
The Great British Curry Crisis - aritraghosh007
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2165379e-b4b2-11e5-8358-9a82b43f6b2f.html#slide0
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lordnacho
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.

~~~
kspaans
> 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".

~~~
scrumper
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.)

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corin_
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.

------
Paul_S
“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
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.

~~~
Paul_S
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

~~~
yummyfajitas
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.

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

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bencollier49
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.

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pjc50
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.

~~~
programmernews3
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.

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ableal
_" 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)
)

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

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rubberstamp
> 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
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.

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

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

~~~
arethuza
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.

~~~
KineticLensman
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

