Hello curry lovers! I have here a very interesting and I bet very tasty curry recipe. It's from a passionate chef named ANDREA REUSING and I thought of trying this recipe as soon as possible because it looks beyond gorgeous and yummy. Read the recipe below to know how interesting it is.
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WILD SHRIMP AND PEAS WITH COCONUT RICE
THE CHEF: Andrea Reusing
HER RESTAURANT: Lantern in Chapel Hill, N.C.
WHAT SHE IS KNOWN FOR: Asian-influenced fare made with top-notch North Carolinian ingredients.
Total Time: 25 minutes
Serves: 4
1 cup jasmine rice
1¼ cups water
¾ cup canned coconut milk
3 cups blanched green peas (fresh or frozen)
32 medium shrimp (about 1¼ pounds), peeled and deveined, with tails on
5 tablespoons unrefined coconut oil
1 cup fresh curry leaves (kalustyans.com)
1 heaping teaspoon garam masala (kalustyans.com)
1½ cups thinly sliced green garlic, both green and white parts (or four large garlic cloves, thinly sliced)
WHAT TO DO:
1.Set small pot with well-washed rice, water and pinch of salt over high heat. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes, or until tender. Off heat, gently fold coconut milk into hot rice.
2. While rice cooks, prepare sauté: If using fresh peas, bring a medium sauté pan with 2 quarts water to a boil. Cook peas 1 minute, then drain. Spread peas out on towel-lined tray to cool and dry. (If using frozen peas, skip this step.)
3.Sprinkle shrimp with salt and let sit 5 minutes. Rinse, pat dry and set aside. Set large skillet over medium heat and swirl in ¼ cup coconut oil. Carefully add curry leaves and stand back while the leaves pop in hot oil. Once crispy, transfer leaves to towel-lined plate.
4.Add raw shrimp to hot sauté pan and cook 10-15 seconds. Add garam masala and garlic and cook 30 seconds. Add peas and cook 1 minute, or until peas are hot and shrimp almost cooked through. Season with salt and remove from heat.
5. Stir in remaining coconut oil, if desired. Add fried curry leaves and season with black pepper and salt to taste. Serve while hot, alongside coconut rice.
(source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303745304576357390086228616.html?mod=googlenews_wsj )
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Showing posts with label curry meal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label curry meal. Show all posts
Friday, June 3, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Twin Falls’ Indian market brings new ingredients to your culinary adventures
If you don'y know anything about Indian food but you are very eager to learn then try following these tips in the article...
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On Monday, Dadhi Ram Biswa wandered the aisles of India Foods. Many of the ingredients he searched for weren’t available in Twin Falls before India Foods’ March opening, Biswa said. And though most of the customers at the store are from Bhutan, Nepal and India, the shelves offer plenty of culinary possibilities for Western dishes.
“I think I like this store,” the Bhutanese refugee said as he and his wife, Nirmala, looked for fruit, rice and curries.
Hasmukh Patel, owner of India Foods, said he decided to open the store after discovering many of his customers came to his Boise store from Twin Falls and Sun Valley.
“It’s too far, you know, to come to Boise all the way,” he said, adding that most of his Twin Falls customers are Nepali.
The Addison Avenue store is the second for Patel, who has operated his Boise location for nine years. In its three aisles, you’ll find plenty of dry goods — colorful lentils, basmati rice, chickpea flour and large bags of spices — plus jars of pickled mango and chutneys. The store also has a freezer section with samosas, naan, paneer and curries.
So you don’t know the first thing about cooking Indian food? Here are ways you can to expand your culinary lineup.
• Start with the spices. Chef Taylor Dougherty of Twin Falls said Indian spices and curry powders lend themselves well to Western dishes. Try adding curry powder to salad dressing or sprinkling turmeric in fried potatoes. Soups are an especially great template for trying new spices, Taylor said.
If you like pre-made curry powder from the spice aisle, try making your own from turmeric, coriander, cumin, cloves and cayenne pepper, Taylor suggested. You can tweak the recipe to highlight the flavors you like, and minimize or leave out the ones you don’t.
Her husband, Mike Dougherty, also likes playing with Indian seasonings.
“My wife and I constantly cook with spices that are part of curries, but we make it more familiar,” he said.
• Ask the staff. Chirag Patel, Hasmukh’s nephew, is almost always behind the counter at Twin Falls’ India Foods and is happy to give advice on ingredients. Have no idea what to do with chana dal? He can tell you how to cook the tiny beans (no need to soak them, just boil them in water). Never seen the spice called ajwain? Have no fear, just use it on cooked vegetables. As Chirag said: “Every day, every vegetable.”
• Find new life in familiar snacks. Look for Indian cookies and candies in the middle aisle. Even the potato chips are different, like the bags of Lay’s India’s Magic Masala. If you’re feeling especially brave, try the sugar-coated fennel seeds, located next to the microwaveable meals. They look like sprinkles, but taste them first before putting them on your cupcakes.
• Go for easy. If you’re into the flavors, but you’re not ready to make your own five-course Indian meal, try the prepared gravies, microwave meals and frozen foods. You can use them for a fast lunch, like the microwaveable potato-filled Kashmiri Dum Aloo, or as a supplement to homemade meals. Try adding cubes of paneer, a cheese that you’ll find in the freezer section, to spiced vegetables and rice, or boiling an egg and adding it to a gravy.
• Don’t fear. Even if you’ve never heard of kalijiri seasoning or muth beans, it won’t kill you to try them.
“Be a little more adventurous,” Taylor Dougherty said.
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Monday, April 25, 2011
A REVELATION: The Taste of India
This article have highlighted some good points. This is definitely a must-read. Curry? Who's really the master of it? Who bore it?
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As more and more Indian chefs move out into the world, it’s being said that London has become the capital of modern Indian food. But the future of Indian food lies in the same place as its past – in India itself.
When most Indians go to restaurants it is either because we have no choice or because we want the kind of food we cannot get at home (either foreign food or the kind that requires tandoors etc.). Rarely do we go to a restaurant to see what a great chef can do with Indian food.
This means that we have, in effect, no restaurant tradition. If you look at the oldest Indian restaurants, they were usually created for people who were unable to eat at home and had no alternative but to eat out. The Udupi restaurants of Bombay, for instance, catered to South Indians working in the city who had left their families behind. The Muslim restaurants of Calcutta were frequented by working men.
When the middle class did go out to eat and chose an Indian option (especially in the post-Independence phase) it either went tandoori (the Moti Mahal rip-offs or the Pandara Road places in Delhi) or preferred a bastardised Punjabi cuisine (Kwality, Gaylord, Volga, Amber etc.) that no self-respecting Punjabi ate at home. In no case was the chef’s imagination rewarded and in nearly every case, nobody even knew who the chef was.
