Brexit curries no favour with South Asian chefs in Britain

Britain's curry houses are closing down at the rate of two a week, due to a shortage of skilled chefs and kitchen staff.

Chef Mohammed- Faizul Haque feels the heat in the kitchen at the Taste of India curry restaurant in London, on Thursday, March 9, 2017. Curry shop owners in Britain fear that the onset of Brexit will add to their woes and force many of them out of business. Matt Dunham / APShow less

LONDON (// Mohammed-Faizul Haque makes it look so easy.

He adds a pinch of cumin, coriander, salt, chilli and garlic to a pan of sizzling chicken in thick sauce — measuring everything by eye — and sends out a dish of balti kuchi chilli chicken to a very satisfied customer at the Taste of India restaurant in London.

But Chef Haque’s deft touch isn’t easy to replicate — and that’s a problem for Britain’s curry houses which are shutting down at a rate of two a week, due in part to a shortage of chefs and kitchen staff.

Curry restaurant owners backed the campaign to leave the European Union after they were assured it would lead to more visas allowing South Asian cooks into the country. Not only has the British government not delivered but now Brexit is likely to make the situation worse by cutting off the flow of East European workers who have increasingly filled the gaps in recent years.

“What’s happening since Brexit is even more restaurants are closing; we can’t get people from anywhere,” said Oli Khan, the senior vice president of the Bangladesh Caterers Association UK and a celebrity chef. “Curry houses are in danger.”

Brexit is just the latest problem to hit the South Asian restaurant industry in a country where chicken tikka masala is as much the national dish as fish and chips. Indian food is actually a catch-all term for South Asian dishes cooked in restaurants run mostly by Bangladeshis and fused with British tastes to create a cuisine worth an estimated 4.5 billion pounds a year to the UK economy. For example, the humble poppadom is not traditionally served as a starter but became one because the British were used to being served bread as soon as they sat down

Britain’s 12,000 curry restaurants are already struggling with competition from prepared supermarket meals, high delivery costs, and rising food prices from a lower pound.

“What is at stake now is not the heritage of Bangladesh, but the heritage of Britain,” said Enam Ali, owner of Le Raj in Epsom. south-east England. .

“I’ve given my life to the curry industry and I can see with my own eyes that it is disappearing,” Mr Ali said. “I really feel the government should intervene before it is too late.”

The concerns of the curry industry are felt all over Britain. From high-tech companies seeking engineers, farmers seeking fruit-pickers and builders needing labourers with prime minister Theresa May set to begin the legal process of Britain’s departure from the EU on March 29, all are worried about staff shortages in the future. An analysis from the Oxford Migration Observatory shows some 89,000 people from many of the EU’s newer members in the east are working in food and beverage services.

While leaving the EU will allow Britain to eventually limit European immigration, the government has so far refused to relax the rules for migrants from non-EU countries.

The rules now require migrants from outside the EU to have a job paying about 35,000 pounds (Dh159,843) a year — more than many nurses make in Britain. Curry houses, which mostly charge reasonable prices, cannot meet that standard.

In recent years, restaurateurs have hired Eastern Europeans, particularly Poles and Romanians, to fill the gap. Between 5,000 and 6,000 out of a total 150,000 people working in curry houses are East Europeans. With no common language, there can be communication problems in the kitchen. Many East Europeans are not at all familiar with curry, unlike previous generations of South Asian migrants, who often aspired to opening up their own curry houses.

Take Aga Pozniak, a qualified teacher from Lodz in central Poland. Though she now works front of house at Taste of India, she started out as a kitchen assistant.

“I had never been in an Indian restaurant in Poland so I had no idea about the Indian kitchen. I learned everything here,” she said. T

The lack of opportunities for advancement, however, means that Eastern Europeans rarely stay for long. And family-owned restaurants can no longer look to the next generation to fill the gaps or take over. As immigrants from the sub-continent have prospered and become part of British society, their children have increasingly moved into the professions such as law, medicine and accounting, rather than catering. With no new influx of kitchen staff in the pipeline, even those that want to stay in the restaurant business are discouraged.

At Taste of India, 19-year-old Sayem Ahmed aims to win a Michelin star for the restaurant and is studying business at Middlesex University to make that dream come true. But his studies keep being interrupted because he is needed to help out in the restaurant.

“I’d say the whole industry is in danger,” he said. “They really need to think of something for us.”