The Poster Walls

Walk into a Kati Roll and the walls do the talking. Before you have read the menu, you have seen the posters: vintage Bollywood film posters, layered on brick, some of them peeling at the edges, all of them loud.

They are not decoration added later. The posters have been part of the stores almost from the start, and they say something about where the food comes from and who made the place.

Posters from the start

In March 2006, four years after the first store opened, The Telegraph in Kolkata ran a story on Payal Saha and the shop she had built in New York. It reported that the restaurants were designed by her husband, Anil Bathwal, with original Hindi film posters from the 1960s and 1970s on the walls.

Two months later, a food writer for the Houston Chronicle's Cook's Tour blog described a Midtown store of that time: a narrow storefront painted mango orange, Bollywood posters fixed to a brick wall, and cooks tending broad griddles called tavas. Seven years after that, the writer Lavina Melwani remembered the original MacDougal Street shop for its few seats, its Bollywood posters and its sizzling kati rolls.

So the look is as old as the brand's first press. The orange, the brick and the posters were there early, and they stayed.

The eye behind the walls

It helps to know who Anil is. Before joining Payal at The Kati Roll Company in 2002, he was a Creative Director at one of the world's biggest advertising agencies. He still spends his weekends cooking, painting, sculpting and searching for the next cool font. A store that looks like ours is what happens when someone with that eye runs a kitchen.

What you will see

The poster wall at MacDougal Street

The original store at 99 MacDougal Street has the wall in the photo above: brick, covered edge to edge in vintage Bollywood posters, layered over each other the way posters build up on a street wall. It is the backdrop to a lot of late nights. MacDougal Street stays open until 3am on Fridays and Saturdays.

The Mother India mural

In one of our dining rooms, a painted Mother India mural runs across the brick above the tables, under a row of cage lamps. Where the posters are layered and busy, the mural is one big image, painted straight onto the wall.

The woman with the kati roll

Then there is a painting all our own: a woman in jewelry, painted in the Indian miniature style, holding a kati roll. It is the old art form with our food in it, and it says plainly what the walls are about. This is Kolkata's street food, made in New York, and proud of both.

Orange doors and window lettering

The look starts outside. Our Midtown East store on East 53rd Street is the orange door with the elephant sign. At World Trade on Maiden Lane, the glass storefront has "Kati Rolls & Lassis" lettered across the window.

The walls traveled

When we opened our first store outside New York, on Elm Street in downtown Dallas in 2024, the posters went too. The Dallas store runs 2,200 square feet with seats for up to 50, and Bollywood posters on the brick above the counter. You can read more about Kati Roll in Texas.

Where to sit and look

Most of our food leaves the store in paper, and that is how a kati roll is meant to be eaten. But if you want time with the walls, dine in at MacDougal Street, 39th Street or 53rd Street, order a Kingfisher or an Alfonso Mango Lassi, and take a look around. Every store is listed on our locations page.