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The Great British Curry Crisis
- rawTruthHurts 11y agoReading "British curry" feels like reading "British carbonara"
- rawTruthHurts 11y agoReplying myself in order to reply to everybody: Seeing the reactions, if I give my opinion on fish'n'chips you'll want to break my legs.
- EliRivers 11y agoA well-cooked chip of a good potato, fresh from the kitchen with just the right amount of rock salt, cracked pepper and almost too-hot oil is almost a transcendental experience. But done badly they're awful.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- arethuza 11y agoI don't think anyone in the UK thinks that the curries served here are much like the ones served in India/Pakistan/Bangladesh - so calling them "British curries" seems reasonable to me. My own personal definition of comfort food is a nice hot garlic chilli chicken and a Peshwari naan.
- tim333 11y agoBritish carbonara tends to be a bit different from that in Italy too.
- EliRivers 11y agoThat British curry is exported to India would certainly suggest that it's something different :) Old-school jokes about British food aside, Britain now has a fantastic food culture and the range of cuisine available in even quite small towns compares well with a large chunk of Europe. I think there's a willingness to experiment and innovate (both in terms of the providers and also the diners) that some cultures with very strong food traditions struggle with. I won't go on again about how disappointing my experiences in Naples were, but it opened my eyes to how fortunate I am in the UK.
- KineticLensman 11y agoBritish curry eater here. I have a curry cookbook that identifies the regions of Birmingham where the dish was believed to have originated. The classic Balti is widely understood to have been developed to meet the tastes of the British
- kybernetikos 11y agoI'm not quite sure what point you're making here, but on the assumption that you're challenging the idea of curry as a British dish, curry has been evolving in Britain since before the declaration of independence. Indian and colonial Indian are distinct enough cuisines that there are restaurants specializing in each, and even that doesn't do justice to the fact that some UK 'Indian' staples were invented in the UK.
- joefarish 11y agoTikka Masala was most likely invented in Britain, and is one of the most popular curry dishes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala
- dvdcxn 11y agoApparently it was invented in a flat a minutes walk from my flat. I had no idea.
- pdpi 11y agoOr american pizza? Yet there's an american pizza culture that is quite distinct from italian pizza.
- tonyedgecombe 11y agoHa, in Oxford we have a restaurant called the Oxford New York Italian, talk about confused identity.
- Avshalom 11y agoCarbonara is probably not the comparison you should be using either. The history of carbonara is "well it popped up sometime around world war 2 and had become two relatively distinct dishes by the time it had a name"
- kybernetikos 11y agoI've eaten in Italian establishments that do not carry Carbonara on their menu and become quite sniffy if you ask about it, given that it arose so recently and primarily because of food imports from the USA.
- ableal 11y ago"Vindaloo first appeared in 1797 when Britain invaded Portuguese Goa; the dish is a mispronunciation of the Portuguese carne de vinho e alhos, or meat cooked with wine vinegar and garlic." Close. The Portuguese is "carne em vinha de alhos", meaning meat marinated, then cooked, with wine and garlic. (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carne_de_vinha_d%27alhos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carne_de_vinha_d%27alhos )
- Paul_S 11y ago“This is an art and you need to be Indian to understand it properly". Yes, and you need to be white and speak German to make a schnitzel. What a load of bollocks.
- TillE 11y agoIt's easy to underestimate just how much we're all affected by our own backgrounds and childhoods. Including some very fundamental things about how we think about food. Just a silly example that I've encountered recently: if I say "popcorn", Americans will think butter and salt, while Europeans will think sugar. Even recipes tend to assume certain skills. Of course it's possible for someone to write in painstaking detail instructions about how to duplicate an authentic Indian curry, but in practice does that actually happen? It's more or less impossible to get a good bagel outside of New York. It's just a piece of bread! And yet.
- Paul_S 11y agoFunny you should mention bagels. New York bagels taste nothing like real bagels (which you can still buy in Cracow if you fancy a weekend visit[1]). They are what sliced toast bread is to a farmhouse loaf. [1] be aware that the popular bagel shaped things sold on every street corner are a different thing, albeit with common ancestry
- yummyfajitas 11y agoAre you confusing NY bagels with something else? A NY bagel has a shelf life of under a day. Buy one, eat it the next day, it's hard and awful. They are very rarely toasted.
