Currying Flavour In Old Blighty

PETER Sellers would have loved The Party. His pictures pasted on mirror, pearl necklace laid out before them, son Michael Sellers and daughter Sarah Sellers lighting thediyas. The respectful applause of some MPs, of the mayor, John Major’s brother Terry, those eternal party Indians. It was the inauguration of the Peter Sellers Corner at the Gitanjli Mayfair, another Indian restaurant in London.

The new Mayfair follows an older one. Peter Sellers dined at the old Mayfair when he could. John Major could when he can. But from the famous to Britain’s national embarrassment, its football fans, Britain is "turning into a nation of curryholics". This is official. The new British Tourist Authority guide tells visitors: "There are those who say Britain has no national dish. Others will tell you, with a misplaced sense of island-nation tradition, that it is fish and chips. They are all wrong, Britain has a national dish all right, and it’s a world-beater: the Indian curry." Tips follow on ordering curry "like a true Brit".

Two glossy magazines devoted themselves entirely to Indian food. Tandoori and Indian Oriental Food & Drink figure that Britain spends a quarter of a million pounds (Rs 150 crore) an hour on Indian food. In a year a £2.2 billion (Rs 13,200 crore) business that brings jobs to thousands, spice to millions.

The first Indian restaurant, The Veeraswamy, opened in London in 1927. By 1950 there were 300 restaurants serving Indian cuisine. That rose to 1,200 in 1970, still only some food among others. The curry flood came in the ’80s. The 3,000 Indian restaurants in 1980 became 6,600 in 1990 and are now above 8,000. Just the rise in the number of Indian restaurants over the last two years is more than the total number of Thai restaurants in Britain.

The Gitanjli Mayfair can serve 300. The Creme de la Creme, opened in a cinema hall in Glasgow, can serve a 1,000 at a time. "I wanted the challenge of filling a cinema," says owner Bhupinder Purewal. He spent a million pounds to do up Creme de la Creme. His immediate problem is finding room to expand.

A BBC Good Food Show told viewers last year what Britain is doing with Indian food. It said 70 per cent of people visit an Indian restaurant at least once a month, that three out of four cook an Indian meal at home once a month. Tandoori scanned the market to find that the supermarket chain Asda sells some kind of Indian food to more than a million customers a week. Retail sales are growing by 20 per cent a year. By some reckoning there are more Indian restaurants in London— 3,800— than in Delhi and Mumbai put together.

Britain’s stars are adding new spice to it. Prince Charles and friend Camilla Parker-Bowles served Indian at his 48th birthday, the papers announce. John Major has sneaked in a couple of times a year even as prime minister into his favourite Gandhi’s in unfashionable Kennington. His Labour counterpart, Tony Blair, is another regular at Gandhi’s. Lord Bath goes Indian at one of his fairy tale launches, and only his two lions are not fed curry. Indian restaurants are a good place to find celebrities— Elton John, Tina Turner, George Michael, Emma Thompson, Angelie Hopkins, Tom Cruise, Paddy Ashdown, boxer Frank Bruno and that most followed of stars, Princess Diana. "The Princess of Wales ate a curry last week,"

The Sunday Times says. So it can’t be long before the beautiful people are packing out tandoori houses across the land, calling hesitantly for pints of lager and ‘poppadoms’. The following has grown since the Peter Sellers type doing Indian.

The curry story of Britain looks here to stay. The Curry Club organises gourmet tours to India. In east London food deliveries get stolen. Restaurants are ready to try anything for attention and customers. One chef cooked up a giant pakora made with 50 kg of onions. The poor Alderney Islands of Britain were curryless for long and Indian food was flown in on the last flight every day from Guernsey Islands. Now Matin Miah has opened an Indian restaurant in Alderney, and his hands are full.

The Brits are ready to believe any wonder about Indian food. Mustafa Aulad and Tabassam Ahmed announced they had launched a flying curry service. The media was called in to watch their helicopter take off for some starry destination. But the aircraft did not go far. "All I did was to fly to the end of the runway and back again," the pilot told the police. That was after the firm was paid by a cheque that bounced. It’s great business at home, but Britain isn’t flying out curries.

A curry map of Britain would show up every town and more than a few villages. Wilmslow Road in Manchester now has 65 Indian restaurants, and they serve more than just Manchester. In a quiet village in the English countryside you can dial-a-curry. Cooking tournaments are held the year round. Among them a Hot Stuff Chef of the Year competition, with ‘heats’ first in a dozen cities. And this year the curry-holics will hold a National Curry Day.

Only the British ‘eat’ a curry. The purist, Madhur Jaffrey, insists there is nothing Indian called curry, that much ‘curry’ churned up in those Indian restaurants is ‘detestable’. "Neither the British public nor I would agree," says Curry Club founder Pat Chapman who left a career as fighter pilot to devote himself to curry. As Britain’s most professional curry - eater, he has some right to speak for the British public. And the quarter of million or so Brits dining out every day in Indian restaurants speak for themselves. Curry may not be right but it is real. Lords, industrialists, truck drivers, house-wives, doctors, generals, judges have joined the club driven by the curry craze. It is not a following for pristine cuisine. It’s a craze fed by a Bangladeshi made British idea of Indian food. So what?

