Bangladeshi food is ready for its global moment

Earlier this year, shutki made its debut public appearance in the west end of London.

Rez Rahman, originally an east Londoner and now based in Berlin where she runs Bangla supper clubs under her Roti Mami brand, was invited to hold a residency at Carousel which invites exciting chefs from around the world to host a series of dinners with a premium ticket price which its databank of obsessive foodies always snap up.

Her menu featured tenga shatkora fish broth, kosha duck tacos and fuljhuri pitha and rasmalai ice cream. But her showstopper dish was the shutki which she served as a paste with a runny egg and crisp potatoes. People loved it.

All of a sudden, all over the world there’s an explosion of love with Bangladeshi food. It started of all places in Australia when Kishwar Chowdhury made a name for herself on that country’s version of the TV series Master Chef where she wowed her judges with her grand finale dish of pantha bhat, aloo bhorta and fried fish. She called it Smoke. Rice. Water. That’s also now the title of her cookbook that’s going to make her the Siddika Kabir of the 21st century, this time on a global stage.

Cut to the other side of the world and in New Jersey, a Bangladeshi mother and daughter combo have created Korai Kitchen which has just been listed by The New York Times as one of the top 50 restaurants in the US. Despite their modest demeanour, there’s nothing meek or mild for these ladies – their website opens with probably my favourite ever dining instruction: EAT WITH YOUR HANDS. It’s about the only way to manage their Illish with begun and aloo.

Why is it that it has taken so long for our cuisine to take its place on the global stage? In India, all the major hotel groups have training schools for chefs to develop their skills in the national cuisine with all its fascinating regional variations and there’s at least one Indian restaurant in each of the Oberoi, Taj and ITC hotels that I’ve ever been to. So just over 25 years ago when I wanted to open an Indian restaurant like no other to be called The Cinnamon Club, I was spoilt for choice with all the talented chefs wishing to make the journey to the promised land of curry – London.

I secured a record number of visas – 10 – and we set the scene for a new era for Indian dining. Often predatory competitors, seeing the success we were lucky to have achieved, made sly approaches to our chefs, offering them more money and more senior positions and they would go with our blessing and good wishes because it was easy for us to backfill those vacancies.

It strikes me as an onlooker who’s barely spent a month of his adult life in the country of his birth that Bangladeshis perhaps don’t share the same pride in themselves and by extension in their cuisine as Indians do with theirs. Here’s how I got to that conclusion: During the Covid lockdown, I used my alone time (I’d recently exited Roast, the traditional British restaurant I created in 2005) to map out the culinary ventures that would make up the next stages of my business journey.

I’d been travelling through the southern states of the USA and definitely wanted to do something New Orleans inspired and one of my close friends is a two Michelin starred French chef with whom I want to do a next level Parisian brasserie. I’m now planning my return to hospitality and will find locations for both of those, but I’ve got a Punjabi one that has been itching in my head for ages which will be the first to come to life.

A question that keeps recurring with me is why London doesn’t have a Bangladeshi restaurant of distinction. In the Sylheti enclaves of east London there’s an occasional café serving blinding bhortas and bhunas, but I don’t know a single white person who’s ever been to one which probably tells you a lot about how successfully Bangladeshis have integrated into British society.

“If anyone can do it, it’s you.” That’s what people invariably say when I ask friends or family that question. So, with that burden of being about the only British Bangladeshi to have become part of the mainstream hospitality establishment (thankfully a burden now being shared by the brilliant chef Aktar Islam) I started looking into doing one. I came up with a name, a menu, a mission statement and then I came to an abrupt halt. Where are the chefs who can cook Bangladeshi food?

Britain’s curry houses, which 30 years ago were an essential element of the country’s social fabric, largely have kitchens run by Bangladeshis but they’re churning outmoded Indian food so wouldn’t be of much help. Instead, I thought I’d approach the head chefs of the Bangladeshi restaurants in Dhaka’s five-star hotels. But as, dear reader, you know, there isn’t a single dedicated Bangladeshi restaurant in a smart Dhaka hotel. That’s why I think you guys could up your game when it comes to national culinary pride. You wouldn’t book into a hotel in Paris and need to ask the concierge if there was a decent French restaurant around, now, would you?

Luckily that’s not the end of the line for that thought. Master Chef in the UK this year produced two Bangladeshi stars. Ismail Hussain, a head chef in a Mediterranean restaurant, won over judges with his haleem, which Marcus Wareing, one of Gordon Ramsay’s stable of Michelin starred chefs, told him was one of the best things he had ever eaten in his life. And Sabina Khan made it to the semi-finals where she presented payaji with muri, which she called “Bullets of Joy”.

I invited them both to join me for lunch recently at The Cinnamon Club to tell them that, especially with Ismail who doesn’t just know how to make Bangladeshi dishes but has actually headed the kitchen of a major London restaurant, I could re-visit the plan to have a place that properly celebrates our culinary ancestry for which I had a name but didn’t have a chef. Until now.

I also told them it wouldn’t happen quickly as I had some longer lasting itches to get out of my head beforehand. Ismail smiled and said: “We’ll wait for you.”

I hope they do.

Iqbal Wahhab OBE is a London based entrepreneur who founded Tandoori magazine as well as The Cinnamon Club and Roast restaurants. He is Chair of EQUAL, a criminal justice action group and is a past High Sheriff of Greater London.