35 Years Old, Chor Bizarre, Delhi’s First Themed Restaurant is Now Also its Most Interesting Cultural Address – Local Samosa

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In 1956, Tirath Ram Amla, a four-term Rajya Sabha MP and prominent Kashmiri businessman, opened Hotel Broadway on Asaf Ali Road, at the seam where Old and New Delhi press against each other. For three decades, the hotel ran on the warmth and precision of his daughter, Mrs Vijay Lakshmi Khattar. Then in 1990, her son Rohit Khattar, twenty-seven years old and freshly returned from the United States, decided to do something with the dining room that nobody in India had done before.
He had spent years collecting oddities: mismatched furniture, vintage tableware, curios that seemed to belong everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. The flea markets of Delhi had a name for such sprawling, wonderfully indiscriminate accumulations: chor bazaar, a thieves’ market. Rohit tweaked the phrase slightly, and Chor Bizarre was born. The pun was intentional, the conviction behind it entirely serious. 

He opened India’s first themed restaurant with little more than that collection and a determination to bring Kashmiri Wazwan to a Delhi whose palate, at the time, ran almost exclusively to butter chicken. Moti Mahal, still helmed by Kundan Lal Gujral, was a five-minute walk away.
Thirty-five years later, almost none of that has been diluted. The 1927 Fiat that serves as the restaurant’s Chaat Mobile still sits in the dining room. The four-poster bed at which guests eat formal dinners, the Singer sewing machine repurposed as a table, the mismatched chairs that refuse to form a set, all of it remains. Design Director Rashmi Khattar, who crafted the original décor in 1990, oversaw the recent restoration, adding new vintage pieces while keeping the room’s essential character intact.

Kashmiri cuisine did not arrive at Chor Bizarre as a concept or a trend. It arrived as a family inheritance. Tirath Ram Amla’s roots were in Kashmir, and the Wazwan, the ceremonial 36-course feast, served from majestic copper-lidded tramis, was not an attraction bolted onto the menu but its reason for existing. Chor Bizarre was, for a considerable period, the only place outside the valley where a proper Wazwan could be found. That claim has since attracted imitators. The original has not moved.
The restaurant serves both Kashmiri Pandit cuisine and dishes from the ceremonial Wazwan tradition, a distinction that matters. Brand Chef Srinivas A, who has been with the group for seventeen years, has added new dishes without adjusting the foundations. The tabak maaz, the seekh kababs, the gushtaba, the yakhni- these dishes remain, served exactly as they have always been. 
Alongside them, the current menu extends across regional India: chicken chettinad, Malabar prawn curry, sabz biryani, jackfruit moilee. The Chaat Mobile, loaded with papdi chaat, kalmi vadas, aloo chaat, and the legendary Japani samosa, pays direct homage to Old Delhi’s century-old street-food institutions. 
All of it, Nitin Mathur, COO of EHV International, frames in terms of a singular commitment: “The Wazwan we serve today is the same Wazwan we have always served, unhurried, unapologetic, and deeply rooted in Kashmiri tradition. We do evolve, seasonal additions, new interpretations that our long-standing guests often inspire, but always from a place of knowing exactly who we are and who walks through our doors.” This summer, Brand Chef Srinivas A has introduced a seasonal menu running through May, fruit-forward salads, tandoori starters, coastal curries, Jigarthanda and kulfi, demonstrating that evolution at Chor Bizarre happens from a position of absolute security. The kitchen knows what it is.

Part of what makes Chor Bizarre resistant to the fashions of Delhi’s dining scene is that its physical space operates by a different logic entirely. The interiors are not curated in the contemporary sense, not a coherent aesthetic applied from above, but accumulated, the way an obsessive collector accumulates: one excellent thing at a time, over years, without a mood board in sight. Each dining area is furnished with objects that refuse to coordinate. That was always the point.
The Broadway Bar has its own layered history. Rohit Khattar originally conceived it as a New York Art Deco bar, the hotel’s Broadway address lending itself naturally to theatre posters and playbills from the Great White Way. When Chor Bizarre grew large enough that international visitors seated in the bar felt they were missing the main experience, the bar was redesigned in the restaurant’s aesthetic. 

Later, a second bar opened: Thugs, billed, with some relish, as Delhi’s first pub, whose walls were covered in posters of iconic film villains and whose caricatures of Mogambo, Gabbar, and the Joker were drawn personally by the legendary Gullu Sen.
That Thugs Bar menu has now been revived, briefly, in service of the restaurant’s new cultural programming, pairing cocktails and appetisers with evenings of historical storytelling. The instinct is consistent: even the bar is put to work in the service of something larger than a drink. “Delhi has extraordinary stories. It has historians, writers, oral traditions, and neighbourhoods that deserve to be understood, not just photographed. We want to be the room where those conversations take place.”
The heritage walks began almost by accident. Chor Bizarre sits on Asaf Ali Road, which runs directly into the old city, and in 1990 the surrounding lanes were so full of history that most people simply walked past. The restaurant began taking guests through them, not as a programme but as a reflex. That instinct has now been formalised into something more ambitious.
In 2026, Chor Bizarre’s cultural programming read like a small cultural festival spread across months. From Awadhi Hori spreads replete with storytelling of family histories to Eric Chopra telling one about the troublemakers of Mughal history while you ravish on a mutton seekh kebab, from Dastangoi evenings to book-reading dinners, one doesn’t just experience the food at Chor Bizarre, but also their legacy woven together with the cultural community and awakening they have brought in.

None of this is incidental. Mathur is precise about what the restaurant is attempting to become: “These are not events on a marketing calendar. They are an attempt to make Chor Bizarre a place where something beyond a meal happens. A space where the city thinks about itself.”
The claim is not small. But thirty-five years of evidence suggests that Chor Bizarre has earned the right to make it. This is a restaurant that has watched Delhi’s dining culture churn through trends, watched beautiful rooms arrive and disappear in the time it takes to build a following, and has remained exactly itself throughout. India’s first themed restaurant, its first ISO 9002-certified restaurant, the establishment that first carried Wazwan beyond the valley, these distinctions belong to its founding decade. What belongs to the present is something harder to quantify: the confidence of a room that has never needed to raise its voice.
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