Two Worlds, One Legacy
Soho Tavern x Johnnie Walker Story
Two Worlds, One Legacy is a 13-minute documentary about what happens when a family’s past becomes the foundation for its future. It follows Soho Tavern’s journey from the sacrifices of an earlier generation to a growing British Punjabi restaurant business, with a family recipe becoming the thread that connects Punjab, Britain, Scotland and Malta. Food sits at the centre of the film, but the story is really about migration, identity, ambition and the responsibility of carrying something forward without losing where it came from.
The Film
Who We Made It For
Soho Tavern has grown from a single Birmingham pub into seven locations across the UK, with brothers Mikey and Danny helping reshape what the traditional Desi pub could become. Their world is rooted in Punjabi food and family, but also in the ambition to create welcoming spaces for a new generation. This project came during another significant moment in that growth, as Soho Tavern collaborated with Johnnie Walker on a new curry inspired by a recipe from their grandfather.
How It Began
The original brief was to create content around Soho Tavern’s collaboration with Johnnie Walker and the launch of a whisky infused curry. It could easily have become a polished food campaign, but as we spent time understanding the family and where the recipe had come from, the real story began to reveal itself. Their grandfather had lived through a very different Britain, worked in the Desi pub world and passed down a recipe that Mikey was now bringing into Soho Tavern. At that point, the project stopped being simply about launching a dish and became a film about legacy.
Behind the Lens
We built the documentary around two generations and allowed that idea to take us wherever the story needed to go.
We travelled to Punjab, where Mikey cooked with his grandfather on the family farmland and learnt the recipe at its source, then to Scotland to explore the heritage and craft behind Johnnie Walker, before following the Soho Tavern team to Malta for the dish’s launch at Breaking Borders Festival.
Back in the UK, we also filmed the modern Soho Tavern story and travelled to Diageo’s London headquarters to hear the brand’s perspective on the collaboration.
Throughout the film, we looked for visual connections between these different worlds, using food, fire, hands, ingredients and whisky to make four countries feel like parts of the same story.
The Finished Film
The finished film gave Soho Tavern something more lasting than campaign content. It captured a point in the company’s growth while preserving the family history and personal story that sits underneath the brand today. What began with a new curry became a record of a grandfather’s influence, two brothers’ ambition and how far a family idea had travelled across generations and continents. For us, that is what made the project matter: the collaboration created the opportunity, but the people gave us the film.