So how does a cuisine with no restaurant tradition and no respect for the vision of the chef adapt itself to the restaurant-focused and chef-crazy twenty-first century? Good question. Only I am not sure there are any good answers.
Most discussions of modern Indian food lead inexorably to London, often described (by people who live in London, mainly) as the new capital of Indian cuisine. There is a historical reason for this.
The first proper Indian restaurants (not meant for working men far away from home) in the world probably opened in London. They catered mainly to ex-East India company men who had developed a taste for Indian food during their time in the sub-continent. Eventually, they died out (as did their patrons) to be replaced by cheap curry houses run by Bengalis from the Sylhet district of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
There were exceptions, of course. In 1966, Gaylord took Kwality-style Indian food (including tandoori chicken) to London and in 1973, Shezan, a Pakistani restaurant in Knightsbridge, was Egon Ronay’s Restaurant of the Year, an unprecedented honour for an Indian restaurant in that era.
But Indian food did not go properly upmarket and trendy till the Taj group (in the shape of Camellia Panjabi, then executive director of the Taj), opened the Bombay Brasserie in 1982. As good as the food at the Brasserie was, nobody (not even the Taj) claimed that it was a breakthrough in cuisine terms. This was simply good Indian food, reproducing authentic flavours with a few twists in presentation.
All that began to change in the Nineties. Till then, a successful upmarket Indian restaurant in London (as distinct from a Sylheti curry house) tried to do no more than imitate the food and ambience of a restaurant at a five star hotel in India.
In many ways the breakthrough was Chutney Mary, opened in London in 1996 by Namita Panjabi (sister of Camellia who would eventually leave the Taj to join Namita in London) which dared to experiment with Western-style presentation and introduced unusual flavours (such as lots of Goan and Anglo-Indian food) to London.
The success of Chutney Mary and the Brasserie led to a flood of upmarket Indian restaurants, some with Indian owners (Tamarind), some owned by big London groups (Zaika) and some with an entirely British clientele (The Cinnamon Club). As the cult of the celebrity chef finally caught on in Britain, these restaurants began pushing their chefs forward. Some argued that the Michelin guide followed the French tradition of recognising chefs rather than restaurants and so it made sense to promote the chefs.
A variety of Indian chefs, many of them drawn, bizarrely enough, from the Oberoi group which has no great reputation for Indian food in India, and some of whom were only coffee shop chefs, began to be launched by PR consultants as great Indian chefs: Vivek Singh (The Cinnamon Club), Atul Kochhar (Tamarind), Vineet Bhatia (Zaika), Cyrus Todiwala (a well-regarded Taj chef who made his name with Café Spice Namaste) etc.
It was the emergence of the super-chefs that led London restaurants to claim that their city was now the capital of Indian food. The first to get a Michelin star was Atul Kochhar who got one for Tamarind. He then moved to Benares and got a star there too. Vineet Bhatia got a star for Zaika, moved to his own Rasoi, got a star for the new place, opened another restaurant in Geneva and got yet another star. Sriram, a chef venerated in India for his work at Karavali in Bangalore, opened Quilon and finally got a star. And Camellia and Namita Panjabi’s Amaya (chef Karunesh Khanna) not only got a star but was also Restaurant of the Year when it opened.
The claim that these restaurants (and their chefs) have taken Indian food to the next level is based on several factors. First of all, they are chefs in the French tradition. You do not go to say, Rasoi to eat an authentic regional rogan josh. You go to see what a great chef like Vineet Bhatia can do with the flavours we associate with a rogan josh.
As is true of all great chefs, Bhatia will play around with flavours and presentation. He will drizzle truffle oil on his mushroom naan. He will infuse khichdis with flavour and serve them as side dishes. Most startlingly, he will push his makhni sauce (the gravy for butter chicken) into a gelato machine, turn it into an ice-cream and serve it next to a chicken dish.
At other restaurants, similar innovations abound. One of the tastiest dishes on the Amaya menu consists of fresh oysters with a ginger-coconut gravy. As Indians do not normally eat oysters on the half-shell, this is a first. At Quilon, Sriram does an Indian take on moules marinière, serving mussels with a Kerala gravy. These innovations led to the second claim advanced for these restaurants. At most Indian restaurants (even those in India) the menu seems remarkably similar: the same dishes crop up again and again.
But the London chefs have broken through that barrier. No two London Indian restaurants (at least in the premier league) have the same menu. This is a new generation of Indian food with new dishes being invented every day.
And the third and final claim is the simplest of all. A Michelin star is a mark of global recognition. How can we not admire chefs who have been honoured by Michelin and reviewed so favourably by British critics? They are people who have done India proud.
It is a powerful case made stronger by the fact that till recently, there has been nothing to compare the food of these chefs to. If you want to see how good Gordon Ramsay’s Royal Hospital Road restaurant is, you can compare it to three star Michelin restaurants in France and make an informed judgement. But given that we have no real restaurant tradition in India, what can you compare the London restaurants to?
And yet, the London chefs have their Indian critics. There is, first of all, the Indian taste factor. The vast majority of Indians I have met who have been to the expensive Indian restaurants in London have come back shaking their heads and refusing to go back. Few of them have liked the food.
The London lobby offers two defences. First of all, it says, because we have no proper restaurant culture in India, we are unwilling to accept any innovation. We want a simple rogan josh, a straightforward mutter-paneer, an ordinary seekh kabab or whatever. We cannot stomach the fact that the London chefs are serving new dishes. When we see something we have not come across before, we immediately conclude that “this is not Indian food” and close our minds. The second defence is that this is Indian food for the London market. It has to reflect the tastes of upmarket Brits who are used to expensive Italian or French restaurants. It is not meant for Indian palates.
Both defences are solid but it is not difficult to see why they do not convince Indians. It is all very well to say that Indian cuisine needs to move forward but at what stage does the food stop being Indian? Here, for instance, are some of the dishes recommended by the Michelin Guide at Benares: Soft shell crab with squid salad; Fried John Dory with peas and tomato chutney; grilled roe deer fillet with yellow pumpkin risotto and chocolate mousse with praline ice-cream.
There is a substantial lobby within the Indian food world which argues that all that the London chefs are doing is Frenchifying the food: plating it in the style of French restaurants so there is a prettiness to the presentation, reducing the spice levels for Western palates, using meats that are more popular in the West than in India (roe fillet, for instance), eliminating watery gravies, and creating food that seems more comprehensible to Western sensibilities.
This may well be a valid and interesting thing to do but it is not the only road forward. On the other hand, an indigenous restaurant tradition is developing in India and domestic chefs are doing many interesting things.
While you cannot call it a restaurant tradition in the strictest sense, there has always been a professional catering tradition in Lucknow and Hyderabad consisting of Muslim cooks who made the food for large weddings or celebrations on a freelance basis.
