A Doctor's Life Beyond The Hospital: Inside Yohan Irani’s Scrumptious Dublin Supper Club

Yohan Irani’s life unfolds across two seemingly incompatible worlds: the relentless, high-stakes environment of modern medicine and the slow, sensorial intimacy of a shared meal. Currently based in Dublin, the Bengaluru-born doctor has slowly built a parallel practice over the last two years — by day, he is a doctor, healing people with science; by night, he is a chef, bringing people together over shared meals and stories.

Originally from Bengaluru, Irani moved to Ireland to study medicine, eventually specialising in general medicine. But even during his college years, there was a growing sense that something was missing. “I always knew there was something creative out there for me,” he says. In Dublin, that instinct found form in food — first through content creation, and then, more ambitiously, through a series of intimate supper clubs.

Titled ‘Not just dinner’, these gatherings focus as much on conversation as on cuisine. “They’re equally about who you meet at the dinner as much as the food,” Irani says. Held in spaces like Bibi’s Café in Dún Laoghaire, Dublin, the events bring together strangers over menus that defy simple categorisation. Instead of sticking to authentic, traditional Indian or Irish staples, Irani aims to create dishes that flow across cultures: focaccia paired with braised cabbage, or a comforting Indian daal served alongside Guinness bread — a traditional Irish soda bread made with wholemeal flour and a generous pour of dark stout beer.

For Irani, this refusal to adhere to culinary purity is a deliberate choice. “The food is never authentic to a country,” he says. Instead, his cooking reflects the layered nature of his own identity — Parsi by heritage, shaped by South Indian foodways, and now deeply influenced by Irish ingredients and European techniques. The result is a style that is intuitive rather than orthodox, guided as much by availability and mood as by memory.

His approach has also been shaped by travel and collaboration. Over the years, he has spent time cooking in Sicily and working on food-led retreats in Greece and Portugal, experiences that have expanded both his palate and his sense of what a meal can be. But even as his culinary world grows, his motivation to do this remains profoundly personal. For Irani, cooking is not a hobby that sits outside his profession; it is a necessary counterbalance to it. “My main goal is to encourage people in healthcare to build a life beyond the hospital. It’s vital — not just for your own mental health, but for your patients’ too,” he says. “The work can be intense and all-consuming, and without something outside of it, you risk burning out. We’re all caught in this constant race to move from one milestone to the next, but it’s important to step back and put things into perspective. You have to take care of yourself if you want to show up fully for others.”

Over the next few months, Irani wants to take his culinary practice beyond Dublin’s intimate dinner tables to a food-and-nature retreat in Portugal, where he plans to cook with local produce and experiment with unfamiliar ingredients.

There are also collaborations in the pipeline, he says, including a supper club tied to the launch of an app centred on offline community — an idea that mirrors his own ethos. His tables, after all, have always been about presence: where strangers meet, talk, and share, without the mediation of screens.

After nearly two years of evening events, Irani is also turning toward daytime. “All my events are only dinner time events… and that really bothers me because I like to sleep early,” he says, laughing. What he envisions instead are slower, softer gatherings — breakfasts and brunches built around eggs on toast, oatmeal experiments, and of course, his beloved Guinness bread.

Follow @yohan_irani on Instagram.

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