Curry and Cholera

For his birthday, I sent Egbert a gift certificate to an Indian restaurant close to his dorm, near King's Cross tube station. He is studying in London for the semester, and he loves Indian food, so treating him to dinner seemed a good birthday present. The restaurant is called Dishoom, and was rated by Timeout London as among the best.

London is one of the world’s foremost cities for Indian restaurants, having the most of any city outside India--and, amazingly enough, apparently even more than there are in Mumbai. I suppose that's not too surprising, given Britain's colonization of India: Brits living there got a taste of Indian food and had to have it once they got home. The first Indian restaurant in London opened in 1759, and there are currently six Michelin-starred Indian restaurants there (all in Mayfair). There’s even a whole street full of Indian restaurants: as you walk down Brick Lane, the air is full of curry, and people stand in doorways attempting to entice you with the rich scent of Indian food and special offers if you’ll only step inside.

When we were in London a few years ago, Egbert (then a rising senior in high school) and I did not get Indian food while visiting Brick Lane, partly because we’d already eaten at a gelato festival in Spitalfields, and also because we were looking for a bagel place I’d read about (which turned out to be rather terrible) and I was curious to learn what London bagels were like. But we did get Indian food in Soho a few days later.

We got Indian food in Soho because Egbert really wanted to see the Broad Street Pump. That’s where a 19th-century doctor hypothesized--and then proved--that contaminated water, not “miasma,” caused cholera, thus pioneering the field of epidemiology and moving medical science a major step forward in the development of the germ theory of disease. It was the main sight that Egbert wanted to see in London, so one afternoon we headed to Soho to see the Broad Street Pump. When we got there, we discovered a construction site, but no pump. Thwarted! Egbert was quite incensed, as if he’d traveled all the way across the Atlantic specifically for this one thing--all for naught. When we realized we’d found the right place but could not see the pump, we wandered around a bit and then decided to stop in at a nearby Indian restaurant for consolation and sustenance. We shared tikka masala (actually a UK invention). It and the naan were quite good, and we ate at a counter in the front window and watched Soho go by as we ate.
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This meal was Egbert’s most memorable in London, and last week he messaged me from there, asking if I remembered the name of the restaurant. I didn’t, but I remembered two things about it: it was somewhere near the location of the Broad Street Pump; and, what it looked like (the front of the restaurant was glass, with heavy ornate wooden doors). I searched “Indian restaurants in Soho, London,” and, focusing on those within a few blocks of the pump (now restored, apparently--we’ll have to go see it when I go visit him in a few weeks) I was able to zoom in using Google street view on each until I found the right one. At the time we were there, the place was called Imli Street. Now it’s called Tamarind Kitchen, and is apparently still quite good. We’ll have to go there (for old time’s sake) after we see the pump site. And we’ll also have to visit either one of the Michelin restaurants (all in Mayfair), or perhaps the oldest Indian restaurant in London, Veeraswamy (1926).

And, I am looking forward to being able to walk to Dishoom for dinner---so long as Egbert has found it meets his standards.

UPDATE: We did not go to Tamarind Kitchen, but we did go to Dishoom. Wow! a great dining experience. A fun place, outstanding service, and delicious (and different) food and drinks. Make sure you get the gunpowder potatoes and the black dal. (I found a recreated recipe for the dal online and made it myself. It's intensive -- it takes 24 hours to cook! It also calls for a LOT of cream. Yum.)