The Changing Face of London’s Indian Food Shops
Indian food shops in London are seeing an exciting revival. Sejal Sukhadwala explores this phenomenon through the variety of Indian stores in the city — the chaotic older stores, well-organised newer stores, stores with separate stands for Ayurvedic ingredients & mithai counters; and how they present a hyper-real fantasy of India, allowing the diaspora to keep up with India's changing cooking trends.
Growing up in London in the 1980s, one of my first food memories is of Mr Singh’s shop just off the Finchley Road. Although inexplicably called Osaka, it had nothing to do with Japan: it was a tiny place that sold Indian groceries such as dals, spices, a few vegetables, and long-grain rice that seemed to come only in two varieties in the UK in those days: ‘patna’ for everyday cooking, and basmati for special occasions.
The shelves were sparsely stocked, but my mother was happy to have an Indian grocer so close by, a rarity in those days. It sparked a much-craved connection to her home country; and in practical terms, it meant she could cook without having to use too many substitutes. Mr Singh was a somewhat mysterious figure, a man of few words with a Mona Lisa smile. I wondered about him as I sat in that space, now a contemporary Indian deli-café, sipping a fine rose falooda one afternoon before the pandemic.
On the opposite end of Finchley in north London, there was the equally small but far buzzier Goodeats. The friendly owner had clocked my father’s love for suran (elephant foot yam) and made a point of phoning up to inform him whenever he had it in stock. Once, when it was snowing heavily, he insisted: “Uncle, don’t come out in this weather, we will deliver.” This was in the days before home deliveries were commonplace.
The most memorable Indian grocer, however, was Bina Stores in nearby Golders Green. We’d just moved into the area, and it became our go-to for everyday ingredients. The cavernous space was set over two floors, with a mind-boggling array of spices, pickles, grains and beans on the ground level; and massive wedding-sized cooking pots, idli and dhokla steamers, tawas, chakri moulds, wooden dal churners, and thin Indian rolling pins upstairs. The owners always made a point of asking about my and my sister’s school life and education, often getting the two of us mixed up. My mother relished their warm hospitality, coupled with personal recommendations for products that included high-quality saffron and asafoetida, kept behind the cash register for customers in the know.
Art by Preksha Sipani
These weren’t among the first Indian food shops, however. According to Panikos Panayi’s ‘Migrant City: A New History of London’: “The first Indian grocery business started in 1928-29 in London supplying Indian students, other businessmen and professionals, Indian officials of the high commission, and some Englishmen who had probably spent time in India. In 1931 there followed the Bombay Emporium in Grafton Street, while the first Bengali food shop in London’s East End, Taj Stores, opened in 1936”.
A 1937 advertisement for the Bombay Emporium, which also had a branch in Leicester Square, is preserved by the British Library.It boasts of selling “Indian spices, Bombay and Madras curry powders, sweet mango chutney and hot pickles, pappadoms, bombay ducks, ballachang etc,” adding “finest quality teas and coffees, patna, basmati and pillau rice, dhalls of all kinds, alphonso mangoes, Indian oils, betel leaves and nuts.” Like all the shops mentioned so far, the Bombay Emporium shuttered its doors years ago, but its stock doesn’t sound a million miles from what’s sold today.
Food writer Jenny Linford first wrote the pioneering Food Lover’s London in 1991 (subsequently re-printed six times) – a rare book from that era to acknowledge and highlight the diverse and global nature of London’s shopping and dining culture. She told me that by the early ‘90s, there was an “impressive range of stock… and an emphasis on bulk buying. I was very struck by the way the Indian food shops in Southall sat alongside with Indian restaurants, kitchen utensil stores, sweet shops, jewellery stores, fabric shops - a whole shopping and eating scene… Over the years… the small, traditional… shops - with their origins as greengrocers or grocers – (went) on to open huge, smart stores, more like supermarkets in feel”.
Jenny captures well the heyday of London’s Indian food shops, which was to last a couple of decades. There was a real vibrancy to the west London suburbs of Southall and Wembley in those days, where most of these venues were located. Southall was particularly glittery and boisterous, with the loud bhangra music playing on street corners providing a distracting soundtrack to food shopping at Sira, Gifto and, later, Quality. Naan bakeries gradually started opening; and a few chefs lined the pavements frying up huge vats of neon-bright jalebis.
In Wembley, trucks intriguingly selling hot sweetcorn in paper cups (later I learnt it was a common cinema snack in India), sugar-cane juice sellers, paanwallahs, kitchenware stores, and stalls piled high with boxes of mangoes in season had joined the long-established Fudco and Fruity Fresh. Many of the shops were chaotic – becoming better-organised over the years – with separate sections for Ayurvedic ingredients, and sometimes self-service pickle carts and mithai counters.
Both areas attracted families who combined weekend shopping trips with lunch, the different ages bonding over plates of chilli paneer, dosa, mooli paratha and chaat. Promoted by the local boroughs as tourist destinations, the neighbourhoods attracted not only the odd shell-shocked visitor from abroad, but also coachfuls of older Indian women from out of town on their quarterly stocking-up spree. I’d occasionally see mothers-in-law guiding their daughter’s English husbands on Indian ingredients; and young Indian brides visiting from the U.S, shepherded by their mothers to Tarla Dalal cookbook collections in Popat Stores. Fudco, which sells “cashew nuts that are better than in Goa”, as whispered by my Goan friends, also once sold bespoke, freshly milled flours stone-ground from grains of choice; and pop-up pavement carts would appear out of nowhere to promise “world’s best saffron.”
