Add the cinnamon sticks,
black peppercorn,
green cardamom,
cloves,
butter.
Put in onions, cook the onions down.
That’s Moiz Subedar, head chef and co-owner of Mela Tandoori Kitchen
in the heart of San Francisco's Civic Center district.
And he's making every South Asian restaurant staple:
Real aficionados don’t even call it “chicken tikka masala”
- to them, it's
And that's true from the British Isles to the California coast.
Our number-one selling item – by far, hands down – is chicken tikka masala.
Hey guys, I’m Sana,
and today we’re exploring the origins
of chicken tikka masala, its popularity –
and why the future of curry houses across the United Kingdom, in particular, is under threat.
OK, so the first thing you need to know about CTM
is that there's a lot of people who say it's not from South Asia.
It’s actually British. Wuuuuuut?!?!?!?!
Ok, kind of.
Chicken tikka masala's origins are often traced back to Glasgow, Scotland where a
number of restaurants claim to have been the first to cook the dish starting in
’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.
These stories often center around one particular Bengali
immigrant and a restaurateur by the name of Ali Ahmad Aslam, who ran the Shish
Mahal restaurant that still stands today.
Reports from the time say that a
customer at Shish Mahal sent back their chicken dish claiming it was too dry or
bland, and when it was returned to the chef he added a marinade consisting of a
can of tomato soup, yogurt, and a mixture of spices, or masala.
Except that might actually not be that accurate, either.
According to Sean Kerry, a researcher who
studied curry houses in the UK,
CTM's origins are actually a lot more complicated.
Some people claim its origins lie at the Moti Mahal restaurant
in Delhi. Others say Glasgow, and others say a Bangladeshi chef invented it
somewhere in the UK.
I think like all these questions it's very difficult to
know the historical truth. But, what I would say is that it's entirely possible
that it was simultaneously invented in different parts of the world.
Whatever the true story behind chicken tikka masala is, it took off, becoming a
signature dish for South Asian restaurants across the U.K. and the U.S.
The curry industry, we have over 12,000 curry houses.
And the curry house itself contributes
$4.2 billion to the British economy every year.
So it's very popular.
So when chicken tikka masala become number one it means that the
national dish is not fish and chips anymore.
In the early ’80s, CTM was so popular in the U.K. that it was being sold,
pre-packaged, at the popular Waitrose supermarkets.
By 2001, the U.K.'s foreign secretary Robin Cook
hailed chicken tikka masala as a truly British dish and
invention, with the chicken tikka being "Indian" and the masala being
"British" - because the British desired a gravy to be served with their meats
Chicken tikka masala is now a true British national dish.
It is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences.
And by 2009, Brits were consuming 2.5 billion pounds of CTM
per year, with approximately 65,000 people employed all around the U.K.
in restaurants also known as curry houses.
The new migrants that come in very often
are looking to eat the kinds of foods that they recognize from home. So if you
look at supermarkets and that kind of thing those reflect very often those
kind of new tastes. And the food market is a relatively easy one for new groups
to enter into.
But none of this would have been possible without the migration
of South Asians to the U.K. to begin with.
And that's a story in and of itself.
And it starts with … you guessed it: colonialism.
The British landed on the Indian subcontinent beginning in the late 1600s
as merchants, establishing trading posts across a number of cities
under what became known as the East India Company.
By the mid 1700s much of India had come under the control of the
company and a century later India had become a British colony.
One notable immigrant to the U.K. from South Asia was Sake Dean Mahomed,
who after becoming a captain with the East India Company moved to London.
There he established the
first Indian restaurant in the U.K. known as the Hindoostane Coffee House.
Sailors, so-called lascars from Bengal,
who were living in boarding houses and, of course,
those boarding houses the men would have been supplied with food and out of that
supply of food started small waterfront cafes.
And that's really the origins of
the present-day Indian curry trade.
Fast-forward to the 1950s and '60s when
immigration laws were eased, during that time the UK saw significant increase in
the number of South Asian immigrants.
And this changes a lot.
Mass migration really happens after 1947,
where you start to get smallish numbers, through the '50s
of migrants coming for work because the UK was looking for a kind of labor to
staff the shortages.
