Series 5 Gordon spiced up my kitchen

Date Published:

11/12/2007

How Gordon spiced up the Curry Lounge. Owner Arfan Razak reveals what really happened when his restaurant got the Kitchen Nightmare treatment

Fresh blood

When we opened The Curry Lounge, I didn't have any restaurant experience. I was driven by my desire to serve authentic Punjabi food, which is richer and dryer than much of the generic Asian cuisine served in British restaurants. And that was the problem. I think that initially our menu was simply too authentic for everyone's tastes and people didn't recognise the dishes. Our first few months in business went really well. Then people just stopped coming.

So we decided to try and shake things up. We thought we could cater to everybody's taste with a 'Create Your Own Curry' menu so people could have whatever they wanted from their meal. But that didn't work out either. My vision of an authentic Indian restaurant was plagued by drunken requests for Vindaloo, a dish that isn't even authentically Indian- it's a half-Portugese dish that literally means 'wine and potato curry'. After six months, when things looked really miserable, we got in touch with Gordon.

Back to basics

What Gordon demonstrated was that we had to take pride in our dishes and dictate the menu to our customers, rather than the other way round. One of his major innovations was that we attempted to re-educate our diners about the true spices of India, rather than just catering to what they thought of as 'Indian food'.

The major difference in opinion we had with Gordon was in his move to reduce the menu by as much as he did. Initially, I accept we had far too much variety but we all felt that the level of dishes cut was limiting the customer's choice. I felt that perhaps Gordon didn't get into the Indian psyche. Indian dining is not about an a la carte selection of eight starters and eight mains. The food is as diverse as its culture, after all. Since filming we have increased the number of dishes as customers were complaining about a lack of choice. We also had to scrap his Tiffin boxes as they died a swift death.