Is it chocolate mint time for Indian restaurants?
I was interested to read this article in the FT about the decline of the Indian takeaway sector in the UK: it seems times are tough for curry houses, with costs up, margins being squeezed and immigration controls making it hard to find skilled cooks. Business is bad, and the market's shrinking. I think Jonathan Guthrie's analysis gives too much credence to the kind of gripes you can expect from small or medium-sized businessmen faced with a difficult trading environment. Even if rice and spices are more expensive to source - what about the increasing vegetarian market? That's an opportunity to increase margins. What about the profits to be made from selling Cobra and Kingfisher?
In reality, this is about maturity and competition. Britain is surely now saturated with curry houses: new ones must find life very tough, and long-established ones have plenty of rivals making life much harder than it was in 1975, say, when Indian food seemed an exotic and rare thing. Curry houses have already gone through one reinvention, in the 1980s, when many of them went up-market (I remember how classy Jamal's seemed when it opened in Oxford in I think 1986) and will need to do so again to survive in this new world, where they compete not only with each other but the new kinds of budget restaurants that offer a decent night out - the Pizza houses and gastropubs for example. The other problem for them is that supermarkets now offer low-price equivalents of takeaway Indian food. Why spend the best part of £20 on a couple of chicken tikka masalas from the shop when you can pick up the same thing from Tesco for less than a tenner?
Times are changing, and some curry houses will no doubt go to the wall. But those left will still be able to do well - and they'll be more varied, and more fun.
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