And then particularly for South Asians through
the '50s and 1960s. And then in larger numbers through the 1970s and 1980s when
you get family reunification, particularly from Pakistan and
Bangladesh. So that's when you start to get the formation of larger settled
communities across the UK, always linked to kind of areas of work.
Today, the South Asian community in the U.K. is approximately 5% of the
population, with visible communities in all major cities including
which is home to the famous curry mile.
There's also the famous Brick Lane in London's East End.
It's the home of the country's Bangladeshi community, known as Banglatown,
and it's known for its many curry houses.
This area of Banglatown was predominantly
settled by Bangladeshi families.
It's always been an incoming area.
You've had Jewish people, Irish people, all sorts of people come in here.
But while the South Asian communities grown considerably
over the decades, it does face a number of political, economic and social challenges -
all of which are showcased around curry houses in the UK.
Recently, immigration laws have deeply
impacted the ability of South Asian restaurants to bring over chefs and
waiters from South Asia.
This has resulted in a massive shortage of South
Asian workers and thus the shutting down of numerous restaurants over the years.
And with the lack of South Asian chefs, restaurants have had to hire
Eastern European immigrants who now work in curry houses in the thousands.
But Brexit threatens the employment of even those workers.
Brexit is going to happen very
shortly, not far to go. And we still don't know what going to happen, it's
deal or no deal.
And the thing is, if you don't have free
movements, then those European will be also stopped, and they'll have to have a
visa to come to United Kingdom.
Brexit is going to be a problem for the
catering industry nationwide, but particularly in a place like London,
where huge numbers of workers come from overseas. The curry houses are
particularly affected, because if the children of the restauranteurs are not
coming into the industry you're going to have to pull in people from overseas.
Former Secretary of State for International Development Preeti Patel
even tried to gain support for Brexit among curry house owners by saying that
the UK's withdrawal from the EU would save the industry by keeping Eastern
Europeans out and thus prioritizing South Asians for restaurant jobs.
The future of curry in this country is at risk because our membership of the
European Union renders us powerless to control our borders.
The Brexit campaign was sold to a number of South Asian
communities by people that wanted
us to leave Europe on the basis that, you know, if we weren't tied to Europe we
could expand back into our broader networks of people so that the routes to
South Asia to and from South Asia would open up. It was a very strongly kind of
nostalgic imperial idea that Britain could reconnect with its empire.
We are actually struggling for the skilled chef, even low-skilled people that are needed
within the curry industry.
So hence there is like three to four curry houses that are closing every week.
And that's not a good news for the British economy, neither for
the Asian community in the United Kingdom.
There's also the changing face of neighborhoods, as South Asian communities
like the Bangladeshi community struggles to keep their businesses and restaurants open -
especially in East London.
Because of gentrification they're simply being
priced out of the market and I think also they're being replaced by new
incoming forms of food. So somewhere like Brick Lane or the Curry Mile in
Manchester, which is very close to here, you'll see those traditional Indian
restaurants being replaced by kind of shisha places or Lebanese places.
And those reflect the churn of those areas because often Indian restaurants are
located in areas of high migration and and high kind of transition.
And then there's the straight up racism
that South Asian communities have faced for decades.
In the '60s and '70s violent attacks on members of the South Asian
community by white skinheads became commonplace
and they were fueled by anti-immigrant rhetoric of the time.
Fast-forward to the early 2000s: and South Asian communities are once again the target of racism,
and more specifically Islamophobia, following 9/11 and the 7/7 attacks on the London Underground.
Every day violence and hostility is extreme, and that's ratcheted up a lot since Brexit.
So incidents of Islamophobia, in particular are massively high, but I
think that's true across all South Asian communities as well.
And in the aftermath of Brexit -another moment of anti-immigrant sentiment -
racially-motivated hate crimes in the UK spiked to their highest levels ever.
And Islamophobic attacks in the UK have also increased by 26% in 2017, with over 1200
incidents reported.
So how do we make sense of this dissonance or disconnect
in British society between its ongoing love affair for South Asian cuisine
but also its long and complicated relationship with South Asian immigrant
communities.
It's always been a kind of very global society.
It's culture and identity has always been global,
but it's never been happy with representing
itself to itself in that way.