Big news! Well, it's not exactly news, it was announced over a year ago but it still warrants a mention in this blog I think.
To mark the 200th anniversary of the opening of the first Indian restaurant in Britain, Cobra Beer conducted a survey to find 'The UK's Curry Capital' and it turned out to be my very own London Borough of Bromley!
What you may not know however, was that Birmingham's "Balti bosses" were angered by the survey.
Raj Rana, owner of Brum restaurant Itihass, hit out at the study. "Bromley is a nice, quaint, tourist town and it's a relaxing environment", he claimed, having clearly never been there. "But if you go back to the first Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants, they didn't settle in Bromley, they settled in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham" - Really? So they definitely didn't settle in London, no?
In fact, Asian immigrants, often seaman from the East India Company have been settling in London since the 1600's. While in the last century in London, Tower Hamlets and Southall amongst other areas famously became huge Asian populations.
Perhaps suburban Bromley isn't synonymous with the Asian community in the way Brick Lane is but its restaurants are invariably run by Bangladeshi's from the East End who cater for the huge appetite for curry in the area and this is exactly what the survey was based on.
Of course, Birmingham likes to claim the Balti as their own invention but the curry house ‘formula’ was pioneered in London in the late 1940s. And while London can trace it’s curry house history all the way back to 1810, 'The Darjeeling' became Birmingham's first curry house some 136 years later!
In fact, the first appearance of curry on a menu in London was as far back as 1773 at the Coffee House in Norris Street, Haymarket.
Birmingham has certainly played its part in the explosion in popularity of Indian food in this country but the facts speak for themselves; Bromley has one curry house per 853 residents, more than 10 times the national average!
So I’m sorry Liverpool, Manchester and Brum but; We, are, top of the league! Say we are top of the league!
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