In 1977, when the Maurya Hotel opened in Delhi, Ajit Haksar, the legendary former chairman of ITC, was determined not to open the standard Kwality-style Indian restaurant that was ubiquitous in that era. He sought out Imtiaz Qureshi, a chef who ran a catering business in Lucknow, and hired him to handle the Indian kitchen at the Maurya.
Eventually, Imtiaz introduced his entire extended family to ITC and most of his sons, brothers-in-law, nephews, sons-in-law etc. were hired to work in the kitchen of the chain. But the breakthrough came in the late 1980s with the opening of the Dum Pukht restaurant.
Dum Pukht, a style of steam-cooking, has been a part of North Indian cuisine from medieval times (what was called Dum Poke by the Raj) but Imtiaz (and Manjit Gill, who was then executive chef at the Maurya) refined it for restaurant cooking. Then, they began updating traditional recipes.
The standout dish on their menu was the Dum Pukht biryani, an amalgamation of two different styles of biryani (Lucknow and Hyderabad) with many fresh touches. Each order was finished a la minute in the oven after a sheet of pastry had been placed over the dish to seal in the flavour. The biryani was not terribly authentic (it was certainly not the typical Avadhi pula o) but it became such a hit that its recipe soon became the standard for all upmarket restaurants everywhere in India.
Among Imtiaz’s other innovations was a rum-marinated raan (leg) of lamb also steam cooked under a pastry cover (purdah) along with cocktail onions and other flavourings. This was not a traditional dish but it quickly became a standard recipe.
Indian chefs argue that, away from the public eye and without the benefit of PR consultants, such innovations are constantly taking place. But like all successful innovations, they make their point so subtly that they rarely shock or startle diners. The true proof of their success is the speed with which they are quickly picked up by other chefs.
Among the most famous of these innovations is the black dal. Most North Indian restaurants serve some form of black dal, usually describing it as a traditional Punjabi dish. While it is true that a black dal has been cooked in Punjabi homes for generations, that dal is only a distant ancestor of the modern restaurant black dal.
Today’s black dal is only 50 or 60 years old. Like many of today’s North Indian classics, it was popularised (if not invented) by Delhi’s Moti Mahal restaurant which made tandoori chicken famous. It was at Moti Mahal that the makhni sauce (made with tomatoes, butter and cream) was popularised as a way of turning chicken tikka into a gravy dish (butter chicken or murgh makhni). When people asked for a dal that was as rich as the rest of the food, the makhni sauce was added to standard Punjabi black dal to create the restaurant dal we know today.
So, ask Indian chefs, is that dal an innovation or not? It is certainly more influential than some Michelin-approved kaddu risotto served in London.
If you believe Indian chefs, there are many such unsung innovations in Indian cuisines. For instance, the batter-fried bombil, a dish in which the Bombay duck fish (best known in its sun-dried form) is pounded to a thin fillet, coated in masala and then fried, which is a standard in coastal restaurants all over India, was probably invented by Bombay’s Gajalee restaurant. The crab in butter garlic, a favourite of European food writers on visits to Bombay, started out in the Chinese menu of Trishna restaurant (butter-garlic sauce is unknown on the South Indian coast) before becoming a so-called ‘coastal’ standard.
One of the criticisms Western food critics often make of Indian food is that it all looks the same: bowls of brown goo. This is not an unfair criticism but it stems partly from the fact that Indian food is meant to be shared. At a French or Italian restaurant, each guest orders individually. But an Indian meal usually involves a few dishes which are shared by everyone at the dining table.
Most upmarket Indian restaurants in London now try and plate their food so that each guest orders an individual dish. This has the advantage of helping reduce the brown goo problem because plates can be arranged prettily. But it also means that Indian food has to be reworked to suit the presentation.
A second and entirely valid criticism of Indian food is that it has scant respect for ingredients. Vegetables are cooked to nothingness. And chicken, meat and fish have many of their original flavours sucked out of them in the cooking process.
The point of much of Indian food (though not perhaps of tandoori cuisine which may help explain its popularity in the West) is the spicing. Far more important than the original taste of the ingredients is the way in which they are spiced.
This runs counter to the prevailing philosophy in the West where less is more and high quality ingredients have very little done to them in the cooking process. Chefs cooking for a Western audience make similar adjustments to Indian cuisine. Not only do the chilli levels go down but all spicing is usually reduced. A fish curry will become a piece of fish with a gravy underneath it. A rogan josh may show up as a lamb shank in a puddle of rogan josh curry. And so on.
Indians are prepared to be forgiving of this sort of adjustment in general. But many chefs from India argue that, in the process, the chefs cooking for Western audiences also tamper with Indian flavours. The gravy served below a sea bass may taste nothing like an Indian fish curry. The rogan josh gravy may lack the dish’s distinctive fat content.
The new area of conflict between chefs who cook in India and those who cook abroad is the authenticity of flavours. Are the upmarket London chefs bastardising Indian flavours – along with the presentation – in an effort to please English critics and the Michelin inspectors? Many Indian chefs insist that this is precisely what is going on.
Even as this argument rages, many Indian chefs have opened restaurants in India that marry Western style presentation with authentic Indian flavours. The most successful of these is undoubtedly Varq at Delhi’s Taj Mahal Hotel where Hemant Oberoi, India’s best known chef, mixes Western presentation (a mille-feuille for instance with a South Indian crab between the pastry layers) with Indian dishes though sometimes, when a dish requires traditional presentation, he dispenses with the Western plating. For instance, Oberoi’s Martaban Meat, cooked with pickle spices, comes to the table as a hearty curry in a pickle jar. In London, the dish would have consisted of a piece of lamb placed over a small pond of pickle sauce.
Varq is the most successful of the new wave of Indian restaurants but there are many others. Indian Accent, also in Delhi, is run by Manish Mehrotra, a chef who originally specialised in Thai food and who has lived in London. Mehrotra’s food is authentically Indian but his style is as smart as anything the London chefs can dish out.
At the Meridien Hotel in Delhi’s Connaught Place, Davinder Kumar, a chef trained in the French tradition, runs Monsoon which combines French cooking techniques with deliciously robust and earthy Indian flavours. Marut Sikka, a TV chef and food entrepreneur, owns Kainoosh at the DLF Mall in Delhi, and does a brilliant job of mixing classical Indian cuisine with more innovative dishes.
Bombay has been slower to catch on to the trend but ironically, it is London’s Michelin-starred Vineet Bhatia who runs the city’s most innovative restaurant. Bhatia’s Ziya is located at the exact same spot in the Oberoi Hotel where he once toiled as the chef at the Oberoi’s Indian restaurant. After some early hesitation, Bhatia decided not to compromise with Indian habits (no sharing portions of butter chicken for the whole table, for instance) and serves only plated food.
