely on gut instinct. Her pushback changes his mind more than he would have guessed.
The group today employs roughly 600 people, remains entirely self-funded and has avoided the “scale game” — even after Table’s comeback on the awards circuit, landing at No. 1 on Condé Nast Traveller X District Top Restaurant Awards 2025.
Ask how they would build The Table, and they say: “Build something you are genuinely proud of. The rest follows.”
Heena Khandelwal is a Special Correspondent with The Indian Express, Mumbai. She covers a wide range... Read More
