There are two Mumbais every visiting celebrity encounters. One is all premieres, luxury hotels and flashing cameras. The other is discovered through recommendations. Over the past days, The Odyssey director Christopher Nolan and actors Matt Damon and Tom Holland found themselves on the latter trail.

At the Film Heritage Foundation in Ballard Estate on Friday, founder Shivendra Singh Dungarpur took Nolan through the Foundation’s restoration facilities, where the director watched technicians at work on a 70mm print. For a filmmaker who has spent years championing celluloid, it was a rare opportunity to see India’s preservation efforts up close. Nolan, fans would know, has also served on Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation for over a decade. That Dungarpur’s Foundation has grown into one of the world’s leading centres for restoring and preserving films probably made it a fitting stop before The Odyssey reached Mumbai.

Photographer and filmmaker Sunhil Sippy, rarely someone to be overawed by famous names, found himself unexpectedly tongue-tied. He presented Nolan with a signed copy of Opium of Time, his 2021 coffee-table book of monochrome photographs of Mumbai. “I was nervous when he asked me to sign it,” Sippy says. “I simply wrote, ‘What an honour.’”

That evening, Dungarpur took Nolan and actor Matt Damon to Trishna in Kala Ghoda, that has fed Bombay’s old guard for decades. Nolan was, reportedly, already familiar with that menu, having eaten there with his family on an earlier trip.

If Friday belonged to cinema, Saturday belonged to Mumbai. Hours before the premiere, Nolan, Damon and Holland walked into Olympia Coffee House in Colaba. Founded in 1918, the Irani café has changed little over the decades. Its marble tables have welcomed everyone from taxi drivers and office-goers to politicians and film stars, while regulars still arrive early for bun maska, chai and its famously limited roast mutton. When Mirror met owner Mufti Ilyas Abul Rahim Saji, 56, last evening, he laughed at how ordinary the afternoon had seemed.

“Around 2.30 pm, members of their team started coming in,” he says. “We thought they were regular customers. They had tea and snacks, left, then returned again.”

Only around 6 pm did anything seem unusual – because security personnel gathered outside before a van pulled up. “We didn’t recognize them,” Saji says with characteristic matter-of-factness. “They came in, sat down, had tea and spoke among themselves. Then it was time for my prayers, so I left.”

The advance team had told Olympia only that a few VIP guests would be dropping in and requested chai and bun maska. True to the café’s old-school hospitality, Saji decided that wasn’t quite enough. He asked the kitchen to send out saffron phirni and custard as well.

The Saji family bought a 50% stake in Olympia from its Iranian owner, Mohammad Mirab, in 1954, when Mirab and his cousins were returning to Iran. Three generations later, copper vessels are still used here, because, Saji insists, “the taste changes if the pot changes.”

What has never changed, he says, is the place’s philosophy. “Our customers range from taxi drivers to celebrities, but everyone is our customer and we treat them alike. Everyone gets the same service,” says Saji, explaining that they go by the principle of equality taught in Islam.

Manager Inayat Maridiya, 40, knew only that “VIP guests” were arriving. “They stayed for seven or eight minutes,” he says. “As they left, Tom Holland gave me a thumbs up. Only later did someone tell me he was Spider-Man.”

Saji laughs. “I’ve never watched the Spider-Man films.”

By the next morning, celebrity had worked its familiar magic. Customers arrived asking for the table where Nolan, Damon and Holland had sat, and even the cups they had used. They were out of luck. “They’d already gone back into the kitchen and were mixed with the rest of the dishes, obviously,” says 30-year-old waiter Shahbuddin Khan. There were even those who hugged Shahbuddin, as though a little of Hollywood glamour might have rubbed off on him.

In less than 48 hours, three of Hollywood’s biggest names had visited three very different Mumbai institutions: one preserving the history of cinema, the other preserving the city’s everyday rituals.