A huge new Indian restaurant has opened in Bristol - four years after it first announced it was launching in the city.
Mowgli Street Food has taken over the former Pizza Express site in Corn Street. The restaurant chain originally revealed that it was to open its first Bristol restaurant back in 2019. Plans were stalled due to the pandemic and also the amount of work that needed to be done on the 19th-century former bank.
Mowgli Street Food was founded by former barista Nisha Katona in Liverpool in 2014 and has rapidly expanded across the UK.
The new Bristol building is what Katona calls “very Mowgli”. Set inside the elegantly high-ceilinged buildings of Corn Street, she says the grand space will be home to ‘the fresh, light zing of Indian food unplugged’.
“There are many old buildings like this in India from a bygone era into which life and trees and food markets sneak and grow respectfully, and exotically. I will bring my trees and lanterns, branches and ropes with our chat bombs and cheese toast and gunpowder chicken,” she says.
Mowgli Street Food’s menu is entirely comprised from the founder’s family recipes and, she says, is about ‘how Indians eat in the privacy of their home kitchens and favourite lunchtime street stalls’.
The new Corn Street restaurant has retained the building’s 19th-century features but has added its own touches including ‘swing’ seats for diners.
Scroll through for nine photos of the new Bristol Mowgli Street Food.
1. Mowgli has opened in Corn Street, Bristol
2. Mowgli has opened in Corn Street, Bristol
3. Mowgli has opened in Corn Street, Bristol
4. Mowgli has opened in Corn Street, Bristol