The Great British Curry Crisis | Hacker News Reader

The Great British Curry Crisis

ft.com

My 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.

You get points for knowing Raavi Kebab near Euston

I've been to the place next door (Diwana) many times -- never even noticed that one.

Diwana is popular among vegan students from SOAS. There would be no point going to Raavi for vegans :-)

When you eat out at restaurants regularly and without needing to constantly think about value for money - which isn't the same as to say always eating at places like the Ivy - it's easy to stereotype based on your experiences, and in some ways can be beneficial in that it can help you pick places you'll like. Somewhere that looks very plain doesn't automatically mean bad food just as stylish furniture doesn't automatically mean good food, but it can often suggest something to you before you've eaten there. If I saw somewhere like Raavi Kebab then sure I'd think it more likely than not to be somewhere to get cheap, not-great food because more often than not, that's the case with places that look like that. It doesn't mean I wouldn't be willing to try it if someone like you recommended it, or if it had good reviews online.

Of course there are people who care about the status thing, but for most people it's more about a shortcut to making decisions.

> There's a great place next to Euston station that sells Nihari

What's the name of this place? I need to try it!

I'd actually forgotten the name of the place, but I just checked on Street View and it's across from the Indian bakery called Ambala on Drummond Street. And funnily enough that other dude was right, it's Raavi Kebab.

I always have a green Bharfi (hello branding consultants) after a meal from that bakery.

The bakery is actually pretty clean and modern.

> and a menu that has fancy words for "fish" in it.

I'm sure you're just exaggerating for effect, but that's kind of like saying "a menu with fancy words for meat in it".

May be a cultural aspect. A British pub grub staple is "Fish and Chips." In the kind of food-oriented gastropub the parent comment is alluding to, you'd see an explicit reference to the species, possibly even its provenance. E..g "Halibut & Chips", or "Line-caught Atlantic pollack served with hand-cut goose-fat Jersey Royal chips". It's really a 180 from no-nonsense pub menus, which are in themselves a recent innovation. (First pub I went to regularly your choice was a packet of crisps or a pickled onion from a dirty glass jar on the bar.)

Dishoom is lovely - good food and great design. A restaurant trip is about food but it isn't just about food - the whole experience adds up.

Agreed, good food and presentation at Dishoom

I think, barring a personal recommendation, people use the state of the front of house as a proxy for the cleanliness and hygene of the kitchen. (I'm not talking choice of decor, but status of upkeep).

If 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.

People 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)

What is sold under the name of Indian curry in the UK does not even remotely resemble what is cooked in Indian homes.

Indian-born cookbook writer Madhur Jaffrey[1] has been railing against the poor standards of Indian food in the UK since the 1950s when she was a student in London.[2] In 2010, she wrote a cookbook called Easy Curry about which one reviewer wrote, "If you have the local curry house menu by your phone, consider replacing it with a copy of this book."[3]

A year earlier, she had teamed up with Aasif Mandvi[4] to bring out the movie Today's Special[5] that portrays Mandvi as a French sous chef who has to take over his father's struggling Indian restaurant in Queens, New York.[6] Mandvi's character has to deal with all the factors against the family tandoori joint: the unhygienic prep, the unhealthy pool of oil in which the dishes are served, the cheap decor, the declining customer base, etc.

So yeah, the young blood is getting the message.

(American television viewers may remember Mandvi from his stint as correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.[7])

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhur_Jaffrey

[2] Very muddy to very modern http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3f603c2e-70d2-11d9-b572-00000e2511...

[3] Curry Easy by Madhur Jaffrey http://www.amazon.co.uk/Curry-Easy-Madhur-Jaffrey/dp/0091923...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aasif_Mandvi

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Today%27s_Special_%28film%29

[6] Aasif Mandvi and Madhur Jaffrey on Their Film Today's Special http://www.eater.com/2010/4/28/6735605/aasif-mandvi-and-madh...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Show

All 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.

“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.

It'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.

Funny 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

Are 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.

He's saying they're like "sliced bread (for toasting)" i.e. cheap and plain, not that they are like toasted bread.

that's more a case of altering a recipe to better suit local tastes.

try selling what we eat as pizza in italy to americans. they just don't understand how few flavors multiply together. sure there are some that appreciate it, but mostly wants overloaded pizzas with everything on it, and restaurants follows the market.

same with coffee. I can't express how bad is the burnt stuff people outside italy calls authentic barista espresso. gone is all the flavor in favor of the stronger burnt tone of excessive roasting and badly maintained machines.

but people like those flavors, they are trained culturally to like more a flavor punch instead of complex delicate notes, and thus local shops follows.

as a counter example, chinese food in italy has most of its stronger notes tuned down compared to what you would be able to buy in china. same with indian. they tastes nothing like the original (full disclosure, my source for this is not personal experience but a good indian friend and a cousin of mine studying in china)

NY Bagels and Montreal ones have become identities in their own right.

Since when is sugared popcorn a European thing? The only place I've seen non-salted popcorn is in the US.

In the UK at least, at a cinema you'll choose between sweet or salt popcorn, you can get salt/sweet/mixed popcorn in supermarkets, and Butterkist toffee popcorn is a common thing

Sure, but sweet and butter/salt are equally available (literally, pretty much every brand does both) so to generalise that Europeans think sweet when thinking of popcorn is ridiculous.

Corollary: 50% of beers in the US are watery piss, so when Americans think of beer they think of watery piss.

If you ask they will do you a mix in the cinema too!

In Belgium people will look at you funny if you ask for salt on your popcorn

I'm French and I did not know salted popcorn even existed until I went to the UK (other than salted butter caramel popcorn). I just asked for popcorn and always got sugared popcorn...

> while Europeans will think sugar.

Eh? Which Europeans? (British ones?)

Germans.

I wouldn't want to even contemplate salted popcorn.

Germans eat steak with jam on the side. I wouldn't look to them for being the measure of European cuisine. They make a mean wurst though.

That sounds like an excellent idea actually.

Never heard of that.

Jam on top of cheese bread sounded disgusting, but is actually pretty delicious.

Brit here, salted best popcorn.

> Just a silly example that I've encountered recently: if I say "popcorn", Americans will think butter and salt, while Europeans will think sugar.

Sugar in the UK, but salt (and butter) in Ireland. Maybe it's to do with what the chains sell?

I 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.

A 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.

Correct.

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.

"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 )

I wish there was a mid-range Indian food chain on a par with Wagamamas (Japanese), Pizza Express or Nandos.

> 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.

That 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.

Masala Zone does a good job both food and decor wise.

Reading "British curry" feels like reading "British carbonara"

I 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.

British carbonara tends to be a bit different from that in Italy too.

That 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.

British 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

I'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.

Tikka Masala was most likely invented in Britain, and is one of the most popular curry dishes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala

Apparently it was invented in a flat a minutes walk from my flat. I had no idea.

Or american pizza? Yet there's an american pizza culture that is quite distinct from italian pizza.

Ha, in Oxford we have a restaurant called the Oxford New York Italian, talk about confused identity.

Carbonara 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"

I'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.

Replying 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.

A 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.

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