From SBS Food
Five Indian restaurants have been awarded Michelin stars in the UK since 2001. Ed Charles investigates how the trend towards Indian fine diners is progressing Australia.
When Chandra Kanodia opened the Phantom India restaurant in June 1979 on Swanston Street in Carlton, just outside the City of Melbourne, it claimed to be the first Tandoori Restaurant in Australia. He had chefs flown in from famous restaurants in India to make the best Indian food.
Australians have always had a taste for curry but unlike in the UK there were few Indian restaurants to visit at that time.
“I would call it as the first authentic Indian restaurant in Australia as well,” says Kanodia who now runs Glendal Foods, a gourmet food manufacturer. “It was tremendously successful venture for us. It became very popular as the British population living and visiting Australia found us and rekindled their curry taste.”
In those days the the Indian population was small. And as the restaurant became successful Kanodia’s chefs left to open their own Indian restaurants. At the same time more immigrants arrived from India opening yet more restaurants. Davinder Bedi arrived in Australia in 1981 from Bombay, where his family has run hotels and restaurants for the past 75 years. He opened his South Melbourne restaurant Bedi’s in 1983 and it has now been operating for 25 years.
“There were hardly any at all,” he says. “You could count them on your fingertips. About ten to 15 – maybe about five reputable ones.”
Kanodia says that with the arrival of many more migrants and the growing taste for spicy Indian food the numbers of restaurants have multiplied. “Today there would hardly be a suburb where you will not find an Indian Restaurant or a takeaway food shop that is serving Indian food.”
The story of Ajoy Joshi is typical of many. He arrived from Hyderabad to Townsville in the late 1980s before moving to Brisbane. A trained chef, he started cooking the standard Indian restaurant fare – Butter Chicken, Rojan Josh and the rest. “There was nothing that you could say was the creation of the chef,” he says.
He moved to Melbourne to work in the kitchen of an Indian restaurant in Chinatown owned by a doctor. He then left for Sydney to work at the Jewel of India in Balmain before opening Malabar in Crows Nest on the Pacific Highway where he lifted the bar on Indian food by becoming one of the few places to offer southern style food and not have a Tandoori oven.
Since 1996 he has run Nilgiri’s, which is regarded by the Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Guide as one of the best Indian restaurants in Australia. Unlike many restaurants with their prolific menus trying to be all things to all people he offers five to six entrees and five to six main courses and changes the menu regularly.
But now he says he faces competition from some 17 restaurants within a 500 metre radius out of what he reckons are some 360-odd Indian restaurants in Sydney.
Australia is still way behind the numbers of Indian restaurants in the UK, 9,000 according to some estimates. And Chicken Tikka Masala, of which 23 million portions are said to be served in British Indian restaurants each year, hasn’t yet become quite so engrained in the Australian psyche. But bolstered by exponential growth in immigration of Indians, Indian food is becoming as popular and ubiquitous as Thai and Vietnamese food across the nation.
Back in 1986 just 2,100 Indians arrived as permanent settlers – about 2.1 per cent of the total, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Ten years later 3,700 arrived, representing 3.7 per cent of total migrants. And in 2006, the latest figures available from the ABS, 11,300 arrived making them the third largest migrant group after New Zealanders (19,000) and the British (23,300).
In Melbourne restaurateurs report that the kitchen hands that once would have been Italian and Greek and now more often than not Indian.
The question is: will this growth in popularity of Indian food lead to the emergence of fine dining Indian restaurants? In the UK in 2001 Zaika and Tamarind, fine dining Indian restaurants, were both awarded prestigious Michelin Stars for the quality of their food, wine and service. Since then five have been awarded Michelin stars.
Joshi reckons that the market is too tough in fine dining for Indian restaurants of this quality to emerge in Australia. But already we are seeing a higher class of cuisine with places such as British India and The Thali Room in Adelaide bring a new level on quality to Indian food.
Bedi says that he thinks most Indian restaurants are doing all right. “The quality of the food will always depend on the chefs,” he says. “And the quality of the fine dining will depend on the people who are operating them because they have to be professional people. Everybody wants to have a living and people do it. It is a lucrative business if you can run it properly.”