As the story goes, and as the credulous often repeat, Veeraswamy is the oldest Indian restaurant in the United Kingdom.
Founded in 1926 by British-Indian army officer Edward Palmer, the restaurant is high-end, with ostentatious décor that references “1920s Maharajas’ palaces,” according to its website. It is located just off the Georgian crescent of Central London’s Regent Street, one of the city’s major shopping streets. Today, it sits right above a boutique belonging to the Jo Malone perfume brand.
If Veeraswamy is notable for its age, it is also uniquely regal. Palmer’s English grandfather, an army general, had married a Mughal princess believed to be the eponymous Veeraswamy. Palmer was a lecturer on the subject of Indian cuisine, and in addition to opening the restaurant and naming it in her honor, he wrote an influential cookbook that included the recipe for his signature mulligatawny soup.
Today, Veeraswamy is frequented by the wealthy, celebrities, and, according to rumor, the occasional royal. It serves dishes like roast duck vindaloo and “specialty prawn curry from the kitchen of Raja of Travancore.” If it seems a world away from the humble, budget-conscious curry houses that punctuate towns across the country, and which are a staple of many British people’s night outs, that’s because it is.
But despite its supposed claim to fame, Veeraswamy was not the first Indian restaurant in the country, or even the first in London. Instead, the earliest versions of Indian restaurants arrived in Britain centuries before—and it was Bangladeshi restaurateurs and cooks, not English army officers, who were most responsible for popularizing and shaping the curry house into its modern incarnation. Along the way, they had to confront issues ranging from racist bullying and fierce competition to the problem of alcohol and the shortage of workers.
Now, in the face of difficult economic and political headwinds, they are forced to consider another existential question: whether there is a real future for the British curry house at all.
It’s rarely possible to be definitive about the first of anything, and identifying Britain’s first Indian restaurant is no exception. When I speak with Arup Chatterjee—author of “Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India”—over Zoom, he waxes lyrical about the “Hindustani” coffee houses that appeared as far back as the 18th century, which were outfitted with hookahs, divans, and palm trees imported from India.
He tells me that he believes the first restaurant that served curries was founded in Haymarket, near Downing Street, in 1773. A green plaque on George Street in Marylebone, Central London, meanwhile, proffers the first Indian-owned curry house: “Site of the Hindoostane Coffee House: 1810. London’s first Indian restaurant. Owned by Sake Dean Mahomed (1759-1851).”
If early adaptations of Indian dishes were served in these environments, however, it wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th century, when Bangladeshi immigrants began arriving in the U.K., that the modern curry house started to take shape. Chatterjee names a few examples of these curry houses, including the Shah Jalal Restaurant and Coffee House, which was opened in 1920 in London’s East End. Its owner, Ayub Ali Master, was one of the first Sylhetis—people from the Sylhet region of northeastern Bengal—to immigrate to the U.K., and he would not be the last.
“People got together to debate politics—it was mainly men. They were almost like pubs without alcohol. They weren’t posh like gentlemen’s clubs. I don’t like the word ‘authentic’ but they would’ve been as true to the cooking they would’ve had at home within the constraints of the available ingredients.”
In “Sons of the Empire: Oral History from the Bangladeshi Seamen who Served on British Ships during the 1939-45 War,” author Yousuf Choudhury says that by 1943, there were about 500 or 600 Sylhetis in London, “all ex-seamen, mostly working as caterers, cleaners, washers up and kitchen porters.” According to Sejal Sukhadwala, food writer and author of “The Philosophy of Curry,” many early-20th-century curry houses were established by Sylheti seamen, and these spaces were a lot more radical than upmarket restaurants like Veeraswamy.
“People got together to debate politics—it was mainly men,” she says. “They were almost like pubs without alcohol. They weren’t posh like gentlemen’s clubs. I don’t like the word ‘authentic’ but they would’ve been as true to the cooking they would’ve had at home within the constraints of the available ingredients.” Shah Jalal, for instance, regularly hosted meetings for the India League, an organization that campaigned for Indian self-governance during the colonial era, and curry houses like it played a vital role in the growing campaigns for independence from British rule.
In the following decades, greater numbers of Bangladeshi people began migrating to the U.K. Many arrived following the Partition of India in 1947, during which Bengal was cleaved in two; West Bengal became part of India, and East Bengal part of Pakistan (later renamed East Pakistan). Those divisions led to the creation of Bangladesh as an independent state in 1971, but not before the devastating bloodshed of the Bangladesh Liberation War.