Even if you take the line that Westernised presentation is the future of Indian food – and there is no reason why we should accept that position – it is no longer necessary to go to London to find that kind of food. It is now readily available in India and most of the new restaurants serve a cuisine that is far more authentic than the UK version. After all, it is one thing to sell something to Brits as Indian food, quite another to sell it to Indians, who know their own cuisine.
When Brits go out to eat Indian food in London, they are eating a foreign cuisine just as Indians who go to an Italian restaurant in Delhi are eating something exotic. It is valid for the chef at the Indian Italian restaurant to tinker with the flavours to suit Indian palates. And it is as valid for the Indian chef to change his cuisine for Westerners.
But no cuisine can advance on the basis of food made for foreigners. The real evolution must happen in India and it must appeal to Indians. Fortunately, there is more of that going on than we may recognise at first.
At one level, there are the dishes created by restaurateurs over the years: tandoori chicken, black dal etc. These are more plentiful than we may realise. Even in the South, it’s not just coastal food that has been re-invented for restaurant guests. Even the medu vada, the staple of every south Indian canteen all over the country, is not a traditional dish. It was invented at the launch of a railway line near the town of Mettur.
At another, there is the assimilation of regional traditions into a new kind of north Indian cuisine. The Dum Pukht biryani which is neither entirely Lucknowi nor entirely Hyderabadi is one example. Most Indian restaurants – even those with no avant garde pretensions – serve a cuisine that is significantly different from the kind of restaurant food available three decades ago. The new dishes have emerged out of a synthesis of regional cooking styles.
And then of course there is the Frenchified school of Indian cooking. It may have started in London but it has many branches in India now. You can argue about whether the prettiness of plated presentation is against Indian tradition or whether the chefs necessarily respect the authenticity of Indian flavours. What you can’t dispute is that such restaurants do well all over the world and cannot be ignored. Some may serve food that causes self-respecting Indians to throw up. But equally, many are run by talented chefs who are genuinely innovative.
The truth is that there is no one way forward and no one capital of Indian cuisine. Those who claim that the London chefs are showing the way forward tend to underestimate the innovations taking place within India and make the mistake of arguing that Frenchification is the only route ahead. Equally, those who run down the London restaurants, saying that their food is not genuinely Indian, make the error of defining authentic Indian food too narrowly. At the start of the 20th century, 99 per cent of Indians had never heard of tandoori chicken. Does that mean that it is not an authentic Indian dish? Obviously it doesn’t: a great cuisine evolves over the years.
The important things to remember are (a) India is not a country like France. It is a sub-continent on par with Europe. Therefore, it does not lend itself to easy generalisations or classifications. At any given time, there is a lot happening in India – and to its cuisine – that may not be immediately obvious.
And (b) let’s never forget that the Indian middle class – the chief consumers of any restaurant cuisine – is only now coming of age. As the middle class grows in prosperity and influence, it will demand newer restaurants, better food and greater innovations in cuisine.
Is it likely that a handful of restaurants in a single British city can compete with the vastness of India and the affluence of the growing Indian middle class? London may have had a historical importance in the development of Indian food. And its chefs may have made some valid contributions.
But the future of Indian food lies in the same place as its past – in India itself.
(source: http://www.hindustantimes.com/The-Taste-of-India/Article1-688858.aspx)
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As more and more Indian chefs move out into the world, it’s being said that London has become the capital of modern Indian food. But the future of Indian food lies in the same place as its past – in India itself.
When most Indians go to restaurants it is either because we have no choice or because we want the kind of food we cannot get at home (either foreign food or the kind that requires tandoors etc.). Rarely do we go to a restaurant to see what a great chef can do with Indian food.
This means that we have, in effect, no restaurant tradition. If you look at the oldest Indian restaurants, they were usually created for people who were unable to eat at home and had no alternative but to eat out. The Udupi restaurants of Bombay, for instance, catered to South Indians working in the city who had left their families behind. The Muslim restaurants of Calcutta were frequented by working men.
When the middle class did go out to eat and chose an Indian option (especially in the post-Independence phase) it either went tandoori (the Moti Mahal rip-offs or the Pandara Road places in Delhi) or preferred a bastardised Punjabi cuisine (Kwality, Gaylord, Volga, Amber etc.) that no self-respecting Punjabi ate at home. In no case was the chef’s imagination rewarded and in nearly every case, nobody even knew who the chef was.
So how does a cuisine with no restaurant tradition and no respect for the vision of the chef adapt itself to the restaurant-focused and chef-crazy twenty-first century? Good question. Only I am not sure there are any good answers.
Most discussions of modern Indian food lead inexorably to London, often described (by people who live in London, mainly) as the new capital of Indian cuisine. There is a historical reason for this.
The first proper Indian restaurants (not meant for working men far away from home) in the world probably opened in London. They catered mainly to ex-East India company men who had developed a taste for Indian food during their time in the sub-continent. Eventually, they died out (as did their patrons) to be replaced by cheap curry houses run by Bengalis from the Sylhet district of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
There were exceptions, of course. In 1966, Gaylord took Kwality-style Indian food (including tandoori chicken) to London and in 1973, Shezan, a Pakistani restaurant in Knightsbridge, was Egon Ronay’s Restaurant of the Year, an unprecedented honour for an Indian restaurant in that era.
But Indian food did not go properly upmarket and trendy till the Taj group (in the shape of Camellia Panjabi, then executive director of the Taj), opened the Bombay Brasserie in 1982. As good as the food at the Brasserie was, nobody (not even the Taj) claimed that it was a breakthrough in cuisine terms. This was simply good Indian food, reproducing authentic flavours with a few twists in presentation.
All that began to change in the Nineties. Till then, a successful upmarket Indian restaurant in London (as distinct from a Sylheti curry house) tried to do no more than imitate the food and ambience of a restaurant at a five star hotel in India.
In many ways the breakthrough was Chutney Mary, opened in London in 1996 by Namita Panjabi (sister of Camellia who would eventually leave the Taj to join Namita in London) which dared to experiment with Western-style presentation and introduced unusual flavours (such as lots of Goan and Anglo-Indian food) to London.
The success of Chutney Mary and the Brasserie led to a flood of upmarket Indian restaurants, some with Indian owners (Tamarind), some owned by big London groups (Zaika) and some with an entirely British clientele (The Cinnamon Club). As the cult of the celebrity chef finally caught on in Britain, these restaurants began pushing their chefs forward. Some argued that the Michelin guide followed the French tradition of recognising chefs rather than restaurants and so it made sense to promote the chefs.
