I didn't want to be associated with that culture, because it's not what Indian food is about I wanted to give the cuisine the respect it deserves." I couldn't understand the idea of people getting drunk on a Friday night and breaking up glassware. He adds: "I was very disappointed, and I hated the word curry. "Peppers, onions and tomatoes, which aren't used much in Indian cooking, were everywhere, and I realised that what Indian restaurants were serving the mass market was food that was adapted, but not Indian." "The first thing I noticed was that the menus seemed very classic Indian, but when you actually tried the dishes they had nothing to do with authenticity," recalls Bhatia, who now holds Michelin stars in both London and Geneva. When Vineet Bhatia - who, along with Atul Kochhar, became one of the first Indian chefs to receive a Michelin star in the UK - arrived in Britain in 1993, he was shocked by most of the so-called Indian food he found. Karunesh Khanna, head chef of the Michelin-starred Amaya in London, traces this development of sophisticated Indian dining in the UK back to the capital's earliest formal Indian restaurants, Bombay Brasserie, Chutney Mary and Veeraswamy, and describes "a massive evolution of Indian cuisine from the 1990s to what we have today". But while the merging of British and Indian culinary traditions can be traced back 400 years - to when the first merchants from the East India Company landed in Surat in 1608 - it's only relatively recently that we've seen Indian fine dining reaching such gastronomic heights. Prasad knows only too well the impact Michelin stars can have on a restaurant, having lost his in 2009, only to regain it a year later. That jump and Michelin's acceptance of Indian cuisine gave others more confidence and proved that getting a Michelin star was only a matter of time for Indian chefs at the head of their game." That set the benchmark and it's gradually increased. "The big breakthrough was in 2001, when Zaika and Tamarind both got their Michelin stars. "In the last 10 years there has been a huge transformation in the Indian restaurant sector," says Alfred Prasad, of London's Michelin-starred Tamarind restaurant. Where once was the Anglo-Indian food of the Raj - the kedgerees and mulligatawny soups, which merged British ingredients with Indian spices - and then the homogenous neon sauces of our curry houses, dumbed down for the mass British palate, we now have light, modern, sophisticated dishes that pay homage to Indian culinary tradition while using superior produce and modern cooking techniques. Given the UK's rich and complex history with the subcontinent and its food, it's perhaps only natural that we should now be the forerunners when it comes to Indian fine dining, boasting a wealth of refined Indian cuisine presided over by five Michelin-starred chefs (see panels). We ask their ground-breaking chefs how the cuisine came from corner curry house to being a frontrunner in fine dining. They do that to Chinese food in New York, and I can't bear it.Indian fine dining in the UK has come a long way, with Britain now boasting five Michelin-starred Indian Restaurants. Here, sharing means the chef does miniature versions of the order and plates them individually, so everyone gets a little bit of everything. I love the tamarind-sour, curry-leaf-spiced, coconut-sweet seafood of southern Indian coastal cooking, which means I want to cover the table with it all and let everybody dig in. The room is ominously bland, its low ceiling and tropical-jungle murals making it feel like a hotel breakfast-buffet room. So far, Benares, Tamarind, Vineet Bhatia's Rasoi, Amaya and now Quilon each have stars, making Indian cuisine more one-starry than Japanese, Chinese and Italian. I'm only here because it recently got a Michelin star, and I am forever curious as to what Michelin sees in London's Indian restaurants. Admittedly I have only just arrived, but it seems fairly certain I am not going to enjoy Quilon.
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