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29 Queen Street
Quayside
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 3UG
0191 221 0601
www.vujon.com
A few years ago I attended one of Maunika Gowardhan’s excellent Indian cookery classes at Blackfriars (Maunika’s first book, Indian Kitchen has, incidentally, has just been published; it’s a stunner).
As Maunika explained to the attendees that most British curry house standards are in fact an anglicized hybrid of Bangladeshi cooking, which would be largely unrecognisable in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, I noticed a split in the room.
Half the guests nodded intently, their hard-won knowledge validated by a real expert; the others looked taken aback, the Indian rug swept from under their feet. Surely their beloved tikka masalas and jalfrezis, previously thought the real deal, couldn't be just counterfeit inventions?
Of course, in these days of authenticity and provenance, it creates a problem for the best restaurants. Do you stock your menu with the standards that so many of your potential customers expect to see, and which most of them are likely to order? Or do you offer genuine cooking from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh’s varied regions and traditions, hoping to attract a clientele that cares, and educate some who don’t?
Vujon, in Newcastle’s Queen Street, has attempted to square the circle by offering dishes that name-check a number of India’s regions - here a lamb from Kashmir, there a Pondicheery pheasant - and yet, also, there’s our old fake friend chicken tikka masala, ready to be ordered with vast jugs of Cobra, a beer as authentically Indian as Burton on Trent.