A variety of Indian chefs, many of them drawn, bizarrely enough, from the Oberoi group which has no great reputation for Indian food in India, and some of whom were only coffee shop chefs, began to be launched by PR consultants as great Indian chefs: Vivek Singh (The Cinnamon Club), Atul Kochhar (Tamarind), Vineet Bhatia (Zaika), Cyrus Todiwala (a well-regarded Taj chef who made his name with Café Spice Namaste) etc.
It was the emergence of the super-chefs that led London restaurants to claim that their city was now the capital of Indian food. The first to get a Michelin star was Atul Kochhar who got one for Tamarind. He then moved to Benares and got a star there too. Vineet Bhatia got a star for Zaika, moved to his own Rasoi, got a star for the new place, opened another restaurant in Geneva and got yet another star. Sriram, a chef venerated in India for his work at Karavali in Bangalore, opened Quilon and finally got a star. And Camellia and Namita Panjabi’s Amaya (chef Karunesh Khanna) not only got a star but was also Restaurant of the Year when it opened.
The claim that these restaurants (and their chefs) have taken Indian food to the next level is based on several factors. First of all, they are chefs in the French tradition. You do not go to say, Rasoi to eat an authentic regional rogan josh. You go to see what a great chef like Vineet Bhatia can do with the flavours we associate with a rogan josh.
As is true of all great chefs, Bhatia will play around with flavours and presentation. He will drizzle truffle oil on his mushroom naan. He will infuse khichdis with flavour and serve them as side dishes. Most startlingly, he will push his makhni sauce (the gravy for butter chicken) into a gelato machine, turn it into an ice-cream and serve it next to a chicken dish.
At other restaurants, similar innovations abound. One of the tastiest dishes on the Amaya menu consists of fresh oysters with a ginger-coconut gravy. As Indians do not normally eat oysters on the half-shell, this is a first. At Quilon, Sriram does an Indian take on moules marinière, serving mussels with a Kerala gravy. These innovations led to the second claim advanced for these restaurants. At most Indian restaurants (even those in India) the menu seems remarkably similar: the same dishes crop up again and again.
But the London chefs have broken through that barrier. No two London Indian restaurants (at least in the premier league) have the same menu. This is a new generation of Indian food with new dishes being invented every day.
And the third and final claim is the simplest of all. A Michelin star is a mark of global recognition. How can we not admire chefs who have been honoured by Michelin and reviewed so favourably by British critics? They are people who have done India proud.
It is a powerful case made stronger by the fact that till recently, there has been nothing to compare the food of these chefs to. If you want to see how good Gordon Ramsay’s Royal Hospital Road restaurant is, you can compare it to three star Michelin restaurants in France and make an informed judgement. But given that we have no real restaurant tradition in India, what can you compare the London restaurants to?
And yet, the London chefs have their Indian critics. There is, first of all, the Indian taste factor. The vast majority of Indians I have met who have been to the expensive Indian restaurants in London have come back shaking their heads and refusing to go back. Few of them have liked the food.
The London lobby offers two defences. First of all, it says, because we have no proper restaurant culture in India, we are unwilling to accept any innovation. We want a simple rogan josh, a straightforward mutter-paneer, an ordinary seekh kabab or whatever. We cannot stomach the fact that the London chefs are serving new dishes. When we see something we have not come across before, we immediately conclude that “this is not Indian food” and close our minds. The second defence is that this is Indian food for the London market. It has to reflect the tastes of upmarket Brits who are used to expensive Italian or French restaurants. It is not meant for Indian palates.
Both defences are solid but it is not difficult to see why they do not convince Indians. It is all very well to say that Indian cuisine needs to move forward but at what stage does the food stop being Indian? Here, for instance, are some of the dishes recommended by the Michelin Guide at Benares: Soft shell crab with squid salad; Fried John Dory with peas and tomato chutney; grilled roe deer fillet with yellow pumpkin risotto and chocolate mousse with praline ice-cream.
There is a substantial lobby within the Indian food world which argues that all that the London chefs are doing is Frenchifying the food: plating it in the style of French restaurants so there is a prettiness to the presentation, reducing the spice levels for Western palates, using meats that are more popular in the West than in India (roe fillet, for instance), eliminating watery gravies, and creating food that seems more comprehensible to Western sensibilities.
This may well be a valid and interesting thing to do but it is not the only road forward. On the other hand, an indigenous restaurant tradition is developing in India and domestic chefs are doing many interesting things.
While you cannot call it a restaurant tradition in the strictest sense, there has always been a professional catering tradition in Lucknow and Hyderabad consisting of Muslim cooks who made the food for large weddings or celebrations on a freelance basis.
In 1977, when the Maurya Hotel opened in Delhi, Ajit Haksar, the legendary former chairman of ITC, was determined not to open the standard Kwality-style Indian restaurant that was ubiquitous in that era. He sought out Imtiaz Qureshi, a chef who ran a catering business in Lucknow, and hired him to handle the Indian kitchen at the Maurya.
Eventually, Imtiaz introduced his entire extended family to ITC and most of his sons, brothers-in-law, nephews, sons-in-law etc. were hired to work in the kitchen of the chain. But the breakthrough came in the late 1980s with the opening of the Dum Pukht restaurant.
Dum Pukht, a style of steam-cooking, has been a part of North Indian cuisine from medieval times (what was called Dum Poke by the Raj) but Imtiaz (and Manjit Gill, who was then executive chef at the Maurya) refined it for restaurant cooking. Then, they began updating traditional recipes.
The standout dish on their menu was the Dum Pukht biryani, an amalgamation of two different styles of biryani (Lucknow and Hyderabad) with many fresh touches. Each order was finished a la minute in the oven after a sheet of pastry had been placed over the dish to seal in the flavour. The biryani was not terribly authentic (it was certainly not the typical Avadhi pula o) but it became such a hit that its recipe soon became the standard for all upmarket restaurants everywhere in India.
Among Imtiaz’s other innovations was a rum-marinated raan (leg) of lamb also steam cooked under a pastry cover (purdah) along with cocktail onions and other flavourings. This was not a traditional dish but it quickly became a standard recipe.
Indian chefs argue that, away from the public eye and without the benefit of PR consultants, such innovations are constantly taking place. But like all successful innovations, they make their point so subtly that they rarely shock or startle diners. The true proof of their success is the speed with which they are quickly picked up by other chefs.
Among the most famous of these innovations is the black dal. Most North Indian restaurants serve some form of black dal, usually describing it as a traditional Punjabi dish. While it is true that a black dal has been cooked in Punjabi homes for generations, that dal is only a distant ancestor of the modern restaurant black dal.
Today’s black dal is only 50 or 60 years old. Like many of today’s North Indian classics, it was popularised (if not invented) by Delhi’s Moti Mahal restaurant which made tandoori chicken famous. It was at Moti Mahal that the makhni sauce (made with tomatoes, butter and cream) was popularised as a way of turning chicken tikka into a gravy dish (butter chicken or murgh makhni). When people asked for a dal that was as rich as the rest of the food, the makhni sauce was added to standard Punjabi black dal to create the restaurant dal we know today.