These events in turn led to the mass movements of Sylheti immigrants to Britain. Upon arrival, many opened their own restaurants. As Chatterjee writes: “Even after Partition, East Bengalis felt no serious dismay as being pigeonholed as ‘Indian.’ They realized it was good for business, for it evoked a sensory recuperation for the Raj-sick middle-aged Britains.”
Reading both Sukhadwala and Chatterjee’s books can be disorientating, especially when I realize I’ve tacitly accepted the narrative that Britain’s curry houses are a 20th-century invention that exploded in popularity from the 1970s—all sizzling Baltis, pints of Lager, and canny restaurateurs dreaming up chicken tikka masala. It’s true that the number of curry houses in the U.K. rapidly grew in the latter half of the 20th century. But their history goes much deeper than that—and narratives about how curry houses have long been a staple of British public life ignore the fact that the immigrant communities that formed them faced enormous challenges on the road to that standing.
“In London and modern Britain there’s two types of curry house,” says Chatterjee. “[High-end restaurants like] Chutney Mary and Veeraswamy and then your mom-and-pop, Bangladeshi-owned curry house. Neither is ‘authentic.’ But the Bangladeshi curry house is about authentic immigrant experiences.”
Many British towns and cities have a “curry district.” Some—like Manchester’s Curry Mile or Birmingham’s Balti Triangle—are almost exclusively rooted in hospitality, and feel more tailored to outside visitors. Others, like Southall in West London and the Golden Mile in Leicester, offer more—restaurants, groceries, and shops that primarily cater for the diaspora and local community.
Manchester’s Curry Mile, located on Wilmslow Road in Rusholme, exemplifies how these neighborhoods developed. In the 1950s and ’60s, many South Asian immigrants were enticed to the U.K. by recruiters promoting work in the area’s textile mills and factories. Restaurants and other businesses arose to serve those new communities, but it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that such restaurants became popular among white Mancunians. By 2008, the local council erected a sign proclaiming the street a “Curry Mile.”
London’s Brick Lane is probably the best-known curry district in the country. This East End neighborhood’s history has long been marked by people arriving from outside of London: 17th-century French Huguenots made it a center for weaving after escaping persecution; in the 19th century, Askhenazi Jews were given special dispensation to open a Sunday market. Then, in the 20th century, Bangladeshis from Sylhet arrived, and in turn transformed the street into a byword for curry.
Eventually, Brick Lane earned the moniker of “Banglatown,” and became the largest Bangladeshi community in Britain. Many of its new arrivals served in the merchant navy in the Second World War before assimilating to London life by taking tailoring jobs alongside the area’s Jewish residents. Later, they saved enough money to open businesses, such as shops, supermarkets, and curry houses.
Curry quarters like these sprang up first as community spaces for South Asians to carve out support networks and enjoy familiar food together. But to make their businesses viable from the 1960s onwards, restaurant owners had to cater to the wider population. This is where many first- and second-generation workers faced racism head on—serving white people “while absorbing their shit at the same time,” says dancer Akram Khan about his curry-house upbringing. It was common for waiters to be mocked for their accents, or to face abuse over the prices they charged.
Worst of all was the violence, which tended to occur later in the evenings. Licensing laws in the U.K. meant that the pubs closed at 11 p.m., but restaurants were free to pour beer until the early hours.
One of the most important elements in the curry house’s growing popularity was the decision by many owners to start serving Lager alongside their food.
It’s not clear exactly when this change took place. (Interestingly, Veeraswamy claims it was the first to popularize Lager in curry houses after a fateful visit by Prince Axel of Denmark in 1924. He was apparently so taken by the food that he sent a barrel of Carlsberg every year thereafter.) But according to beer writer Pete Brown, the timing aligned with a broader switch to Lager among British drinkers, which began in the late 1970s.
“Lager was exotic,” Brown says. “In the ’60s they marketed it at women: There were adverts with headlines [like] ‘A blonde for a blonde,’ with a woman holding a half pint of Lager.”
That strategy succeeded in winning over female customers, but later, Brown says, brands like Carlsberg and Heineken changed tactics to start appealing to men. “They spent a ton more money to get rid of the image they had created,” he says. “They made Lager seem slightly subversive, slightly exotic.”