I often walked down east London’s Brick Lane, not only to indulge my love of Bengali mishti, but armed with illustrated Bangladeshi cookbooks so as to better recognise the many unfamiliar varieties of squashes and greens. Later, I discovered south Indian shops in Wembley, and East Ham in the east, with massive ranges of exceptionally crunchy rice flour snacks, bags of rice in every variety and hue ranging from palest pink to deepest purple, ready-made dosa batters, and the likes of Madras cucumbers, banana blossoms and bright orange Sri Lankan king coconuts kept in chilling rooms behind makeshift plastic curtains.
Snacks from Kerala and Tamil Nadu also started appearing in mainstream Indian grocers, mostly owned by Gujaratis and Punjabis, who created separate aisles entirely devoted to them. An increasing range of Indian-Chinese noodles, ready-made masalas, multi-grain flour mixes, and packaged snacks gave us a glimpse of the sub-continent’s changing eating habits, enabling us to keep up with the latest trends. For me, the shops were also treasure troves of lesser-known regional ingredients, such as tamarind seeds and black niger seed oil, which would then become a starting point for whole new culinary adventures.
These stores gave us a hyper-real fantasy of India – an India that was stuck in a gaudily-coloured, bejewelled 1980s Bollywood movie poster, an India without technological advances, emerging superpower status, ostentatious billionaires, and social and political problems. Romanticised as “authentic” by British friends, they were moulded in the diaspora image of “Indian.” Then around a decade ago, I noticed that they were beginning to look tired and disorganised, their produce tacky, dusty or wilted. Paan stains seemed to become brighter; the notices from local councils not to spit on pavements more embarrassing. Weary, ageing owners whose businesses had taken on an air of neglect told me with a mixture of resignation and pride that their well-educated children were working in professional jobs, and had no interest in continuing the family legacy. Additionally, British supermarkets were beating these shops at their own game, offering a spiralling range of Indian ingredients. Many independent places began shutting down, with no new openings in sight. I felt deeply sad thinking this was the end of the road for London’s Indian grocers and greengrocers. And then the pandemic hit…
Lockdown has given a new lease of life to these neighbourhood joints, scattered across not only Southall, Wembley, Brick Lane and East Ham, but also Harrow, Neasden, Kingsbury and Queensbury in north London; Upton Park and Ilford in the east; and Tooting and Peckham in the south. Londoners of all backgrounds have been using them as local convenience stores to buy essentials like milk and bread, especially during the first lockdown of March 2020 when it was difficult to get to supermarkets.
Whereas anecdotal and social media evidence suggests that young Indians are cooking less Indian food than ever before, non-Indians are cooking significantly more, in turn buying more Indian groceries. Dals and curries have long been staples here anyway, but Brits are now making naans, pickles, dosas, samosas, chaats and even papads from scratch. Chef, baker and food writer Dan Lepard, explains the appeal of his local branch of VB & Sons, where he’s been shopping for years: “When I want basmati, I buy what VB & Sons call ‘vafa’, a very long grain rice with a slight beige colour (that) stays firm… For everyday cooking, I buy all nuts and most grains (there) as the big supermarkets rarely have a good selection. And VB always have… aubergines in different sizes, from the tiny purple tom-thumb ones (to) white egg-like brinjals.”
Fruit and veg rarely seen here before, such as mogri or moongre (radish seed pods), galeli (palmyra fruit), wood apples, and purple amaranth leaves have now joined the ubiquitous ivy gourd, snake gourd, bitter gourd and ridge gourd. Their sudden availability is intriguing, and can perhaps be attributed to the strengthening of trade between England and India post-Brexit. Nitesh Khimani, owner of the neat and compact Q Stores in Finchley, where my mother took me shopping when I moved into my first apartment many years ago, pin-points what’s changed: “One thing I have noticed is that people are more adventurous now, picking up new ingredients to experiment with. There’s a lot less bulk-buying; they’re more likely to purchase 5 kg and 10 kg bags of rice, atta and dal, maybe because of lack of space, or they just want to try more variety. The young ones have been shopping more for their parents and neighbours during lockdowns, and they’re attracted to new organic ranges. A lot more people buy ready snacks and masala mixes – and these now come from all over the world: Kenya, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Pakistan. There are more customers from different castes and religious backgrounds, too; plus more non-Indian buyers. Ethnic food shops now sell each other’s countries’ produce, so you can also buy Indian items in, say, Turkish and Romanian places.”
I don’t know what the future holds for London’s Indian food shops. Will there ever be glamorous emporiums in central London again? Will young Indians start experimenting with regional dishes? Will non-Indians eventually move on to another cuisine? Will people be cooking more – or less – after the pandemic? Have the shops become integral enough part of their local communities to survive? Or will they fade away to make room for yet more apartment blocks? I don’t have the answers but, for now, I’m relieved that they’re having their moment in the sun.
Art by Preksha Sipani
Sejal Sukhadwala is a food and drink writer based in London. You can follow her here.
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