In Portobello, the Bollywood Bar offers karaoke and cricket

Shiv Singh came into the beer garden at the Bollywood Bar on Sunday, lit a cigarette and started watching music videos on the wide-screen TV.

He had cued up a couple songs, he said. This one is “Chaar Botal Vodka”, he said.

The beer garden is sheltered, the walls are covered floor to ceiling with green plastic ferns and other plants.   

Small waterfalls flow on either end, which owner Shashi Reddy said reminds him of his home in Hyderabad. 

The flatscreen TV currently playing Bollywood music videos often plays cricket games. There’s Guinness barrels for tables.

The bar is on Richmond Street, and Singh said he lives around the corner, in Portobello. 

He noticed it when it opened back in mid-January, he said. But it’s his first time coming in.  

He chose a Sunday assuming it wouldn’t be too busy. "I’m that person who enjoys my own vibes. But, yeah, I need the Desi music all the time,” he said. 

“I tried all the Bollywood parties. You know, in the end, I was just missing the bar,” Singh said. “So I really appreciate their initiative."

Cocktails, cricket, karaoke

Reddy, the owner, said he’s also owned grocery stores and restaurants in Dublin. But he’d been wanting to get into the entertainment business too.

He wanted to create a space like he had as a student, where people don’t just eat and leave but stick around, he said.

“If you go to restaurants … you won’t spend more than 30 minutes … 90 minutes max,” he said. 

He also wanted somewhere with food, not just pints, he said. He wanted the mix he knew from home.

“When I was in college life, we used to have this. Like, 25 years ago when I was in India. We used to go for all these kind of events and hang-out places. This was in my life,” he said.

He said watching a cricket game easily takes a few hours, and that’s what he wants – for people to stick around that long.

It took a long time to actually open the place he envisioned, Reddy said. He had a lot of ideas, and Ireland — “everything takes time here”, he said.

The Bollywood Bar he has created is a lot of things, a cocktail bar, a restaurant, a karaoke space. 

And yes, a place to watch cricket— including the Indian Premier League, which Reddy called “kind of Indian religion”.

There’s DJ nights, comedy open-mic nights, musical performances. And they have more plans: board games, and movie nights, Reddy said.

Comedy

Bollywood Bar’s invitation to stay and hang out already means the staff are making adjustments to figure in its success on weekends.

Ali Muhammad, the operational manager of Bollywood Bar, said it’s already so busy on Fridays and Saturdays that people queue up for the beer garden, where they can smoke shisha and watch cricket. 

So they’re restricting people to 45 minutes per table for shisha in the beer garden, Muhammad said. 

They’re working on filling up on other days of the week, getting people to the comedy nights, for example.

Dhruv Gandhi, who runs Indian Comedy Club, hosts events at Bollywood Bar on Thursdays. 

He said anyone can take the mic, and people can perform in any language. 

"When I started comedy, my English was shit. I was afraid to go on stage because English is not my first language,” Gandhi said. "People knew me as, ‘This person keeps trying. He's not funny yet, but one day, probably.’"

Gandhi wants other people to get the chance to get experience on stage, speak to an audience, joke around with them. “Once you are comfortable, you can go and explore other comedy clubs where you can do it in English."

Already it’s been a cultural fusion, said Muhammad, the operational manager.

"We recently did a Bollywood and Irish music night there together where we were playing combined songs there. And we got a great response here," he said.

Something familiar

Part of what’s driving Bollywood Bar, both Reddy and Gandhi said, is a shift in who is in Dublin, and in what they want.

Gandhi said the number of Indian students in Dublin has increased. 

Reddy said some cohorts in the IT industry shifted to Ireland after Brexit, and many of the workers are Indian, and that’s an audience he is aiming for. 

Reddy said the idea was to make something fresh, a place for Indians in Dublin to go out the way they’d go out at home.

He said people can be stressed at work, or they can be stressed because they moved here and it takes time to settle into a new culture and country. “Everybody is coming to start new life,” he said. 

At Bollywood Bar they can find familiar food and music. “So they kind of, you know, they won't feel alone,” he said.

“From south India or north India and everything … after coming to Ireland, everybody comes to one place,” he said.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.