“There were racist gangs in Birmingham like the APL and communities had to fight physically, and that included in the restaurant. Violence came about because of drunkenness, and once the pubs closed they came piling in drunk. It was a recipe for disaster.”
In the 1980s, Brown says, breweries like Foster’s and Carlsberg began to distinguish themselves by playing up their national provenance. “When you got to the ’90s, it was about ‘world beers,’ and that was about ‘what provenance have we not done yet.’ And you had beers marketed with ‘interesting’ countries even though that country did not have [Lager] brewing heritage,” he notes.
Today, the two Lagers most linked with the curry house are Britain’s Cobra and India’s Kingfisher. The former was launched by founder Karan Bilimoria in 1989 to be a perfect pairing with a curry or mixed grill. It was said to be smoother, less gassy and “quite unlike any other beer.” “What was special about Cobra?” laughs Steve Sailopal, founder of Good Karma Beer Co. “Everyone [believed the marketing] and used to say: ‘You don’t want a beer that bloats you—have a Cobra.’ [...] It was a load of bollocks that Cobra were saying and they got away with it.”
Still, both beers became intrinsically linked with curry houses, and a major customer draw. But amidst that popularity, it’s easy to forget the effect Lager had on Sylheti curry house owners, most of whom were Muslim, and who were often grudging participants in its adoption.
“Straight after the mosque we’d go to a Sikh cash-and-carry [wholesaler],” says Mohammed Ali, MBE, whose father opened the Rajpoot in Birmingham. “I’d be with my dad looking at a wine list and I would think, ‘We’ve just come out of the mosque for God’s sake!’”
In the restaurant, things were just as complicated. Ali recalls pulling pints when he was a teenager, and the enormous quantity of Carlsberg kegs that the restaurant went through. Margins were tight—he says many of the Rajpoot’s competitors were practically giving away dishes to entice people in. Selling Lager was the factor that drew crowds and kept the restaurant in the black. But it also invited serious trouble, particularly during the period of heightened racist violence in the 1980s.
[Content warning: This section includes accounts of racist slurs, discriminatory language, and violence.]
Ali says his typical day began by serving families at lunch, and later tolerating the grueling post-pub crowd. He would size up visitors to see if they were likely troublemakers—making split-second judgments and ushering out anyone who wore a tracksuit or had a tattoo on their neck. He grew adept at spotting customers likely to bolt: They would have racist conversations, order Lager after Lager, and be loud, annoying the regulars. If they ran, you couldn’t let them get away; otherwise, you’d be seen as a soft touch.
He recalls one incident vividly. A group of men fled his father’s curry house without paying; all but one got away, and Ali chased him to an alleyway. The man was out of breath and sweating, and totally inebriated. Their party had been crashing back pints of Lager in the Rajpoot right up until its 2 a.m. closing time.
“He said, ‘You got me. How much money do I owe you, gaffer?’” Ali says. He remembers looking at the man’s face and thinking about his dad, who worked 364 days a year. The Rajpoot was his father’s world, his pride, and his new home since leaving Bangladesh for Birmingham. “I told him, ‘Put your wallet away,” Ali says. And then he beat him.
A few weeks earlier, he had witnessed his father being smashed in the head repeatedly with a wooden pole. The ambulance arrived at the Rajpoot, but the attackers escaped before Ali could catch them. He can’t remember exactly how old he was when his father was taken to hospital, but he thinks he was just 15.
Today, Ali stands by his actions. “I say it with pride,” he says. “Because that’s what we had to do and needed to do. I’m not saying this too openly because I don’t want to condone violence, but in those days you had to fight—just like fighting skinheads.”
For Ali, the curry house of the 1980s was inherently a place of violent tension and racist threat, and he felt he had no choice but to fight back. “That didn’t happen by standing on street corners saying, ‘Skinheads don’t come into our area, please.’ There were racist gangs in Birmingham like the APL—the Anti-Paki League—and communities had to fight physically, and that included in the restaurant. Violence came about because of drunkenness, and once the pubs closed they came piling in drunk. It was a recipe for disaster.”
Not all of Ali’s customers were so aggressive. He speaks wryly about former regulars at the Rajpoot, in particular a larger-than-life but well-meaning customer called Andy. During the early 1990s, Andy was such a regular presence that he was allowed into the kitchen to chat to the staff.
