Co-founder of Black Sheep Restaurants and Gen.T Lister, Syed Asim Hussain, breaks down the interior of his most personal project to date
New Punjab Club is intended as a theatrical stage as much as it is a love letter to Black Sheep Restaurants' co-founder Syed Asim Hussain's family’s homeland in the Punjab, a province that straddles the border between India and Pakistan.
The result is a fantastical, gravitas-laden space that deftly combines colonial influences with the bombastic contemporary art of the region.
To unravel the restaurant’s tapestry of influences, we sat down with the fourth-generation Hongkonger to delve into the driving forces of family history, nostalgia, and the intoxicating craft of storytelling.
See also: Review: New Punjab Club
How did you decide to base New Punjab Club on this particular time and place?
We as restaurateurs look at ourselves as historians of culture and cuisine—the restaurant is the result of our investigation into what happened in the shared province of Punjab between India and Pakistan post-independence. The essence of the restaurant is big, bold, boisterous, colourful, swanky, which is what was happening culturally within Punjab at that time.
This is at an interesting cross-section of fantasy and nostalgia—of my nostalgia for growing up in Pakistan and my understanding of what this time was, and then the fantasy of what Pakistan would’ve been during the ‘50s and ‘60s.
What distinctly Punjab elements did you incorporate?
We say that Punjabis are not very sophisticated, but what they are is unapologetically authentic. We want to leave all the Indian restaurant clichés at the door and rely on our memory bank and our understanding of what this culture and cuisine are.
You’re sitting right now on a Victorian couch, we’re surrounded by beautiful contemporary Pakistani art, the plateware is an interesting mix of Churchill plates from the ‘60s, and with that we use local tabletops.
We’re trying to bring all these elements together in a very Wes Anderson [setting]. A lot of his work also sits at the cross-section of fantasy and nostalgia.