If it’s true that we’re losing our taste for curry, then I sympathise with the restaurateurs affected – but I have to say I’m not surprised. According to the owners of many of Scotland’s best-known Indian restaurants, we’re body-swerving them in favour of cut-price chains like Hungry Horse and Nando’s. This drop in custom is causing a crisis so serious that Sanjay Majhu, chief executive of the Harlequin Leisure restaurant group, has already sold four of his 14 Ashoka restaurants in the last year and hopes to off-load the rest. And there’s speculation that other restaurateurs will close up for good.
Now an emergency meeting of 150 owners of Indian restaurants across Scotland, chaired by Foysol Choudhury of the Guild of Bangladeshi Restaurateurs, is to convene in Edinburgh on September 8 in the hope of finding ways of halting the decline. First minister Nicola Sturgeon and Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale have been invited: Choudhury believes there’s a lot government can do to help, as restrictions on immigration and difficulties in obtaining work visas means there’s a lack of trained specialist chefs coming to Scotland from India and Bangladesh; tax rises and escalating business costs are also apparently to blame for the problem.
It is an interesting development, given that Scotland – and particularly Glasgow – is known to have a special fondness for curry. But problems have been brewing for some time: two years ago supermarket ready meals were being blamed for a dramatic drop in business of some 123 million diners across the UK between 2009 and 2012. In the same year, the Scottish Food Enforcement Liaison Committee (the part of the Food Standards Agency which monitors food safety and consumer protection policies) discovered that more than one in three curries tasted in Scotland weren't what was advertised on the menu, with cheap beef being used instead of lamb.
So I don’t think this is a problem governments can or should try to solve.
The industry should be looking to itself for answers. If it’s true, as is claimed, that the traditional curry house customer now prefers to chow down things like Nando’s hot peri-peri butterflied chicken, World Buffet’s Indian meals and Hungry Horse’s chicken Tikka ‘Titan’ Naan – massive plate of naan smothered in tikka sauce topped with chicken tikka, onion bhajis, plus chips on the side – for around a tenner a pop, then maybe they should let them, and choose instead to up their game and move upmarket. Trying to compete with this low-price-at-all-costs market simply devalues their unique and potentially stunning cuisine.
I’d suggest they focus instead on the increasingly sophisticated Scottish consumer whose knowledge of and interest in regional cuisines from around the globe is unprecedented.
The very term ‘Indian restaurant’ has become a generic anachronism, harking back to the 1960s when they first arrived and were a bit of a mystery to us. Given there are 26 different states in modern India alone, and they are bookended by Pakistan and Bangladesh, each with their own regional culinary identities, the very term seems woefully out of date.
The restaurants that are continuing to in bring in the punters are those that have acknowledged that our tastes and expectations have changed.
The days of the one-hit-wonder dish are numbered. Now diners are looking for individual flavours instead of one massive dish of the hottest (or blandest) sauce that swamps everything else. Tapas, or small sharing plates, of imaginative regional dishes, made to order from scratch, and using locally-sourced Scottish ingredients, are much more on-trend.
Diners want to know the provenance of what they’re eating and to discuss it round the table, and they’re prepared to pay for it. I’m thinking of pork cheek vindaloo and green chilli butter crab at Edinburgh’s VDeep, mutton mince curry and crispy velvet crab in a steamed roll with basil and mango drizzle at Tony Singh’s Edinburgh pop-up; oven-baked spiced haddock at Glasgow’s Mother India; monkfish with ginger and paprika at Dhabba, in the Merchant City, and Scottish lobster with Alappy-style moilee sauce at Haymarket's The Mumbai Mansion. They’re proving that people will reward quality with custom.
I wonder if, instead of trying to lure trained chefs from abroad, restaurateurs might think instead about training up younger members of their own communities in this country, much as the Scots-Italians have done. After all, the original immigrant families are now in at least their third generations.
In a radio discussion I took part in earlier this week, Choudhury said that was proving impossible because young people didn’t want to become chefs. I don’t blame them, if all they’re learning to do is the same old, and being paid close to the minimum wage.
If they were encouraged to be more inventive with regional dishes, paid more than the living wage, and encouraged to engage with their diners, then perhaps they would be more interested in joining the industry. This is what Scotland’s top chefs already do, and the result is loyalty. Apprenticeship schemes may also help.
Replacing sitar with bhangra, and flock with Farrow & Ball, might also do the trick.
In other words, innovate or die.
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