So, ask Indian chefs, is that dal an innovation or not? It is certainly more influential than some Michelin-approved kaddu risotto served in London.
If you believe Indian chefs, there are many such unsung innovations in Indian cuisines. For instance, the batter-fried bombil, a dish in which the Bombay duck fish (best known in its sun-dried form) is pounded to a thin fillet, coated in masala and then fried, which is a standard in coastal restaurants all over India, was probably invented by Bombay’s Gajalee restaurant. The crab in butter garlic, a favourite of European food writers on visits to Bombay, started out in the Chinese menu of Trishna restaurant (butter-garlic sauce is unknown on the South Indian coast) before becoming a so-called ‘coastal’ standard.
One of the criticisms Western food critics often make of Indian food is that it all looks the same: bowls of brown goo. This is not an unfair criticism but it stems partly from the fact that Indian food is meant to be shared. At a French or Italian restaurant, each guest orders individually. But an Indian meal usually involves a few dishes which are shared by everyone at the dining table.
Most upmarket Indian restaurants in London now try and plate their food so that each guest orders an individual dish. This has the advantage of helping reduce the brown goo problem because plates can be arranged prettily. But it also means that Indian food has to be reworked to suit the presentation.
A second and entirely valid criticism of Indian food is that it has scant respect for ingredients. Vegetables are cooked to nothingness. And chicken, meat and fish have many of their original flavours sucked out of them in the cooking process.
The point of much of Indian food (though not perhaps of tandoori cuisine which may help explain its popularity in the West) is the spicing. Far more important than the original taste of the ingredients is the way in which they are spiced.
This runs counter to the prevailing philosophy in the West where less is more and high quality ingredients have very little done to them in the cooking process. Chefs cooking for a Western audience make similar adjustments to Indian cuisine. Not only do the chilli levels go down but all spicing is usually reduced. A fish curry will become a piece of fish with a gravy underneath it. A rogan josh may show up as a lamb shank in a puddle of rogan josh curry. And so on.
Indians are prepared to be forgiving of this sort of adjustment in general. But many chefs from India argue that, in the process, the chefs cooking for Western audiences also tamper with Indian flavours. The gravy served below a sea bass may taste nothing like an Indian fish curry. The rogan josh gravy may lack the dish’s distinctive fat content.
The new area of conflict between chefs who cook in India and those who cook abroad is the authenticity of flavours. Are the upmarket London chefs bastardising Indian flavours – along with the presentation – in an effort to please English critics and the Michelin inspectors? Many Indian chefs insist that this is precisely what is going on.
Even as this argument rages, many Indian chefs have opened restaurants in India that marry Western style presentation with authentic Indian flavours. The most successful of these is undoubtedly Varq at Delhi’s Taj Mahal Hotel where Hemant Oberoi, India’s best known chef, mixes Western presentation (a mille-feuille for instance with a South Indian crab between the pastry layers) with Indian dishes though sometimes, when a dish requires traditional presentation, he dispenses with the Western plating. For instance, Oberoi’s Martaban Meat, cooked with pickle spices, comes to the table as a hearty curry in a pickle jar. In London, the dish would have consisted of a piece of lamb placed over a small pond of pickle sauce.
Varq is the most successful of the new wave of Indian restaurants but there are many others. Indian Accent, also in Delhi, is run by Manish Mehrotra, a chef who originally specialised in Thai food and who has lived in London. Mehrotra’s food is authentically Indian but his style is as smart as anything the London chefs can dish out.
At the Meridien Hotel in Delhi’s Connaught Place, Davinder Kumar, a chef trained in the French tradition, runs Monsoon which combines French cooking techniques with deliciously robust and earthy Indian flavours. Marut Sikka, a TV chef and food entrepreneur, owns Kainoosh at the DLF Mall in Delhi, and does a brilliant job of mixing classical Indian cuisine with more innovative dishes.
Bombay has been slower to catch on to the trend but ironically, it is London’s Michelin-starred Vineet Bhatia who runs the city’s most innovative restaurant. Bhatia’s Ziya is located at the exact same spot in the Oberoi Hotel where he once toiled as the chef at the Oberoi’s Indian restaurant. After some early hesitation, Bhatia decided not to compromise with Indian habits (no sharing portions of butter chicken for the whole table, for instance) and serves only plated food.
Even if you take the line that Westernised presentation is the future of Indian food – and there is no reason why we should accept that position – it is no longer necessary to go to London to find that kind of food. It is now readily available in India and most of the new restaurants serve a cuisine that is far more authentic than the UK version. After all, it is one thing to sell something to Brits as Indian food, quite another to sell it to Indians, who know their own cuisine.
When Brits go out to eat Indian food in London, they are eating a foreign cuisine just as Indians who go to an Italian restaurant in Delhi are eating something exotic. It is valid for the chef at the Indian Italian restaurant to tinker with the flavours to suit Indian palates. And it is as valid for the Indian chef to change his cuisine for Westerners.
But no cuisine can advance on the basis of food made for foreigners. The real evolution must happen in India and it must appeal to Indians. Fortunately, there is more of that going on than we may recognise at first.
At one level, there are the dishes created by restaurateurs over the years: tandoori chicken, black dal etc. These are more plentiful than we may realise. Even in the South, it’s not just coastal food that has been re-invented for restaurant guests. Even the medu vada, the staple of every south Indian canteen all over the country, is not a traditional dish. It was invented at the launch of a railway line near the town of Mettur.
At another, there is the assimilation of regional traditions into a new kind of north Indian cuisine. The Dum Pukht biryani which is neither entirely Lucknowi nor entirely Hyderabadi is one example. Most Indian restaurants – even those with no avant garde pretensions – serve a cuisine that is significantly different from the kind of restaurant food available three decades ago. The new dishes have emerged out of a synthesis of regional cooking styles.
And then of course there is the Frenchified school of Indian cooking. It may have started in London but it has many branches in India now. You can argue about whether the prettiness of plated presentation is against Indian tradition or whether the chefs necessarily respect the authenticity of Indian flavours. What you can’t dispute is that such restaurants do well all over the world and cannot be ignored. Some may serve food that causes self-respecting Indians to throw up. But equally, many are run by talented chefs who are genuinely innovative.
The truth is that there is no one way forward and no one capital of Indian cuisine. Those who claim that the London chefs are showing the way forward tend to underestimate the innovations taking place within India and make the mistake of arguing that Frenchification is the only route ahead. Equally, those who run down the London restaurants, saying that their food is not genuinely Indian, make the error of defining authentic Indian food too narrowly. At the start of the 20th century, 99 per cent of Indians had never heard of tandoori chicken. Does that mean that it is not an authentic Indian dish? Obviously it doesn’t: a great cuisine evolves over the years.
