One journey,
sixteen years.

A diner in Adyar. Two friends. One long table.

Noufal Narikkoli and Fardan T K met in college, took long walks together, and over countless dinners began sketching a restaurant. Not a chain. A house. A place where the biryani would smell of a wedding kitchen, where Arabic mandi would arrive under cloche smoke, and where a child could be brought without apology. They opened the first Zaitoon in 2009. The diner was small, the menu was honest, and the queue, eventually, was long.

An olive — for welcome.

The name came easily. زيتون — zaitoon — is Arabic for olive. A plant that has, for centuries, symbolised welcome, hospitality and the table. From the first menu, the kitchen pulled equally from Arabian, Hyderabadi, Malabar and Continental traditions. The biryani was slow-dum. The mandi was sand-pot. The breads came hot off a live griddle. Sixteen years on, the technique hasn't changed; only the room has grown.

Twelve cities. Two countries. One kitchen.

What began in Adyar now serves twelve cities across India and Qatar — Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ernakulam, Trivandrum, Coimbatore and Doha. Every kitchen is run on the same masala blends, the same biryani layering, the same insistence on cuts cleaned that morning. In February 2025, after years of demand from a city that has long shaped our flavours, we finally opened in Kozhikode — our twelfth and most-anticipated outlet.

And now, Calicut.

Kozhikode is not a city to underestimate. It built the biryani vocabulary we work in. So when we opened here, we did it properly — a 180-seat dining room with both indoor and alfresco, a 110-cover banquet hall for the days when family is the only guest list, an open Arabic grill, and a kitchen that runs from 11 in the morning to midnight, every day of the week.