By the time you read this, I am pretty sure that the owners at Olympia on Colaba Causeway would have had to engage in some pretty insane crowd management, given the kind of publicity the Irani café drew in, in buckets, thanks to the visit by Hollywood’s Christopher Nolan, Matt Damon, and Tom Holland, when they dropped by the busy space, en route to the India premiere of their opus, The Odyssey.

City-based social media influencers, who wouldn’t be caught dead in the functional, uncool-for-my-Instagram-feed eatery before this episode, must have been making a beeline as soon as the news broke the Internet last Saturday. As the post tweeted by Universal Pictures was splashed across social media and news platforms, I am also sure that many with tonnes of free time in other cities, and unfamiliar with menu inclusions in Irani cafés and restaurants, must have been playing the guessing game over the fare that was served at the table for the Hollywood celebrities. Chai and bun-maska have now gotten cooler, clearly. And equally quickly, the Internet had also slipped into the role of culinary historian, dishing out copy-pasted [with some help from Guru AI] backgrounders about Olympia and everything one had to know about its menu, tables, chairs… you get the drift. It was amusing to hear the owner later admit that he wasn’t even aware of the biggies who were at his eatery. He must be elated over the increase in footfalls, post the stardust that was sprinkled all over by Hollywood royalty.