Urban Tandoor background
When Urban Tandoor came to us in July 2020, they were already a cult favourite in Bristol — an award-winning Indian restaurant with a loyal local following and a genuine personality. What they didn’t have was any meaningful social media presence.
The brief was straightforward: build them a following on TikTok and Instagram that matched the quality of the restaurant itself. Turn a Bristol curry house into something people across the world would know, love and talk about.
We took on full social media management of both channels from day one — content strategy, production, community management, trend monitoring and posting cadence across TikTok and Instagram simultaneously. Everything in-house, everything built for each platform individually.
Our Approach
We built Urban Tandoor’s social identity around two things: trend-led reactive content and an original parody song series that tapped into British curry culture with humour and warmth.
The parody song format became the account’s signature on TikTok. Taking well-known tracks and rewriting them around naan bread, tikka masala and the Bristol dining experience, the videos had the kind of shareability that only comes when content genuinely makes people laugh. Each video felt low-fi and spontaneous — which was entirely the point. TikTok audiences can tell the difference between content made for a platform and content made for a boardroom.
This is the core of how our TikTok content creation team works — everything is built for TikTok first, never repurposed from elsewhere.
For Instagram, we adapted the best-performing TikTok content while also developing platform-specific formats that suited how Urban Tandoor’s audience behaved there — behind-the-scenes content, food photography-led posts and Reels that cross-pollinated the TikTok audience into a growing Instagram community.
Across both platforms, we tracked trending formats and sounds daily, moving quickly to get Urban Tandoor into cultural moments before they peaked. That speed — reacting within 24 to 48 hours — is one of the core principles behind our approach to TikTok marketing and what separates accounts that grow from accounts that stagnate.
The content strategy was consistent from the start: funny, fast, food-led, and always authentically Urban Tandoor. No two videos felt the same, but every piece of content felt like the same brand — whether someone found it on TikTok or Instagram.
The Results
What started as a local restaurant’s social media experiment became something no one in the restaurant industry had achieved before. Urban Tandoor is now the most-followed Indian restaurant on TikTok and Instagram anywhere in the world — with some of the highest engagement rates of any UK restaurant on either platform.
The numbers tell part of the story. The press coverage tells the rest — the New York Times, BBC Radio 1 and Radio X all covered the account, not because we pitched them, but because the content was good enough that journalists found it themselves.
Urban Tandoor is no longer just a place to get an incredible curry. It’s a genuinely iconic British food brand on social media — proof that consistent, platform-native TikTok agency can do for a brand what advertising spend alone never could.