The main advantages restaurants had over pubs were more liberal licensing hours. Meaning that you could spend the evening on the piss down the pub, then tip down a curry house for some food and more beer.
Though the choice of beer in restaurants ranged from nothing to bollocks. If you were really lucky, there might be bottle-conditioned Guinness. The other choices being fizzy Bitter or fizzy Lager.
In my case, at this period, restaurants would mean curry houses. Pakistani-owned, I think. The default was three chapatis. Rice was a special order.
45p for a curry with three chapatis it was at Chakwal, handily located right next to the Pack Horse. A Tetley pub with a pretty decent pint of Mild. If not quite in the A-class of the Cardigan Arms. (At the time, a pint of Mild next door was around 18p.) You had to order rice specially.
Chakwal wasn’t even BYO. Totally dry. Not that it worried me that much. I usually went during pub opening hours. And when I’d finished eating, there was the Pack Horse and Tetley’s Mild waiting next door.
Posts
15 comments:
One of the striking things now about the so-called Curry Mile, the strip of south Asian restaurants along Wilmslow Road in Rusholme, south Manchester, is that there are no pubs on it, or on any of the side streets just off of it. The last one still trading, the Albert, shut a couple of years back, although it was never the same after Manchester City left their nearby ground at Maine Road in 2003, prompting the Irish landlord to retire to Australia and most of the customers to relocate elsewhere. At the southern end of the Curry Mile, the historic, but long shut, Hardy's Well was allowed to fall into disrepair by the developer who bought the building, then burnt down in suspicious circumstances, and the site is now being converted into flats.
Similar establishments in Bradford.
A soup bowl of curried mince (Keema Madras) a saucer with a couple of slices each of tomato and cucumber and a smear of mint yoghurt, and three chapatis. No cutlery at all.
Luxury!
Around the same 2.5 curry:pint price ratio these days?
Most "Indian" restaurants were owned and run by families originating in Sylhet which is now in Bangladesh but was, at the time, still in India.
Today nearly 80% of UK Indian restaurants and takeaways are still run by Sylheti origin families.
The good old Empire favoured certain ethnic groups to serve in specific trades. Prime examples being the Gurkhas in the military and Hong Kong Chinese in the on board laundries of ships. Sylhetis were preferred for employment in merchant (but not royal navy) ships. Sensible move as the workforce spoke the same language, had the same culture and could get on well together.
Sylheti communities sprang up in many port cities, even Sunderland and at the beginning of the mass immigration after the war, Sylhetis were granted special status and rapidly carved out a new trade in the restaurant trade.
On Tyneside most of them served keg Harp Lager!! WRT to chappatis and parotas etc, recently many Bangladeshi "Indian" restaurants are ditching a lot of the fake Indian stuff like Phall and Vindaloo and tending more to traditional Bangladeshi food, which is rice based.
https://theculturetrip.com/asia/bangladesh/articles/why-the-uks-indian-curry-houses-are-starting-to-celebrate-their-bangladeshi-roots
We in Ireland know that too well with the Anglo Irish having a lot of power until the mid 19th century in Ireland.
Interesting about the introduction of more authentic food.
Oscar
With a pub right beside the lack of beer was no loss.
Oscar
Was there a legal barrier to a pub converting to a restaurant in a pro forma way in order to get around the restrictions on hours?
Could they put a pot of stew on a burner in the back and make a few sandwiches and say they were now a restaurant? Or were there much stricter rules about how much of the business had to come from food before they counted?
Chris, Kashmir in Bradford is still like that. I now live in York and no restaurant have a keema curry on the menu!
Anonymous,
th3ere were restrictions on restaurant licences. For example, I'm pretty sure they were only allowed to sell drinks to accompany a meal.
There was nothing to stop a pub converting fully into a restaurant, but it wouldn't be able to operate in the same way as a pub.
Then how did gastro pubs come about?
Oscar
Stu
My brother took me to the Kash about 25 years ago, I was somewhat amazed that it was still the same then, now after living in Australia for the intervening period... well the mind boggles!
The Kash, the Taj and the Karachi were like the holy trinity around the bottom of Great Horton Rd in the mid/late 70's
.
Oscar
So far as I know there was nothing to stop a pub selling food to any extent they liked. There were some pubs where you were made very uncomfortable if you only had a drink. You had to sit outside, or in a very spartan public bar. I was a member of a village cricket team who would come into the village pub after a game (home or away) and shift a considerable amount or beer (we were always very thirsty after a match) but the Landlord* didn't like us as we got in the way of his food business.
*think of Viz comic's Cockney Wanker character, he could well have been the model.
Gastro pubs were just pubs with fancier food than was typical for pub grub at the time. From a licensing point of view, they were still just pubs.
The advantage restaurants had over pubs basically disappeared with the liberalisation of licensing laws in the 1980s when pubs were allowed to open later.
Sounds like a handful any way Chris.
Oscar
Is it an apocryphal story that some of the cheap curry restaurants in Rusholme had the cutlery chained to the table?
Post a Comment