Back in 1979, I took my grandmother and her friend Frances to Monty’s in Ealing. Monty’s was one of the early Indian restaurants in London. My nan was in her 90s, and it was her first curry. We ordered the usual array of dishes – the sizzling tandoori, the Bombay aloo, the dal. My nan and her friend, both Eastenders, tucked in. They wondered why it had taken so long to go for an Indian.
In the curry house, we are somewhere different, somewhere with a bit of glamour even
Midway through the meal, a door at the side of the restaurant opened and in came Old Mr Monty, the patriarch of this establishment, about the same age as the people at our table. One of the waiters had told him that this was my grandmother’s first curry and that she was very old. Mr Monty didn’t speak much English, but he sat with us and ordered some extra dishes and refused to let us pay at the end. As we left, he gave a small bow. You wouldn’t get that in a Pizza Express.
As many as a third of the old traditional curry houses in the UK have closed. Difficulties in finding staff, rising prices and competition have eaten into the success story. The glory days, when every town had its own curry restaurant or two, seem over. There has been a lot of chatter about the need for the curry house model to evolve, to be more funky, more street food, more, God forbid, hip. But of course, that way lies oblivion because the traditional curry house has something that modernity can’t offer, and it’s more than nostalgia.
Growing up in Northolt in the 1970s, the local curry restaurant was truly exotic and even a bit daring. It gave us a taste for food with a bit of heat and spice. Then there was the heavy red velvety flock wallpaper, the wobbly wooden partitions and the Indian prints. It was incredibly cheap too. What I liked then, and what I like now, wasn’t really the food, it was the sense of being in a bubble, a world that seemed almost hermetic. In the curry house, we are somewhere different, somewhere with a bit of glamour even. In the same way, the working classes flocked to the old gin palaces of the 19th century, places where you could forget yourself and your circumstances.
Today, in this rough old world, when you find a classic time-warp curry house, it really is time to celebrate and lap up that opportunity to time travel. It is a total experience, not a confected one. I was in East Yorkshire lately and came across a classic Indian. And boy, it was packed. Packed with families and with people ordering chicken tikka masala, and poppadoms and washing it down with a few lagers. Really, who cares if the calorie count is on the high side. If the food bears scant resemblance to what you’d find in India or Bangladesh. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t push culinary boundaries.
None of that matters; in fact, it makes it better. Because what is the alternative if you live in Northolt or Nuneaton or Northampton? There are chains; they are everywhere. There might be the odd high-end place. Perhaps the pub has gone all gastro, rather than gastroenteritis. But none of these feel like ‘our’ restaurant. The traditional curry house is something that belongs to us all.
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