- corin_ 11y agoHe's saying they're like "sliced bread (for toasting)" i.e. cheap and plain, not that they are like toasted bread.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
- lordnacho 11y agoMy sense is times have changed. People demand something whose main attraction is not just the price. My parents ran a Chinese restaurant for years, and there was barely any investment in the design of the place. Same old kitsch for decades. On top of that, Chinese, just like Indian, has a reputation for not being healthy, and health seems to have ticked up as a factor in people's choices. When I was living in London a few years ago you could see things happening in the eating out business. Chains have shaken off the McDonald's feel. Heck, even McDonald's has shaken off the McDonald's feel. You can't have a cheaply designed restaurant anymore. Some goes for pubs, you want a nice fireplace and a menu that has fancy words for "fish" in it. The food may not be very different, but you can tell which restaurants people go to, and which ones are empty. The thing is, family places like my parents', they don't have the appetite to try a big redesign. Old school thinking generally means they tend to believe that taste is what matters. Case in point. There's a great place next to Euston station that sells Nihari, a Pakistani shoulder-of-lamb that's slow cooked. I took my banker buddy there, and the look on his face was incredible. The walls were bare, the floors laminate, less pretty than a uni canteen. He wasn't impressed. I guess modern people go out to a restaurant not just to eat, but as a sort of status thing. Now not everyone is out at the Ivy all the time, but also you don't want to be eating where the non-professional class eats. New blood is what's needed. Those young guys in the article, I think they have a good idea of modern design is.
- SixSigma 11y agoIf you look at the photo in the article the plate in the middle has food sitting in a pool of cooking oil. > the sauce can be customised with a couple of dashes into a madras, bhuna, vindaloo or any of the other curry-house standards. That's why I stopped eating curries out. It's the same six things in every restaurant you go to. Having been to India plenty if times, you find out that "Indian restaurant food" in the UK is a franchise, not a cuisine.
- pjc50 11y agoPeople demand something whose main attraction is not just the price. I can see this happening, and I'm not sure whether it's a good thing as part of the general UK "food revolution", where we've gone from a joke to international leader in a generation or so; or a bad thing, as another inequality marker. Midprice food is being squeezed out of everywhere except JD Wetherspoon. Takeaway seems to be still flourishing, assisted by Just Eat and related startups. Indian, Chinese, fish&chips, and pizza are the standard repertoire, occasionally from the same kitchen. But when you go out to eat, part of the cost is renting a table-sized area of floor for a couple of hours. Absurdly high real estate prices mean that may be a significant part of the price. So the whole enterprise needs to go "upmarket" to recover that cost. (Back of an envelope says that 1-bed London flats are now £2/hour)
- rubberstamp 11y ago> Khan even blames Uber, the taxi app company, for disrupting the curry trade: “A lot of people in London have joined Uber . . . including chefs, tandoori chefs, waiters, managers — even the owners of restaurants >The price of a curry, treasured by the British public but always thought of as a cheap dinner, has barely changed in 20 years but costs are rising fast. If the food was good it should be priced normally, not too cheap. If there was money to be made in this business, those chefs wouldn't be leaving for uber. Blaming uber while keeping prices same for 20 years! Good food is always appreciated and I will always return to the place unless the quality deteriorates. Low balling is a problem in every field.
- Paul_S 11y agoThat line about prices not changing for 20 years sounds totally bogus to me. A quick trip to wayback machine shows over a 20% price increase over 8 years for my local curry house.
- corin_ 11y agoAll round feels like a bit of a ridiculous article, expect better from the FT. Not sure Indian restaurants have a particularly harder time than any other independant restaurants that fight for business and profit margins. And some of the logic used/quoted is just... I mean, they start right off with someone complaining about how business is hard while casually mentioning that "there are eight other curry houses on the street". Then the line about Uber taking people away from wanting to cook Indian food... is possibly the most ridiculous complaint I've ever heard. > Non-Bangladeshis are also reluctant to work in the industry. Khan says he did hire Eastern Europeans in the past, but they quickly moved on. “It is not rocket science but they do not want to do it,” he says. Plenty of Eastern Europeans (and English people, and... etc.) work in restaurants in the UK. If they'll work in a McDonalds but won't work in your kitchen then I suspect the issue is with the kitchen not the Eastern Europeans. The article's headline might be fair, but really badly justified in the writing.
- somberi 11y agoMasala Zone does a good job both food and decor wise.
- gadders 11y agoI wish there was a mid-range Indian food chain on a par with Wagamamas (Japanese), Pizza Express or Nandos.
- bencollier49 11y agoI had thought that the quality of curry-house meals was going downhill for years - then discovered that apparently most of them now use Patak's sauces instead of in-house recipes, which would explain a thing or two. I suspect that it's largely driven by a lack of chefs - possibly as a result of social climbing across generations.
- pjc50 11y agoA subtle line that I only picked up on re-reading: "Fewer UK-born Bangladeshi women are returning to Bangladesh to find husbands to bring back, robbing the industry of another labour source." Leaving aside the gender and racial discrimination in hiring restaurant staff, the reason why this 'labour source' has been cut off is a deliberate act of government policy. Concerns about forced or coercively-arranged marriages have been growing, as concerns about immigration in general. Hence the introduction of the spousal visa: if a non-EU national marries a UK national and wants to immigrate, they have to prove that their spouse earns over £18k, which is slightly above an average year's pay on minimum wage. If a family is traditional enough as to prevent their daughter from working outside the home, that also prevents them from importing a spouse.
- programmernews3 11y agoCorrect. These minorities shout blue murder if they think that it can get them an advantage, yet persist with racist and discriminatory practices that they have imported themselves.