The 13-Seat Sigree Counter Worth Watching the Calendar For
Chet Sharma's modern Indian tasting counter in Mayfair rewards diners who book the moment the diary opens — and forgive those who take the £65 lunch back door.
The sigree runs the length of the open kitchen — a custom-built charcoal grill that fires most of what leaves the pass. From the 13-seat counter that wraps around it, you watch a Lahori chicken get its final baste of cashew and yoghurt whey, then land in front of you two minutes later. This is the entire pitch of BiBi in one movement: fine-dining Indian cooking with the theatre of a street stall, priced and paced like the tasting menu it is.
Chet Sharma opened BiBi on North Audley Street as a project about Indian grandmothers — the menu draws from Mumbai street food and Punjabi home cooking, then routes it through a kitchen doing meticulous spicing and modernist plating. The wine pairings are named for Chet's grandfathers, Baldev and Ved. None of this reads as gimmick from the counter. It reads as a restaurant that decided early what it was about and has not drifted.
BiBi is the rare Mayfair Indian tasting menu that earns its price on the plate rather than on the postcode.
Editorial Deep
The Lahori chicken is grilled over the sigree and finished in a sauce of cashew and yoghurt whey — a whey most kitchens throw out. Using it here builds a sauce that reads creamy without weight, tangy without acidity taking over. That is what changes on the plate: the chicken tastes lifted rather than blanketed, which is the failure mode of most rich Indian sauces at this price point.
A Thursday lunch and a Friday dinner are effectively two rooms. At the £65 lunch sitting the counter is bright, the pace is faster, and you can hear every dish description across the sigree. By 8pm on a Friday the music has climbed, the dining room behind the counter is full to its 34 covers, and the ambient volume makes leaning in for the server's spicing notes a real move rather than a courtesy.
The room gets loud enough that dish descriptions get lost, and the floor is trained for it: a guest who misses the components of the beetroot dahi puri will have them re-walked mid-course, without it being made to feel like a correction. That is the register of the service here — informed, watchful, and willing to repeat itself. Wine pairings are pitched with the family backstory intact but not oversold.
Set it beside Gymkhana, the obvious Mayfair Indian comparison. Gymkhana gives you a tasting menu and an à la carte you can order tightly against; BiBi's dinner tasting is the only evening path and the £65 lunch is the only cheaper one. What the extra money at BiBi buys you specifically is the counter and the format — a 13-seat tasting experience with the kitchen a metre away, which Gymkhana does not offer at any price.
Skip the return if you were hoping for à la carte flexibility or a quiet Friday dinner conversation. The format is fixed, the room at 8pm is loud, and a table for four looking to share and graze will be happier at Trishna or Gymkhana. Groups that want the tasting-menu commitment without the counter view will also feel they overpaid.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Grilled Lahori chicken; mushroom galouti kebab; Flourish Farm beetroot dahi puri
“The counter is the reason to book; dinner is expensive, and the cooking makes the case for it.”
Book the £65 lunch if you want the same kitchen without the release-day calendar game. At dinner, the room-plus-bill maths has visible friction that the plate does not fully absorb.
The Verdict
