Weekly Grill: Indian chef extraordinaire Vivek Singh tells us about his City restaurant turning 10 and memories of lamb cooked over cowpats
Who are you?
I’m the founding chef at Cinnamon Collection. Our group has been revolutionising Indian Dining since 2001, with The Cinnamon Club in Westminster, Cinnamon Kitchens in the City, Oxford and Battersea and the magical Cinnamon Bazaar in Covent Garden.
What do you do?
I dream up dishes.
What’s new at Cinnamon Group?
Lots! But most importantly we are celebrating 10 years of Cinnamon Kitchen in the City. When we opened just after the collapse of Lehman Bros in 2008, the City felt like a ghost town and not many people thought we would survive 10 years, let alone thrive. It’s been a great journey converting the erstwhile spice warehouses of the East India company into an Indian restaurant that’s gone on to become a City institution in its own right.
Elsewhere, Cinnamon Bazaar in Covent Garden is getting ready with a brand new menu for the colder weather ahead, think twinkly tongue tickling Chaats and a secret Private Room. shhhh….
Also, I can’t think why it’s taken us so long, but The Cinnamon Club is running it’s own Book Festival. It’s so apt given the surrounds of the Old Westminster Library.
What’s your earliest food memory?
The fragrance of cardamom in a shrimp Malai curry I had at a Bengali Wedding feast… I must have been six or seven.
Tell us about the best meal you ever had
Best is a tall order. I eat out a lot, and most of the time very good or excellent is enough for me. I don’t put myself or the kitchen under the pressure of creating the Best Meal Ever…. I also feel the best meal memories are about the occasion or the company, not just what’s on the menu.
Having said that, I had a meal recently at Core by Clare Smyth, and it was right up there with the best I’ve had.
What’s your favourite dish?
To cook or to eat? I love cooking a Biryani anytime I have friends or family over, it’s my expression of my love for them, I find it very therapeutic and often end up in the zone.
To eat, I absolutely love Thai Curries or Thai cooking in general. I find the balance of sweet, salty, spice and heat deeply satisfying and also the cuisine is generally quite generous, even if the families/people cooking it might not be the wealthiest.
What’s the best thing about the London food scene?
Everything. I can’t think of another city that has the same depth and breadth of cuisines available as London. It’s the melting pot of the world. It’s only in London that you can find a Japanese restaurant as good as (if not better) than anywhere in Japan, or a Chinese, American, Indian or any other cuisine for that matter. It’s also great that excellence isn’t restricted to high brow, fine dining restaurants, but can be experienced across all different price points.
And the worst thing?
I suppose the cost of doing business – it’s probably one of the toughest places in the world to run a commercially viable food businesses. The pressured environment means the food scene needs to adapt and evolve to survive. For too long, the real cost of dining in London has been subsidised by poor working conditions, long hours and below par wages, but things are changing.
What’s your favourite food-related anecdote?
As a child, once a year in January it would be a holiday on India’s Republic Day and my Father’s colliery would be closed. We would have a picnic that day, and my father and his friends would cook a so-so Lamb or chicken curry, and dough balls baked over cowpat. It was all cooked outdoors on a make- shift open fire. The lunch would often be late, with the women grumbling but offering to help , and the children often famished to the point that they’d have fallen asleep.
The ladies would cook for the next 364 days of the year, and yet this was the one meal all of us kids would remember most, and still talk about today.
Cinnamon Kitchen, City celebrates its 10th anniversary with a one-off collaboration dinner with some of London’s finest Indian chefs including Kricket’s Will Bowlby, Asma Khan of Darjeeling and Cyrus Todiwala from Café Spice Namaste, Mr Todiwala’s Kitchen and The Park Cafe. Tickets are £75pp and can be purchased from eventbrite.co.uk; For restaurant reservations go to cinnamon-kitchen.com, pop into 9 Devonshire Square, EC2M 4YL, or call 020 7626 5000