W hy are Indian restaurants in London so awful? I ponder this every time I emerge from one having abandoned a half-eaten plate of greasy dal and a mound of chewy paneer. It can't be, as free marketeers would claim, from lack of competition. There are hundreds of these places in the city and more than 9,000 in Britain, employing tens of thousands of people. Chicken tikka masala, we are told, has replaced fish and chips as the national dish. We hear about a culinary revolution in London in the past decade. So why do the city's Indian restaurants pose such a risk to both the palate and the digestive system?
I speak from long and bitter experience, as someone so predisposed to food from the Indian subcontinent that any other cuisine is a temporary and unsatisfying compromise. When I first came to London, the sight of restaurants with Indian names was reassuring. There, I thought, I can escape from the hair shirt severities of English cuisine.
There was something touching about the dark wallpaper and tinted windows - the reflex of a people still hiding from a perennially harsh sun in their cold, new habitat. And yet the first discordant note would be struck by the menu, which featured dishes (chicken tikka masala and balti) almost wholly unknown in India. Puzzlement would soon give way to unease as the surly waiter (always a bad sign) appeared with curries whose lurid colours - orange, pink and green - hinted at a kitchen devoted to weird chemical experiments. Brick Lane was particularly disappointing. No matter how many different places you tried or how many dishes you ordered, the much-touted multiculturalism of the street seemed squeezed into three or four heavy flavours.
There are, of course, pockets of excellence in Tooting, Southall and Wembley; some unobjectionable bhel-puri and tarka dal can be had at the canteens near Euston. The gourmet chefs of Zaika, Cafe Spice, Tamarind and many other posh restaurants offer a version of Indian food that, though served in alarmingly small portions, at least reminds you of the real thing. But if you are looking for unpretentious food of the kind most Indians eat at home, you'd do well to avoid most of the Taj Mahals and Tandoori Palaces littering the boroughs of London.
Perhaps I am being unfair. These places were never intended to satisfy the cravings of people from the Indian subcontinent - they aimed to arouse the leaden British palate, and they succeeded to a great extent.
The first Indian restaurant in London was opened in 1809 by Dean Mahomet of Patna, Bihar, who offered a place for "the Nobility and Gentry where they might enjoy the Hookha with real Chilm tobacco and Indian dishes of the highest perfection". But Indian restaurants took off in urban Britain only after the big wave of immigration from the Indian subcontinent in the 1950s and 1960s.
Most of these "Indian" restaurants in London were set up by immigrants from east Pakistan, or what after 1971 became Bangladesh. The chances of finding decent north Indian food are better in Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester and Glasgow, where the restaurateurs are mostly west Pakistani or north Indian. The inventions of British-Bangladeshi chefs had a certain roguish charm: balti was created in Birmingham, even though one legend for British consumption placed its origins in remote Baltistan, a made-up region between India and Pakistan.
But then the idea of "Indian" food is itself fraudulent, for there is no such thing. India has more ethnic, linguistic and religious communities than all of Europe; and this diversity is reflected in its cuisines. There is little in common between the lamb-heavy Kashmiri wazwan and the coconut flavours of Malabar prawn. Gujarat specialises in vegetarian savouries, while Bengal has a monopoly on milk-and-curd sweets that no upstart, not even north India with its Persian-inflected syrupy jalebis, can challenge. South Indian food offers delicate pleasures not available in the tandoors of Punjab. The idli and dosa, made of fermented and steamed rice and lentils, are the best-known dishes from the south. But there are infinite variations within what are described as Andhra, Kannada, Tamil and Keralan cuisines. Chettinad, Hyderabad and Mangalore represent separate and major evolutions of high-class gastronomy, even within south Indian states.
Little of this variety is reflected in London - largely because most of its "Indian" restaurateurs are from one part of Sylhet division in Bangladesh, a region not esteemed food-wise for much more than its freshwater fish. However, many more Indian cuisines travelled to the US. Immigration from India picked up in the mid-1960s, and the clusters of Indian restaurants - Jackson Heights in Queens, Devon Avenue in Chicago, Artesia in Los Angeles - that served communities of largely middle-class immigrants could not get away with an ersatz product such as balti.
They came from a cross-section of the Indian population and, consequently, there is a greater diversity of regional Indian food in New York than in London. Bisibeli bhath, a spicy lentil, rice and vegetable concoction, is rare in north India itself. It was pure delight then to find it at both Madras Cafe in the East Village, and Saravanaas on Murray Hill. On Lexington Avenue, there is a luxurious choice of south Indian restaurants. The encounter of Indian spices with Chinese cuisine can be savoured at Chinese Mirch, where the menu includes vegetable Manchurian, a dish wholly unknown in Manchuria.
The row of yellow cabs outside Haandi announces a reliable source of mutton biryani. And the queue of office-goers before Thiru Kumar's dosa cart on Washington Square Park shows that Kumarcould one day challenge Pret A Manger with the lunch-perfect lightness of his wares.
Returning to London I have found escapes from the ubiquitous oily mess of butter chicken and garlic naan. Chowki, near Piccadilly Circus, dedicates itself toIndia's regional cuisines. Few chain restaurants could be classier than Masala Zone, which serves undhiyo, a delicious Gujarati combination of mixed vegetables and fresh coconut. By relying upon traditional recipes, these establishments prove that indiscriminate fusion in our age of multiculturalism doesn't always produce the tastiest meal.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of 'Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India' (Picador) and three other books
Credit: Pankaj Mishra
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