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SPEAKER’S CORNER WHEN YOU GET ITALIAN CUISINE BEING MIXED TOGETHER WITH JAPANESE, IT MEANS FUSION HAS BECOME CONFUSION, ARGUES RESTAURATEUR IQBAL WAHHAB. HE RECKONS IT’S TIME TO KNOW YOUR ONIONS SEVEN YEARS AGO, I decided to open my own Indian restaurant in London. I had been involved in the restaurant world in various guises: as a restaurant critic, then a restaurant [...]
SPEAKER’S CORNER
WHEN YOU GET ITALIAN CUISINE BEING MIXED TOGETHER WITH JAPANESE, IT MEANS FUSION
HAS BECOME CONFUSION, ARGUES RESTAURATEUR IQBAL WAHHAB. HE RECKONS IT’S TIME TO KNOW
YOUR ONIONS
SEVEN YEARS AGO, I decided to open my own Indian
restaurant in London. I had been involved in the restaurant world in various guises: as a restaurant
critic, then a restaurant publicist and as the editor of a magazine called Tandoori. As a professional observer,
I took my curry seriously and appointed myself “voice of the industry”. Astonishingly, people took me seriously.
Having seen Britain’s 8,000 Indian restaurants produce largely similar dishes to varying degrees
of poshness, I decided that sticking to tradition, or “authenticity” as they called it, meant that curry
houses were all stuck in the same groove. I decided that what Indian food needed was a facelift, so I set
about merging French cooking techniques with Indian flavours. I recruited a team of highly talented chefs
from India headed by Vivek Singh, who spent their first three months in the kitchens of my two-
Michelin-starred, French chef mate Eric Chavot’s restaurant, The Capital in Knightsbridge, west London.
Vivek then applied all those skills he had picked up from Eric and set them onto dishes with Indian
flavours, and that’s how The Cinnamon Club came about. Fancy presentation, ingredients not normally
associated with Indian cooking… It’s curry, Jim, but not as we know it. For a long time, our customers didn’t
know what to make of it. We weren’t authentic in the sense that we weren’t doing recipes that some elderly
bloke with a long beard had devised centuries ago. Yet, we took exception to being called “fusion cuisine”,
even though this was very fashionable at the time.
In Australia and New Zealand there is perhaps not so strong an indigenous, native cuisine as
there is, say, in France, China or India; hence Pacific Rim influences took charge over
what restaurants there did. So, as Antipodean chefs began arriving in the UK, we started seeing
pak choi and lemon grass appearing on non- Oriental menus. At first, this was all very exciting.
But it soon became a case of the ‘emperor’s new clothes’. The more ridiculous a combination of national cuisines and ingredients, the more charged we became in saying we embraced it. And then the bubble burst; someone finally went too far. A restaurant in the west London dining enclave of St James’s created a fusion of Japanese and
Italian cooking. It was as if the owners, in plotting their own demise, were telling the rest of us to
wake up and come to our senses.
And by and large we have done it. Two years ago, myself and Akbar Asif, chairman of The Glorious
Group, which was created to open a series of upscale restaurants serving unpretentious food, launched
Roast at London’s Borough Market. It features classical British cooking using the best seasonal ingredients:
grilled pilchards, steak and kidney pudding, apple crumble. Too often, restaurateurs tell people what
they want rather than give people what they want. We don’t spike our potted shrimps with kaffir lime
leaves or put an onion bhaji on our fish and chips.
If this means we have come full circle in our culinary appreciation, that’s no bad thing. We have
been led astray with fads and modes as if food was like fashion – and it’s not. I doubt if even the most
die-hard Bond Street shopper could say that fashion is about life – but most of us understand that food,
at a basic level, is exactly that. What does it say about ourselves if we choose to eat in places because of
an elaborate charade of bluff and counter-bluff?
The British public historically have been bad complainers, mistaking this art form with bad
manners. We’re getting much better; not quite as good as the Americans but we have at least
learned to vote with our feet when we’re thinking: “No thanks – I don’t want cocoa powder dusted
over my chicken tikka, and if you think I want couscous with my roast beef, think again.”
This isn’t to bang on about cultural purity. What it boils down to is this: you’ve got chefs bored of doing things the way they have been done in the past, not diners. So guys, if you want to make foie gras samosas, just do it at home and
get it out of your system. Then, the next day, come to work and give me what I want to eat.
Iqbal Wahhab is Chief Executive of The Glorious Group which operates Roast
restaurant in London’s Borough Market