The important things to remember are (a) India is not a country like France. It is a sub-continent on par with Europe. Therefore, it does not lend itself to easy generalisations or classifications. At any given time, there is a lot happening in India – and to its cuisine – that may not be immediately obvious.
And (b) let’s never forget that the Indian middle class – the chief consumers of any restaurant cuisine – is only now coming of age. As the middle class grows in prosperity and influence, it will demand newer restaurants, better food and greater innovations in cuisine.
Is it likely that a handful of restaurants in a single British city can compete with the vastness of India and the affluence of the growing Indian middle class? London may have had a historical importance in the development of Indian food. And its chefs may have made some valid contributions.
But the future of Indian food lies in the same place as its past – in India itself.
(source: http://www.hindustantimes.com/The-Taste-of-India/Article1-688858.aspx)
Curry Hotline; Bristol's best delivery service
Thursday, April 7, 2011
A MUST READ: Unlocking the secret to cool and creamy curries
Yes, curries are red, hot, and spicy BUT NOT ALL. This is the common misconception among people. Curries are indeed NOT ALWAYS red, hot, and spicy, I mean, those main elements are essential and shouldn't be absent but because of INNOVATION, the world of curry has taken into different versions which broadens it's delectableness. From columbiatribune.com, Wolfgang Puck gives us another tasty recipe.
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When many people in the Western world hear the word curry, they instantly think of something that’s hot and spicy. And, yes, some curries, especially the notorious vindaloo-style recipes from northern India, can be breathtakingly intense.
But, in truth, many curries, among my favorites, are those that are beautifully balanced stews or sautés, combining hot and mild, sweet and pungent seasonings to provide very pleasing, well-rounded experiences. Most, like the recipe I share with you here for Coconut Curry Shrimp, don’t even require bravery to eat them. It’s a perfect example of a harmonious curry that features something to please everyone.
The secret to its mild but full flavor is coconut milk, which provides a rich, creamy, soothing background for all of the other flavors. Joining it are pungent and biting garlic, ginger, and green onion; a medley of fresh citrus juices plus tangy lemongrass (look for it fresh in ethnic markets or well-stocked food stores, or substitute some lemon zest); and jam-like, tart tamarind paste (you’ll find it in the market among other Indian, Asian, or Latin ingredients; or you can substitute more lime juice). Chopped apple and banana simmering in the sauce add their own fruity sweetness.
And don’t forget the curry powder, of course. My recipe calls for a mild version of this classic blend of Indian spices, but you could substitute medium or hot curry powder if you prefer. Whichever you use, buy your curry powder in small containers, as it loses its punch over several months after opening.
Canned coconut milk is widely sold in well-stocked supermarkets and specialty foods stores; be sure to buy the unsweetened kind rather than syrupy coconut milk sold as a bar drinks ingredient. And don’t confuse coconut milk with the thin liquid you find sloshing around inside whole coconuts, which many people call “milk” but is technically coconut “water.” True coconut milk is an extract made by grinding up the coconut’s flesh with fresh water, letting it steep for several hours, and then straining the mixture. Be sure to shake the cans of coconut milk well before you open them, because their thick cream separates and forms a layer at the top of the can during storage.
Once you taste the wonderful flavor of coconut milk, you’ll want to keep using it to make more delicious curries. But the possibilities don’t stop there. Pick up a few extra cans and try the recipe I also offer here for a Coconut-Honey Granita. If you’ve chosen to make your curry spicy, it’s the perfect dessert to cool off and soothe any heat still lingering on your palate.
COCONUT CURRY SHRIMP
1/4 cup peanut oil
12 jumbo shrimp, peeled and deveined
1 large garlic clove, peeled and smashed
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
2 tablespoons chopped organic green onion
1 stalk fresh lemongrass, chopped, or grated zest of 1/2 lemon
1/2 organic green apple, cored and coarsely chopped
1 ripe banana, peeled and coarsely chopped
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
2 tablespoons curry powder, mild or spicy as you prefer
1/2 lemon, juiced
1/2 lime, juiced
1/2 orange, juiced
2 tablespoons tamarind paste
2-1/2 cups canned unsweetened coconut milk
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro leaves
2 tablespoons torn Thai basil leaves, or regular basil leaves
2 kaffir lime leaves, or 2 long strips lime zest
Steamed rice, for serving
In a large saucepan, heat the peanut oil over high heat. When the oil is hot enough to swirl easily and starts to turn fragrant, add the shrimp and quickly sauté, stirring continuously, just until they start to turn pink but are not yet cooked through, about 1 minute. Remove from the pan and set aside on a plate.
Reduce the heat slightly, add the garlic, ginger, green onion, lemongrass or lemon zest, apple, and banana to the pan, and sauté, stirring continuously, until they start to turn soft but have not yet colored, 3 to 4 minutes. Add the cumin and curry powder and sauté, stirring, 1 minute longer. Add the lemon, lime, and orange juices along with the tamarind paste, coconut milk, and cilantro. Raise the heat, bring to a boil, and then adjust the heat to a simmer and cook, uncovered, for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Strain the sauce and return to the heat. Stir in the basil and kaffir lime leaves. Return the shrimp to the pan and cook it until just heated through and thoroughly cooked, about 3 minutes longer. Spoon some rice onto each serving plate. Place 3 shrimp on top of each plate. Spoon the sauce over and around the shrimp and rice.
Servings: 4
COCONUT-HONEY GRANITA
1 cup low-fat milk
3/4 cup honey, plus extra as needed
1-1/2 cups unsweetened coconut milk
Put the milk and honey in a saucepan. Stir over low heat until the honey has dissolved completely in the milk. Stir in the coconut milk. Taste the mixture and, 1 tablespoon at a time, stir in more honey as needed until the mixture tastes just a little bit sweeter than you like.
Pour the mixture into a 13-by-9-inch stainless-steel baking pan and put the pan in the freezer. When ice crystals begin to form — in about 30 minutes to about 1 hour, depending on your freezer — remove the pan and, with the tines of 2 forks, scrape up the crystals evenly. Return the pan to the freezer and repeat the process every 30 minutes to 1 hour, until the mixture is frozen completely, with an icy, granular texture. If not serving immediately, transfer to an airtight freezer container.
Before serving, scrape up the crystals again. Use a large spoon or ice cream scoop to transfer to individual chilled serving dishes.
Servings: 4
Curry Hotline; Bristol's best delivery service
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
2 FOR 1 OFFER AT CURRY HOTLINE
Enjoy eating your favourite curry in a very reasonable price! In case you don’t know this yet, CURRY HOTLINE BRISTOL is showcasing their NEWEST 2 FOR 1 OFFER!
