I’ve had a long-standing reputation for losing my temper in restaurants – not just my own, where I pathetically defended my behaviour if friends or family were there to witness a tantrum by claiming to be a perfectionist and if something wasn’t going right, I was perfectly justified in letting it rip.
The last time I did this was ironically in a restaurant called Temper.
But the award for my longest lasting tirade belongs in a Michelin starred Indian restaurant in Mayfair where I looked at the menu and slightly lost the will to live. I stared and stared at it and eventually called a manager over and said I think I’d been given a menu from another restaurant and the reason I thought that was there were no curry dishes on the menu.
It was about 15 years ago but I still remember his reply: “Yes, we don’t do that kind of thing.” It was a leisurely weekend lunch with a friend. Had it been a business lunch, I would have let it go but I was in no rush to accept that. I then asked to speak to the chef who came out and I requested he make me a nice chicken curry. He said it was not something in his brief to perform. I asked him if it was in his brief to keep his customers happy. About an hour later I got one of the finest chicken curries I’d ever had.
I suppose my own business career trajectory had landed us at this point where a fancy Indian restaurant thought it was beneath them to offer what other Indian restaurants did and what over a billion people did each day in the name of south Asian food – to have a nice curry.
It’s now 25 years since we opened The Cinnamon Club where we brought to life my plan to deconstruct the food of the subcontinent and mould it more through a French template. I recruited the fantastically talented chef Vivek Singh to head the kitchen and enlisted the help of my old friend Eric Chavot, then the holder of two Michelin stars. The only rule, I told them, was that there are no rules. We were definitely not going to do what other posh Indian restaurants were doing, namely serving traditional dishes at very high prices. You wouldn’t have recognised the majority of the dishes then because we’d made them up.
In the media frenzy that followed our launch, we got quizzed about everything. I gave an early interview to The Guardian about authenticity and rather cringingly, said this: “Authenticity is a big bugbear for us, and for Indian cooking generally,” Wahhab complains. ‘In France, no one’s conditioned by Escoffier anymore, so why are we so concerned that this is how a dish was made 200 years ago by some old git who’s been passing the recipe down through one Lucknowi family? You hear this story everywhere: “My chef’s got the only recipe because his grandad gave it to him, and his grandad gave it to him, and his father cooked for the king of so-and-so.”
People say to me, “Is your food authentic?” And my response is, “Do you mean good?”
People say to me, “Is your food authentic?” And my response is, “Do you mean good?” What does authenticity mean anyway? Flies in your food, cholera, dysentery? It could mean any of those. The truth is that all the classy Indian chefs emphasise their authenticity when it suits them and ignore it when it doesn’t.
It sounded smart and clever at the time but the world has moved on and we’re now facing the intersection between food and race (just recently an Indian academic couple in America successfully sued their college when they got complaints about the aromas from heating their palak paneer in the staff room microwave, which is a bit of a first world problem frankly).
But one of the things we’ve all grasped more since Black Lives Matters and the full unveiling of the atrocities under British empire rule is that many black and brown folk in the west seek affirmation from white folk rather than their own. Look at how many brown politicians right now in Britain – in all the major parties including our own home secretary who are calling for an end to immigration and to deport asylum seekers because they feel that by dirtying on their own, they’re “serious.”
I suppose chefs and restaurateurs including yours truly have not just championed innovation but have as part of that process of gaining wider legitimacy belittled their own to show we’re different
And I suppose chefs and restaurateurs including yours truly have not just championed innovation but have as part of that process of gaining wider legitimacy belittled their own to show we’re different. Here’s the context: Chinese, Mexican and Indian are called “ethnic,” but French or Italian restaurants are called French or Italian and as a result people pay a lot more for them. One commentator, Krishnendu Ray, in a podcast calls this “the hierarchy of taste” where the dining public have developed expectations of a culinary dining experience based on how they view the people of that cuisine’s homeland.
Complicated, eh? And you thought you were just thinking about what’s for dinner.
And when it comes to Bangladeshi owned restaurants it gets even more complicated because in the thousands of eateries in this category, there’s hardly a bhorta or a lau chingri on a menu because we’ve taken the chippy view that Bangladesh is connected to floods and famine whereas India is all Raj and mystique.
I have a strong feeling, given the re-activated sense of identity, that the tides are turning back towards authenticity. We yearn to know the history of a dish, its provenance, its story. Perhaps the real boldness that chefs could adopt is in not so much as making an ironic take on it, but to strive to render it even better than we’ve had it before.
So in a quarter of a century, we’ve gone full circle. For the next Indian restaurant I’m planning, our head chef and I will go out and find those chefs who I mercilessly mimicked back then and place them back on the pedestal they deserve.
And in case you’re wondering, I’m much better behaved these days.
Iqbal Wahhab OBE is a London based entrepreneur who founded Tandoori magazine as well as The Cinnamon Club and Roast restaurants. He is Chair of EQUAL, a criminal justice action group and is a past High Sheriff of Greater London.