“[Customers like Andy] were still a little bit troublesome,” Ali says. “But we kind of had them on a leash. He [went into the kitchen and] asked, ‘What’s the chef cooking?’ and I said, ‘Staff curry. It’s what we eat.’ And it was a revelation to him that we didn’t eat menu food. I gave him a spoonful—it was just a basic meat curry, a bhuna—and he went silent for 10 seconds. He said, ‘Why the hell aren’t you serving this?’ He was totally bamboozled and I was too, [because] I realized we never sold what we ate at home in the restaurant. And why the hell didn’t we?”
Personally, I can understand the reluctance of many restaurant owners to prepare the food they ate themselves. Such food might feature ingredients or preparations that were new to many British customers, and much of their clientele was already hostile. “When the first significant wave of south Asian people settled in British towns in the 1960s, sometimes their neighbours complained that their cooking ‘stank,’” writes Bee Wilson in The Guardian. “Some white residents in Birmingham even went so far as to demand rate reductions from the city council to compensate them for the smell of spice.”
My Malay mother—who was a wonderful cook, and who prepared a Saturday curry with a whole chicken cut into eight or 10 pieces and potatoes, plus a generous tablespoon of curry powder—was deeply ashamed of the smell of her cooking. Even in winter, she would air out the house if aromas of fenugreek, cloves, and cinnamon lingered after mealtime. This was less about unwanted fragrances than her fear that when she opened the door, someone like the mailman would be appalled by what he smelled.
My mother was also deeply skeptical of Bangladeshi curry houses. She would mock them, and seemed personally offended by their “inauthenticity” compared to what she saw as the purity of home cooking. I remember her arguing that “they”—“they” being Bangladeshi restaurant owners and chefs—shouldn’t even use the word “curry,” as they had “Westernized” the dishes.
These debates about authenticity have long trailed in the wake of the Bangladeshi curry house. “In 1976, the cookery writer Madhur Jaffrey complained in her book An Invitation to Indian Cooking that these were ‘second-class establishments’ serving a ‘generalised Indian food from no area whatsoever,’” writes Wilson. But Sukhadwala notes that these kinds of critiques miss the wider picture. “A lot of [British] Indians seem to be angry at Bangladeshis for ‘ruining the cuisine’—their words not mine—because these people weren’t cooks or chefs,” says Sukhadwala. “They started by cooking on steamships in the 1920s.”
Viewing curry as a fixed entity that was bastardized to suit British tastes not only ignores its history but also disregards how dishes are organically shared, adapted, and tweaked as they migrate to new contexts and new cooks. As Sukhadwala’s book shows, every foreign intrusion over the course of the curry’s long history has imparted its own influence on the culinary category. A good example is in the 16th century, when the first Mughal emperor, Babur, brought with him Persian kormas, koftas, and dopiazas, a legacy that has since been folded into the broad understanding of “curry.”
Adapting South Asian flavor profiles for British cooks isn’t even a 20th-century innovation. “In the 18th century, curry powder was sold in some shops in London,” Sukhadwala says. “In the 1950s, [Brits] started adding curry powders to some stews.”
These factoids undercut the assertion that curry house fare is de facto “inauthentic.” As Jaya Saxena wrote in a piece for Eater, worries about authenticity are unevenly applied, and people of color and immigrants typically bear those expectations most. “Like gender, race, and money, authenticity is a social construct — something that we’ve given a certain amount of power to as a society, but that is ultimately ours to define, or to give up on entirely. It doesn’t have to be the notch against which we measure cuisine, but for it not to be, other major shifts are still necessary. People of color and immigrants would need the space to experiment without their identities getting called into question.”
Despite all these challenges—the long struggle to beat back vicious tides of racism, the difficult role that alcohol played, debate over whether curries were either “too foreign” or “not authentic enough”—the curry house had reached a high-water mark by the turn of the 20th century.
“There was a time when ‘going for an Indian’ on Friday night was practically a national pastime in Britain,” writes Thuli Weerasena in Vittles. “Their rise in popularity was exponential, growing from 300 restaurants in 1960 to around 12,000 by 2011. By the early 2000s, curry had entrenched itself so deeply that it had almost become synonymous with what it was to be British.”
“Take [preserving] Brick Lane. Do you want to museum-ify Brick Lane […]? Or do you pump in capital and gentrify the curry house, losing the essence of the Bangladeshi restaurant?”
