That brings us to another remarkable thing about Mahomed. In London, in 1809, he opened the first curry house in Britain. It was called the Hindostanee Coffee House but, as Fisher explains, it didn’t actually proffer coffee – it was instead an ‘eating house’ where Mahomed prepared ‘a range of meat and vegetable dishes with Indian spices served with seasoned rice’, which customers would consume while reclining on bamboo-cane sofas and chairs, under paintings of Indian landscapes.
