Indian is spicing up the market once again...

In the early-1990s dining in an Indian restaurant in the UK on a midweek lunchtime was deemed to be rather odd, but this is what my work colleagues and I did on a monthly basis. It enabled us to escape the office, annoy the non-curry club members with our pungent smells when we returned, and to also experience the cooking of Cyrus Todiwala.?

Todiwala's new outpost in Canary Wharf

He had come to the UK and pitched up in a restaurant called Namasté in Alie Street in east London just near my office and was producing Indian cooking that moved beyond the bog-standard dishes we’d all become accustomed to in restaurants up and down the country. These identikit venues with Taj Mahal-shaped windows largely fed a raucous post-pub clientele and did little business during the daytime.

Todiwala was going to help change this ill-informed, one-dimensional view of Indian cuisine and it began with his move on to much bigger things, initially setting up his own restaurant Cafe Spice Namasté nearby in Prescott Street. Now armed with an OBE he is about to close this 25-year veteran establishment and move into a new site in Docklands, which coincides with a period of arguably unprecedented activity and increasingly deep respect for food from India and the region.

There is no doubt many Indian restaurants have had a tough time over recent decades as younger diners have been brought up on a much broader diet of exciting cuisines including Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican. It’s been sad that many Indian restaurants have failed to adapt and their clientele has simply aged with them.

Recalling these hard times Vivek Singh, another pioneer like Todiwala whose Cinnamon Club restaurant celebrates 25 years this year, says it was a battle to remove poppadoms and chutneys from the menu and it was almost deemed sacrilegious to not have the likes of rogan josh listed.

Much has clearly changed in the UK’s food landscape and the hard fought battles of Todiwala, Singh and others have ultimately benefited the whole industry. And there is much more to come because at this incredibly tough time for the hospitality industry I doubt there is a more buoyant category than Indian cuisine right now.

In the space of a few months we’ve seen the announcement of Gunpowder opening its third site, which will bring its incredibly spiced dishes to a broader audience and prove the UK has upped its tolerance to spice. This has been helped by the wizards at JKS, which took the cuisine up a notch with Trishna, Gymkhana and Brigadiers, whose dishes did not hold back on punchy flavours. We can expect no less from its newly opened venue BiBi.

In addition, widely respected Sanjay Anand, of the famed Madhu’s in Southall, has recently opened an outpost in the Dilly hotel in London’s Piccadilly and Michelin-starred chef Atul Kochhar is in the process of opening five new restaurants, including one at London's Heathrow airport.

Although much of this activity is skewed to London it is not exclusively so because the one place I’m most excited about visiting is Opheem in Birmingham where chef Akhtar Islam is really pushing the boundaries. When explaining his thinking he suggests many of the people who came to the UK from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh dreamt of returning home but that dream for lots of families is now dying: “They’re British, they just don’t realise it, and they cling on to the food and culture of yesterday for familiarity and comfort. The food we cook at Opheem is definitely not that.”

The Vada Pav from Bundobust

Another expanding business outside the capital is Bundobust with outlets in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. It has cleverly mixed craft beer with Indian street food and proved incredibly attractive to a young audience who wouldn’t bother going into the nearest Tesco for a chicken tikka masala but will cross the Pennines for Bundobust’s Vada Pav.

This vitality in the category hopefully provides inspiration to the rest of the sector as it gets back on its feet. It also indicates just how far Indian food, and the nation’s tastes, have progressed since my early days receiving strange looks for merely eating lunch in Namasté. I had a Dishoom bacon naan from a meal kit for my breakfast recently and my children enthusiastically tucked in too. Progress indeed.

Glynn Davis, editor of Retail Insider

This piece was originally published on?Propel Info?where Glynn Davis writes a regular Friday opinion piece. Retail Insider would like to thank Propel for allowing the reproduction of this column.