Cyrus Todiwala

CT: I thought...when I actually asked my friend to send me menus from different restaurants, he sent me a pile of menus, I thought there was one printer in Britain who printed everybody's menus, he decided what every restaurant should have. And only on the menu were two things that represented name of the restaurant. So it was A, some tandoori mixed grill, and A, some hot special or something like that. Everything else, the menus were the same across the country. And I inherited those menus. So I came here and I had the same menu. But even though the names were Indian, the food represented nothing of that food that I knew of in India. So I was very nervous, because they use a lot of colour in the food, they used a lot of things like tomato paste and peppers and Carnation milk and raw coconut powder, and all sorts of things that we just did not know could represent Indian food. And that was scary for me, because I really thought I did not know Indian food. I thought, how can Britain be wrong? How can they be wrong in this country? They cannot be wrong, so we are doing something wrong. And I was almost convinced that I was losing my touch. Till I decided to throw it all out the window and then do what I thought was right.

ND: So tell me, what were the standard things on these menus?

CT: Simple. The names were there, the dopiaza, the dhansak, the pathia and all that. But nothing [...] those are Indian names but not one dish represented what it truly was like in India. And, yeah, everything was...you know, if you use one title, you had chicken dhansak, lamb dhansak, veg dhansak, prawn dhansak, fish dhansak, which is not possible because dhansak is only lamb, can only be lamb. And it is also the classical Sunday dish of our community. So...and that confused me. And then when I saw the dhansak, it was bright red in colour with a few chickpeas floating around, and something else. It was a disaster. It was a disaster. Yet I just kept convincing myself that no, they know what they are doing. But then I realized no, they don't know what they are doing, they are making a mess of everything. So we changed.

ND: So, why do you think the dishes had moved so far from the Indian original?

CT: I don't know. I don't know. It has to be a lack of knowledge of Indian cooking in the first instance. Because those who got into that field were not necessarily trained cooks or chefs or whatever. They just got in on default, some of them got in the business on default. And the food was conjured up with a perception in mind that the British public cannot eat the kind of food that we eat at home, perhaps. And I think that led to this perception, and then that led to this continuity which became the norm. And even today, most of the restaurants have the food that the British public still like.

ND: And Cyrus, what would people normally drink with your food at the restaurant?

CT: Well, they normally would drink, there’s...the British habit is to drink beer with Indian food. Of course, the Brits love their beers in any case, but their habit is to love drink beer. We encourage them to drink wine as well. And the whole idea is that you can start with a beer, you can move on to wines with your food. And that gives you a different experience, because too much beer with your food deadens your palate, makes it heavy, makes you feel heavy. A good glass of wine refreshes your palate with every morsel. And this is something that is very difficult to portray because it's a culture. It's a cultural mindset in the minds of the British public that yes, Indian food means beer, lager, nothing else. And it's been a battle for a long time. It's been a battle. And that's why we do all these events to educate people. Educate ourselves first and then people.

ND: And what would your Indian customers have with their meal?

CT: Indian customers, at lunchtime, they rarely would drink, one. If they do drink, they might have a small glass of beer maybe, but they would not drink so much at lunchtime. Indian customers, no. But dinner time, Indians prefer spirits. Evening times, Indians don't like drinking beer in the evenings. But they do prefer spirits, so they might have a whisky, they might have a rum, have gin, vodka, whatever. But they do prefer their spirits in the evenings. But by and large it depends on the flow, what the people are with them that are drinking. Given the choice, an Indian would have whisky any time.

ND: And where do the association of drinking beer with Indian food come about?

CT: I think it’s Britain. It's very British. It's very British. Because they think that anything spicy, anything hot, anything with chilli or spices and condiments must be washed down with lots of lager. And I guess it's also a pub drinking culture here. So the people drink in the pubs and they continue, they go to restaurants, they’ll continue with the same drink, maybe. You can't...you can go to France, people may be having a beer in a...in a bar or a pub, but as soon as they walk out into a restaurant, they order a carafe of wine or a glass of wine or a bottle of wine. And it's a different culture all together. The British culture is revolving around...it revolves around beer drinking. And so it is. And it's become much of a macho thing on a Friday night, you know? What the disgusting term that is used in Britain called curry. So it's Friday night, lager and curry. So curry and lager, lager and curry. So it's...it's...it's ingrained. It's very difficult to root out. Not that I mind. Not that I mind, but I would...it...it...it demeans the culture of the cuisine. It undermines the historical values that have gone into the production of a cuisine that is thousands of years old and why it originated, how it originated, what it does to the system, why Indian food were designed in a particular way. And this is a lot of effort that goes into cooking that food and it is destroyed within five minutes of somebody wanting to just glug it down with lots of lager. It's deeply rooted. It's a cultural issue.

ND: And where...where do you think the use of the word curry came from?

CT: Well, the use of the word 'curry' I think must have been here for years and years and years, because curry in the term with which it is expressed in Britain is not the term by which we Indians understand the word curry. Curry comes from a South Indian word called kahri, which simply means cooked in a lot of sauce. A lot of sauce meaning with coconut milk. And because the South Indian culture revolves around having curry and rice, because the rice-eating region of India, once you come to the 'V', it's mostly rice eating. And rice needs to be doused with liquid, whether it be lentil or curry or something that went in. Because the rice we use locally is not basmati rice, it's local rice. Local rice is sticky, it's starchy. Starchy rice takes more time to break up. So to break the rice up, you got to put something more wet on it. You can't eat starchy rice, because it will stick in your throat, so you need to wet it down. And that's how the cultures come. So that's how the cuisine evolved around what grows locally. So coconut farms in abundance along the coastal region so coconut was pureed down to make the base for the curries. There are hundreds of different curries. And I do believe that some English gentleman wanted to bring something back to Britain, maybe couple of hundred years ago, and wanted to make a curry back home. He must have been to this guy in Madras, who then devised a powder for him so he could carry just one basic powder back that could emulate everything that went into a standard curry. This particular gentleman there somewhere, he put in everything there and he ground it for the man, Mr Bolt or Bolst, so Bolst's was the first Madras curry powder ever made. When that came here, the word Madras got stuck to it, and the word curry got stuck to it. No relationship to anything that is cooked in Madras, in the region, or to a proper curry. Because when the English gentleman came here, perhaps his palate was sophisticated enough to accept higher flavours but the local people may not have been. So within that curry, to sweeten it down, went raisins and sultanas and pineapples and bananas and apples and all sorts of thing went in, so that became a whole mishmash. The Oxford dictionary also regards curry as a mixture of spices. You see? So this got stuck in the dictionary as well. So you can't prove it wrong to people. But curry is referred to as something which is dry, wet, hollow, straight, slanting, sleeping, everything is called curry, which is wrong. There is more curry served in Thai restaurants than in Indian restaurants. And yet you don't say that I'm going for a curry to a Thai place. You do say I'm going for a curry and all you do is go eat a chicken tikka. Chicken tikka is not curry. So, I mean, there's a lot one can speak about it. I don't know. I mean, I can go on for hours and talk about these things because it is something which has very much formed the foundation of the cuisine in this country.

• Tony Singh

Entry credit

Laura Owen