Britain's 'Curry King' warns against dumbing down of Indian food

By Hasan Suroor London: The man who introduced tandoori to Britain and is credited with revolutionising its culinary culture fears that his legacy is threatened by a new class of johnnies-come-lately in a hurry to cash in on the popularity and commercial success of his invention but with no regard for quality. Ninety-one-year old Mahendra Kaul, known as the “original curry king” of Britain and the first Non-resident Indian (NRI) to be awarded an OBE in 1975 for services to race relations, winces when told that a top Indian restaurant in London which he once owned serves reheated tandoori chicken. ‘’What a shame… tandoori chicken is no longer _tandoor_i chicken if it is reheated ,’’ he says hastening to make clear that he has nothing do with that restaurant any more. Customers routinely complain of “high prices” and “poor quality” of food served at some of London’s leading Indian restaurants. “Overpriced - (naan approx £4 each, and poor quality etc, a group of 16 non-drinkers came away with a bill of over £500!) . Poor service. Food not of an extremely high standard, in fact food is very poor to average quality. Food does not have wow factor, nor does the restaurant. Would 100% NEVER visit again,” fumed one angry diner Faisal after visiting a fashionable Central London curry house. [caption id=“attachment_1084783” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Mahendra Kaul with his wife Rajini.[/caption] Another customer Joanna, wrote: “Worst experience I have ever had! Rude and unprofessional service ! Me and my husband just were rudely asked to leave the place and then followed by the director shouting and swearing at us on the street! Absolutely disgusting experiance! Please never go there.” Customer reviews on tripadvisor.co.uk, a hotel and restaurant website guide, are full of negative impressions about Indian restaurants. Claysea from California writes about a high-priced restaurant in Kensington: “The food quality was not good, but fortunately the portions were also small so we didn’t suffer too much…” One anonymous tourist, writing about another hyped Indian restaurant in the area, complained that “We were served food by throwing everything on the table in a rude manner. Secondly there was hair found in the chutney and we brought this up to one of the waiters and he told us this is all they had.” There are, of course, some excellent Indian restaurants but Kaul is concerned that it is a few ‘bad apples’ that bring a bad name to the whole industry and threaten his legacy.  Britain’s Indian food industry is worth more than three billion pounds with some 9,000  “curry houses” spread across the UK employing 70,000 people. Chicken tikka masala is rated as Britain’s most popular dish famously hailed by late Robin Cook, foreign secretary in Tony Blair’s government, as “our national dish.” Kaul still has vivid memories of those early “struggles” when nobody in Britain had heard of tandoori. It was in the early 1960s and most Indian immigrants were working class people more worried about making a living in a rain-sodden and cold foreign land than haute cuisine. What passed for Indian food was mostly bland curry. “I wanted to introduce Britons to authentic Indian food of high quality and I thought nothing could be more authentic than tandoori. So we brought it all the way from Kashmir,” he says sipping his third Scotch while his wife Rajni keeps a wary eye. But the venture (“at the time it seemed more like a misadventure,” says Kaul) nearly collapsed at the first hurdle. “The tandoor kept breaking up…we didn’t know how to bind it with local clay which was of a different type from our Kashmiri clay and there was panic because without a good functioning tandoor our project made no sense. We had to get experts from Japan who told us how to do it. We then took off and never looked back.” The first tandoori restaurant he set up was Gaylords in Mortimer Street, central London, marking the start of what he describes as an “Indian food revolution” in Britain. Soon, he had restaurants not only across Britain but across the Atlantic in New York, Chicago and several other American cities—and was rubbing shoulders with the likes of Duke of Edinburgh and Margaret Thatcher who loved a “good curry.” Through all this, however, Kaul never gave up his “day job” as a journalist and a broadcaster. For many years (1966-1982), he anchored the BBC’s most popular programme of its time – Nayi Zindagi, Naya Jeevan later renamed Apna hi Ghar Samajhiye — for non-English speaking immigrants from the sub-continent. Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, Pandit Ravi Shankar and Raj Kapoor were among some of the famous people he interviewed. Now nine years short of his centenary, Kaul describes his long journey from All India Radio to the BBC via the Voice of America and interspersed with his years as the uncrowned curry king of Britain as a “fairy tale”. He insists that he is a mere “foodie” who just happened to “do the right thing at the right time.” His only appeal to his fellow foodies is not to let the side down.