The Indian food business is not really about Indians in the food business. About 85 per cent of Indian restaurants in Britain are Bangladeshi. Many Bangladeshis, Sylhetis mostly, now in the business were chefs on European ships. The curryholism now is fed less by the wonders of Indian cuisine brought to Britain by the Raj than by Bangladeshi chefs. Some Bangladeshis have launched what they call the Dine Bangladeshi campaign. The food is called Indian but they want Britain to know that the business is Bangladeshi. Business is big enough now for a little war. The campaign was launched two years ago at a dinner attended by about 200 elected councillors in Britain. Black Congressmen from the US also attended. The campaign wants to give Indian food a Bangladeshi byline. The menu undid the message. The guests were fed the very north Indian chicken korma and pulao . Tandoori is what Bangladeshi cuisine is not, but 2,210 of the 8,000 or so Indian (Indian serving, that is) restaurants listed by Tandoor magazine have Tandoori in their names. They must play on their brand, not on their sentiments, says Tandoor editor Iqbal Wahhab.

"It does not really matter," says Abdul Waheed from his south London restaurant. "I was born Indian, then I became Pakistani and then a Bangladeshi. I have changed three nationalities by doing nothing. But food is food and it is Indian food we serve."

TO the British this will remain Indian food, not Bangladeshi. The subcontinental can see what is from where in names like Jibon Saathi, Jomuna Brasserie, Monju Tandoori or Modhubon. Hardly a Bangladeshi restaurant says it is Bangladeshi. But there are 130 Taj Mahals. More literate owners had to open A Passage to India and a Jewel in the Crown, even a Taste of Two Cities. A common name for an Indian restaurant, or curry house as the average restaurant is called, is Gandhi. One curry house owner was persuaded that was not appropriate for a place selling rogan jos h. He changed the name to Moonlight.

But Gandhis continue to flourish, and not just the one Major loves. One advertises itself with a photograph of Gandhi taken, it seems, just after one of his fasts. Below his picture run the words ‘Sumptuous Starters’, ‘Exotic Specialities’, ‘Tasty Tandoori Dishes’. More follows on Gandhi. "Encompassing the great traditions of the cuisine of the Indian subcontinent was the spiritual soul of the Great Man our restaurant is named after. Sunday buffet eat as much as you like for £6.50."

Raj is an inevitable favourite— 342 restaurants are called Raj something. There is even an East India Company or two. If that’s what it takes to bring in hungry Brits, so be it. The Red Fort dishes up Jingha Dum Averi which the Nawab of Avadh loved "during his enforced riverside residence by the East India Company". The ‘Anglo Indian’ Chutney Mary is Indian in its food, colonial in its decor. Paintings on its walls show white people during the Raj being served by native Indians on the floor.

The curry houses change names often— that is one way of offering something new. The Kent Tandoori became Badshah Kokis and then Thamoulinee. A Planet Bollywood in east London ran into a lawsuit after the owner was sued by the Planet Hollywood chain. Other names remain, like the Bombay Bicycle Club, Madras Blazers, the Battersea Village Rickshaw, Cafe Indiya, India Gossip, or the more familiar Tandoori Nights or Knights of India. In Scotland, restaurants are worried by a new requirement that all names be written also in Gaelic, the near forgotten native language. How do you write Imran Tandoori or Anarkali Balti House in Gaelic?

The Balti Houses of Britain are nearly as controversial in the curry world as the great Indian-Bangladeshi debate. The Balti Houses sprang up in Birmingham and quickly spread all over. There are the Balti believers and the non-believers. "Balti just means bucket, this talk of Balti dishes is rubbish," says old-time chef in Southall Balwant Sagoo. The Birmingham chefs insist that the Balti is a traditional style of cooking, the Baluchi name for karahi (wok). But karahi cooking, call it Balti, has spread. Restaurants now serve Balti kulfis to follow Balti korma. Boots, the chemists, have begun to sell karahis. The Balti was spread as another new wave in Indian food. "But it seems this Balti bubble is about to burst," says Wahhab.

More Brits are beginning to be discerning, and the more discerning now head for upmarket restaurants like the Gitanjli Mayfair, Red Fort, the Bombay Brasserie or Chutney Mary. The chefs at these restaurants are decidedly Indian, often from the glitzy hotel chains of India. The Red Fort in Soho has begun to launch regional food festivals; a Rajasthani food festival was its last. Rasa run by Padmanabham and his Spanish wife Alison serve emphatically Keralite food. The Gitanjli Mayfair, run by the Amritsari Jatinder Singh, Jetty Singh to his gourmet fans, promises "aromatised lamb cooked with robust herbs in Sur Singh style".

"There really ought to be a school that will train chefs in region-al cuisine," says Wahhab. But that he admits, is the "romantic, unlikely route". More likely is the use of the greater range of sauces and mixes that companies like Patak’s are cooking up. The support industry for the Indian restaurant is too large to let the business collapse. "The Indian restaurant is going to have itself reinvented for it," says Wahhab. And so the range of ready mixes grows on the shelves of Indian stores.

Readymade Indian meals sold through the supermarkets are already a £200-million a year business, and multiplying faster than the restaurants. Sharwods, Tilda, S&A Foods, Noon and Pataks sell faster than they cook. Indian take-away food shops too are growing faster than the restaurants. Packaging firms have begun to design containers especially to carry away Indian food. Takeaway was a £625-million business last year. The Balti has almost gone, the names come and go. "It’s no good changing names, the restaurants must change their menus," says Wahhab. Some have. Recent additions: kangaroo korma , ostrich jalfrezie, venison bhuna, bison vindaloo, wild boar pickle. Something new. But anything new?