A survey taken around the turn of the 21st century reported that the majority of Brits thought of chicken tikka masala as the country’s national dish, and Robin Cook, then the Labour government’s Foreign Secretary, picked up the narrative in a speech in 2001. “Chicken Tikka Masala is now a true British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences,” he said. “Chicken Tikka is an Indian dish. The Masala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy.”
But what’s happened since then? As Wilson and Weerasena write, the curry house has since undergone a steady decline, fed by a number of disparate causes.
One is a shortage of chefs—there are now around 15,000 unfilled vacancies for curry chefs, as Wilson notes in The Guardian. “Over the past few years, some of these jobs have been done by EU workers, from Italy and Eastern Europe, but after Brexit, there is no guarantee that this source of labour will continue,” she writes. “Meanwhile, most third-generation British Asian people have chosen not to follow their parents and grandparents into the curry business – and who could blame them, after witnessing their parents endure dwindling profits, long and anti-social hours, rude customers and racial abuse.”
“Economically, it has been less than viable for some time,” says Chatterjee. “And Brexit and COVID has made [the business model] even more unviable.”
There’s also the fact that many of the areas that were once considered “curry miles” are being squeezed out by the forces of gentrification. Brick Lane is one of them. In its heyday, quick-talking restaurant managers would line the strip, hard-selling their fare as potential punters walked past. “My brother…” I would hear them shout before launching into their pitch of how theirs is the best restaurant. “We have the best value, my brother.”
But now, among the longstanding Sylheti curry houses and South Indian grocery stores, there are craft beer bottle shops, specialty coffee shops, trendy boutiques, and street food markets. The numbers speak for themselves: In 2014 there were 35 curry houses on Brick Lane, and by 2021 this figure was almost halved (18), with two restaurants failing to reopen after COVID lockdowns were eased in 2021. Soon the Bengali street signs will seem like relics of a bygone age. “Local businesses and people will be driven out through rising rents,” said Apsana Begum, Labour MP for the neighboring Poplar and Limehouse constituency.
“Bangladeshis are being squeezed out,” echoes Ali. “It’s a tragedy. I’m on the side of the people. The area’s heritage is being stolen and it’s become unaffordable.” It’s a row he was drawn into when he accepted a commission to paint a mural of his dad at one end of Brick Lane, part of a broader project to celebrate the area’s Sylheti community.
Back in Birmingham, the Rajpoot is also standing tall, despite Ali’s father’s death and the restaurant’s later sale. It is also located in another gentrification hotspot, part of an area of the city that is rapidly changing, and where businesses that traditionally catered to local, working-class people are being replaced by bars and restaurants aimed at a wealthier clientele.
For Chatterjee, the options are either to fight to preserve what currently exists—even if that means encasing it in amber—or letting it be swept away by broader economic and social forces. “Take [preserving] Brick Lane,” he says. “Do you want to museum-ify Brick Lane […]? Or do you pump in capital and gentrify the curry house, losing the essence of the Bangladeshi restaurant?”
During our conversation, Ali and I talk about our young children, and the role that racism and violence played in our lives when we were growing up—he in Birmingham, me in a majority-white market town near London. I ask him if he’s told his kids about how his father was hurt badly by the wooden pole, or about the prejudice he stood up to. For the first time, he pauses, and eventually admits he shields them from a lot of it.
“I want them to be aware,” he says. “But I don’t want them to know the details of us fighting with pissheads.”
It’s something I grapple with, too. But when I take my children for a curry in my local area, I feel empowered—that the environments of these restaurants feel safe, that my kids can meet Brown role models and visit businesses which have such a long tradition. I’m also fully aware that my children—I have a two-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter—remain blissfully ignorant of the battle it took for the curry house to become a place for everyone. It’s why I also feel uneasy about taking them to restaurant chains such as Dishoom, which uses faux-colonial decor to create an ahistorical experience of Indian cooking.
Curry may still be a national dish in Britain, and the curry house remains a fixture of many towns and cities for now, but most forget that it was Bangladeshis who brought it to the table. Wherever the curry house goes from here—whether it gradually fades away, is preserved in aspic, or is gentrified for contemporary diners—all those who first built the institution bear the scars of that service.
“Desi Pubs” by David Jesudason will be published on May 17. He also has a free weekly email about Desi pubs here.
Words by David JesudasonIllustrations by Colette Holston
