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When I first tasted Indian food I didn't like it! It's difficult to believe now, I know, but when I was sixteen an Indian family moved next door to a friend. His mother, ever welcoming, invited them in for supper, and this friendly gesture was reciprocated with traditional Indian hospitality. I was included in the invitation and gained my first experience of real Indian cooking. This was well before Indian restaurants hit the high streets and their food was quite new to me, and too spicy for my inexperienced tongue. However, like the first tentative and unpalatable taste of a cigarette, there was something addictive about it that drew me back for more, and before long I was hooked.

Since then I have been able to indulge my interest and love of spicy food over a broad spectrum and a long period. In the early sixties, some six years or so after my first taste of curry, I spent some months travelling in the East, visiting Afghanistan, Pakistan (twice) and spending several months in India. Ten years later I was lucky enough to be able to return to India to work for a time. The job also took me to Nepal, so I was able to compare the differences in cuisine. These two periods in the Indian sub-continent therefore enabled me to gain a good grounding of Indian foods in many different areas and surrounding countries.

Since then I have continued to visit India regularly, visiting many different regions, from Amritsar in the northern Punjab to Trivandrum in southern Kerala, and building on my culinary experiences and interest . I have now been on ten occasions to different parts of India, and have also visited Sri Lanka and numerous other countries of South East Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Malaysia, Thailand etc.) where I have enjoyed their different varieties of spicy cuisine. In addition to these travels, I have relatives living in Bangalore, and they are lucky enough to have a chef who is only too happy to have me in the kitchen watching and sometimes assisting when we visit them. 

As for Indian food in this country, having got the bug at an early age I have been eating in Indian restaurants on a regular basis since they first began to appear in suburban high streets. As I once had a job that involved considerable travel within the UK I have been able to try them in many towns in England, eating Indian food three or four times a week (and I still eat curries two of three times a week). I still try to visit as many different restaurants as possible for comparison purposes, particularly since reporting for the Curry Club, although this gets increasingly difficult now that I travel less. More recently I have acted as one of the judges in the Medway regional heats of the National Curry Chef competition on a number of occasions. 

Finally, do I cook? Well, I try, and the results are all right (I have the seal of approval from an Indian friend of my son's, but I think he was just being polite!), although I can never quite capture that touch of authenticity found in the real Indian/Pakistani restaurants of Southall, Birmingham and the like, or the Indian sub-continent. But at least I try.

So there are my credentials for offering views and comments on Indian restaurants on this website, and I hope you'll agree that they are sufficient to give some credibility to the reports.

Good currying

Malcolm Wilkins