Starting last March Curry Hotline launched their ever affordable treat to all through the 2 FOR 1 OFFER. If you are asking what this 2 FOR 1 OFFER is? It’s an offer in which if you order two main dishes from the numerous list we have in our menu you will get a second dish for FREE! There’s more! If you spend the amount of £10 or more you will get a FREE portion of Bombay Potato or a sparkling bottle of wine (restaurant’s choice) but if you want to choose between a portion of Bombay Potato or a red wine or a white wine then you can get it by simply spending £20.
We are also giving you special set meals for 2 person vegetarian or not, please check out our menu. If you are too busy to visit our restaurant you can always give us a quick call by just dialing 0117 908 6611 and we will deliver it to you as fast as lightning!!
We are OPEN EVERYDAY 6pm 12 midnight so visit us at 72 Stapleton Road, Eastville, Bristol BS5 0RB. If you want to keep updated, join our mailing list at www.dailyspecialls.com!!
Curry Hotline: Good quality, freshly prepared Indian food brought direct to your door!
Saturday, November 13, 2010
‘I’d like to settle the bill for that Indian meal I had 13 years ago’
This was an interesting story I read.. it appeared in the Western Mail on 21st Mar 2009. Western Mail is Wales newspaper and the story is by Robin Turner.. It proves one thing though that the man has a very good memory. Maybe good memory or recall like that is the direct result of eating curry. Then again, that was 13 years ago.
Paying his bill was an honourable thing to do and I take my proverbial hat off to the man in question. Such actions do demonstrate decency and values that everyone should have.. I wanted to share this story with everyone because there is an important lesson in this story. Please read it, share it with everyone in your circle and learn the lesson to help you in whatever you do in your life..
Clearly, the diner is an economist because he paid £60 for a meal that cost £10 at the time 13 years. Evidently, he factored in the inflationary element so that it is in par with today's values. That said, the twist in the story is that the restaurant ... well you read the story to find out what happened..
A GUILTY diner who left an Indian restaurant 13 years ago without paying has handed in a note of apology at a Welsh police station plus £60 “to settle the bill”.
George Michael was topping the charts with Jesus to a Child when the anonymous man ate his curry in a restaurant in Mumbles, Swansea, and Will Smith was breaking cinema box office records with sci-fi hit Independence Day.
In the note, which police believe was written by a man, the culprit tells officers he cannot remember the restaurant’s name but asks them to track the owner down.
Officers believe it was the Seaview Indian Restaurant which was renamed the Aroma Indian Restaurant, and demolished two years ago to make way for a block of flats.
Click here to find out more!
They are appealing for anyone who can remember the owners to come forward.
In the typewritten letter handed in at Swansea’s Cockett Police Station, the guilty man wrote: “Dear officer, I have enclosed a sum of £60 as a way of compensation for not paying for food at a restaurant in 1996.
“The total sum for the meal and drink was under £10.
“However, I have decided to pay a larger sum as a way of compensation.
“I actually forgot that I didn’t pay the restaurant owner for the meal, drink and waiter service.
“But now that I have remembered I would like to pay the restaurant owner the money that is owed to him/her.
“I would appreciate it greatly if you could contact the owner and pay the money that is owed him.
“The problem is that the restaurant has closed down. It was an Indian restaurant situated on Mumbles Road, across the road from Verdi’s in Mumbles, next to the old Pilot public house.
“Please could you give my apologies to the owner. Thanking you.”
A police spokesman said: “It seems the author has had a pang of conscience and wishes to repay the debt, with some inflation.
“It’s a long time for someone to have a guilty conscience but it’s a case of better late than never.”
The restaurant had been a feature of Mumbles for decades and was known as the Canopic tea rooms as locals claimed it was named after the Titanic’s sister ship The Canopic and was decorated with wood panelling from the vessel.
Acting Chief Inspector Steve Jones said yesterday: “We’ll not be putting too many resources into this investigation but we want to do our best to help get this money where it should be... otherwise it will go into central funds.
“It’s got to be one of the strangest cases of guilty conscience late on that we’ve dealt with.”
Curry Hotline; Bristol's best delivery service
Paying his bill was an honourable thing to do and I take my proverbial hat off to the man in question. Such actions do demonstrate decency and values that everyone should have.. I wanted to share this story with everyone because there is an important lesson in this story. Please read it, share it with everyone in your circle and learn the lesson to help you in whatever you do in your life..
Clearly, the diner is an economist because he paid £60 for a meal that cost £10 at the time 13 years. Evidently, he factored in the inflationary element so that it is in par with today's values. That said, the twist in the story is that the restaurant ... well you read the story to find out what happened..
A GUILTY diner who left an Indian restaurant 13 years ago without paying has handed in a note of apology at a Welsh police station plus £60 “to settle the bill”.
George Michael was topping the charts with Jesus to a Child when the anonymous man ate his curry in a restaurant in Mumbles, Swansea, and Will Smith was breaking cinema box office records with sci-fi hit Independence Day.
In the note, which police believe was written by a man, the culprit tells officers he cannot remember the restaurant’s name but asks them to track the owner down.
Officers believe it was the Seaview Indian Restaurant which was renamed the Aroma Indian Restaurant, and demolished two years ago to make way for a block of flats.
Click here to find out more!
They are appealing for anyone who can remember the owners to come forward.
In the typewritten letter handed in at Swansea’s Cockett Police Station, the guilty man wrote: “Dear officer, I have enclosed a sum of £60 as a way of compensation for not paying for food at a restaurant in 1996.
“The total sum for the meal and drink was under £10.
“However, I have decided to pay a larger sum as a way of compensation.
“I actually forgot that I didn’t pay the restaurant owner for the meal, drink and waiter service.
“But now that I have remembered I would like to pay the restaurant owner the money that is owed to him/her.
“I would appreciate it greatly if you could contact the owner and pay the money that is owed him.
“The problem is that the restaurant has closed down. It was an Indian restaurant situated on Mumbles Road, across the road from Verdi’s in Mumbles, next to the old Pilot public house.
“Please could you give my apologies to the owner. Thanking you.”
A police spokesman said: “It seems the author has had a pang of conscience and wishes to repay the debt, with some inflation.
“It’s a long time for someone to have a guilty conscience but it’s a case of better late than never.”
The restaurant had been a feature of Mumbles for decades and was known as the Canopic tea rooms as locals claimed it was named after the Titanic’s sister ship The Canopic and was decorated with wood panelling from the vessel.
Acting Chief Inspector Steve Jones said yesterday: “We’ll not be putting too many resources into this investigation but we want to do our best to help get this money where it should be... otherwise it will go into central funds.
“It’s got to be one of the strangest cases of guilty conscience late on that we’ve dealt with.”
Curry Hotline; Bristol's best delivery service
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