How Britain made chicken tikka masala its own

A contested birth

Historians are sceptical of any single inventor. The dish almost certainly has many parents, improvised in many kitchens at once to suit a British taste for meat in sauce. What the food writers Peter and Colleen Grove conclude is more modest and more telling: chicken tikka masala "was most certainly invented in Britain, probably by a Bangladeshi chef". When Glasgow tried in 2009 to win the dish protected status from the European Union — an official birthplace, like Champagne or Melton Mowbray — the bid went nowhere, precisely because no one could prove it was theirs.

Curry came first, and early

Indian food, in some form, has been in Britain for centuries — a residue of empire brought home by returning colonials and the cooks they employed. The first Indian restaurant in the country, the Hindoostane Coffee House, opened in London in 1810, run by the Bengal-born entrepreneur Sake Dean Mahomed. More than a century later, in 1926, Veeraswamy opened in the West End and survives as Britain's oldest Indian restaurant. But these were exceptions; the curry house as a mass institution had not yet been born.

The Sylheti engine

The people who built that institution were not, for the most part, Indian at all. They were Bangladeshis — and overwhelmingly from one district, Sylhet. Many were former seamen who had worked the steamships out of Calcutta and Chittagong and jumped ship in Britain; a few hundred Sylhetis were scattered around 1940s London as cooks, cleaners and kitchen porters. From that toehold grew an empire. By the 1970s, around three-quarters of the "Indian" restaurants in Britain were owned and run by people of Bangladeshi origin, most of them Sylheti — a fact the menus, with their generic "Indian" branding, carefully hid.

Going for an Indian

The Sylheti restaurateurs made one shrewd commercial move that changed British social life. They stayed open late, after the pubs had closed, when everyone else had shut. The result was a national ritual: the post-pub trip "for an Indian," the lager-and-lamb-vindaloo end to a Friday night, a rite of passage embedded so deeply in British culture that it now feels indigenous. The curry house became, in effect, the country's late-night canteen.

A four-billion-pound plate

The numbers grew enormous. By 2016 Britain had around 12,000 curry houses employing some 100,000 people, with combined annual sales of roughly £4.2 billion — an industry built almost entirely by one immigrant community, anchored in places like the "Banglatown" of Brick Lane. In recent years that trade has been squeezed hard: tightening immigration rules choked the supply of skilled chefs from Bangladesh, and a generation of British-born children of restaurateurs has chosen other careers, thinning the ranks of the family-run curry house.

What's actually on the plate

The dish itself is a study in adaptation. Mild, creamy, orange with tomato and cream and gently spiced, chicken tikka masala was engineered — consciously or not — for a palate wary of real heat, a long way from anything served in Punjab or Dhaka. That is exactly why it works as a symbol. It is not a dish India exported; it is a dish Britain made out of Indian and Bangladeshi parts, for British tastes, in British kitchens run by South Asian hands.

Whose dish is it, really?

And so Robin Cook's tidy patriotic line conceals a sharper truth. The "British national dish" is a Glasgow-or-somewhere invention, most likely cooked up by a Bangladeshi chef, sold under an Indian flag of convenience, to a clientele that thought it was eating the food of the Raj. Chicken tikka masala is genuinely a portrait of modern Britain — but the picture it paints is of a diaspora doing the cooking, the adapting and the late-night labour, while the country happily claimed the result as its own.