'Oldest' curry house revealed for festival

Nasim Cafe, which was later called The Bengal Restaurant, was the first curry house in Bradford, according to the World Curry Festival

Evidence of a curry house in the 1940s has been uncovered by the team behind the World Curry Festival.

To celebrate the festival being held in Bradford during the City of Culture year, organisers researched the city's culinary history and found documents showing a curry house on the site of the current Kashmir Restaurant in 1942.

The discovery was announced ahead of the World Curry Festival, which runs from September 15-29 as part of City of Culture celebrations.

Festival founder Zulfi Karim worked with researcher David Pendleton who uncovered an advert for Nasim Cafe in a December 1942 edition of the Yorkshire Observer.

He said: "One of the contentions has always been which is Bradford's first curry house.

"There's been two or three different restaurants that have claimed over the years they were the first ones, going back to the 1950s, and then later on the Sweet Centre in 1964.

"So it was something I've been wanting to look into for a while because it's the year of City of Culture. Then we stumbled across this through a historian."

Mr Pendleton found an advert in a newspaper in the British Library for Cafe Nasim, which sold "English Dishes" and "Indian Special Dishes".

Mr Karim said: "This will have been around the time of the Second World War so I can't even imagine what they would have been using for ingredients because of the rations.

"We went to see the owner of Kashmir, Mr Latif, and he was not aware of it - he thought it was maybe 1950."

Cafe Nasim was advertised in the Yorkshire Observer in 1942

Mr Karim said, despite many British people thinking of curry as "going out for an Indian", immigrants of Bangladeshi origin opened the first curry houses in the UK.

"The Bangladeshi immigrants who came to the UK - who mainly were in the Navy at the time - decided to set up business and make this their home.

"That's 80 years plus now since we've had a curry house in Bradford and that's a huge story," he said.

The festival takes places over two weeks and includes theatre, lectures and a street food market

'Theatre of curry'

The World Curry Festival started in Leeds in 2008.

Taking inspiration from Bradford City of Culture 2025, this year's festival will include a "theatre of curry", said Mr Karim.

"We felt it was important to bring culture into our festival this year, and not just be about the consumption of food, but really share the ideas and stories," he said.

The three events include a staged reading of Balti Kings, a 1999 play written by Sudha Bhuchar and Shaheen Khan.

During the interval, theatregoers will be served a curry.

"That's really important," said Mr Karim. "It's going to be kind of a communal gathering where you can chat about the play and talk about your stories."

Other events include a supper club and a talk by Dr Amir Khan about nutrition and preserving authentic recipes.

Mr Karim said it was an important time to promote curry as the industry was suffering from a lack of new talent.

"We want to make sure we preserve it. The future is under threat because we're having less people trained up in the sector," he said.

"We need to keep it local, we need to keep it authentic and more importantly we want everybody to enjoy it but also learn to cook at home."

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