If you don’t live in London, or if you haven’t visited one of his “Cinnamon Collection” restaurants – the Cinnamon Club in Westminster, the Cinnamon Bazaar in Covent Garden, or the Cinnamon Kitchens in the City, Battersea and beyond the capital, in Oxford – you will probably still know and recognise the cheery and good-humoured features of chef maestro Vivek Singh from the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen, where he is a regular guest.
Or perhaps you have seen him on tour, where he is regular and welcome face at food festivals up and down the country, including Taste of London and the BBC Good Food Show. He is possessed with a kind of evangelism for spreading the good news about Indian (and especially Anglo-Indian) food that is reflected in his restaurant empire.
“TV has been phenomenal in really drumming up public interest in food and creating an insatiable appetite for it,” says Vivek. “I’d say especially in the last fifteen years or so, I’ve watched TV go so much beyond just pure entertainment, instead acting as a platform for established and emerging chefs.”
Fifteen years ago is in fact not too far off when Vivek originally hit the London restaurant scene, back in 2001, when he opened his first establishment in Great Smith Street, around the corner from Westminster Abbey. It really was the pioneer of a step-change in the quality and variety of regional South Asian cuisine in London. “I do think the perception of Indian cuisine has changed drastically in the UK in the past 20 years, in that it is viewed much more favourably nowadays,” he says.
His was to be a clientele that would go way beyond seeking the traditional Friday-night curry. At the same time, the appeal of the Cinnamon Club, and its later stable-mates, would also be wider than an expensive and rarified Michelin-style jet-setter menu, such as Zaika and Tamarind in Mayfair, which both won stars – the first Indian restaurants ever to do so – in the same year Cinnamon Club opened.
“Of course, there was the demand before,” says Singh, “but great quality ingredients have really elevated it to new levels, with real freshness, innovation and fusion coming to the fore.”
Vivek, together with chefs such as Karam Sethi (Gymkhana in Mayfair) and Asma Khan (Darjeeling Express, just off Carnaby Street) have been in the vanguard of a fresh generation of exciting Indian destination restaurants including the Mumbai-style Dishoom, UP cuisine at Lucknow 49, southern (Tamil Nadu) Ooty, or Olde Goa, the under-the-arches home-style of Gunpowder, Gujarati flavour at Rasoi, specialist Sri Lankan at Hoppers, pub-Anglo at the Tandoor Chophouse, Jikoni in Marylebone (ah, the fish pie!), officers’-club style at Brigadiers or tradition exquisitely curated at Kutir: “A small cottage in the middle of nowhere” – nowhere being deepest Chelsea.
Like Sethi, who spurned his father’s venture-capitalist career, Singh too was a bit of a rebel and shocked his family by foregoing his own father’s path in engineering and instead bringing the style and opulence of the modern, international Indian kitchen to London.
Singh was born in the West Bengal steel-town of Asansol in in 1971, and grew up in what he recalls as an Anglo-Indian atmosphere. Perhaps that is the secret of how he has cracked London wide open. He trained to be a chef at the Institute of Hotel Management in New Delhi before joining the luxury Oberoi Hotels group, and worked at several restaurants across the Indian subcontinent before moving to Britain.
His signature dish remains, however, deeply Indian: chaat, “a street-food snack that is great for a light lunch,” he says. “The base ingredients often include boiled potatoes, raw onions, black salt and coriander topped with tamarind and chilli chutneys.”
Singh’s rebellious and rule-breaking belief that flavours do not have to be restricted – to certain dishes or styles seen as traditional – has unleashed a taste revolution and elevated Indian cooking to a new height in the UK.
“Our menus have evolved a lot over the years,” he said, when interviewed earlier this year. “I now see the seasonal changes as more of a cycle, with an emphasis on the ingredients which we’ll be able to get fresh for each particular season. I’m excited to introduce a couple of new cold chaats as summer creeps in.”
We wonder what he has in store for us this winter?
