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Taste of Britain Curry Festival

Curry Chef HarunAtaur Rahman Harun, our award-winning Master Chef, who recently demonstrated his skills at the Taste of Britain Curry Festival, organised by Curry Life Magazine, in Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta), India as part of the efforts to showcase British Curry cuisine abroad, has just been awarded the title of Curry Chef Of The Year 2010 by Curry Life magazine.

Chef Harun was amongst the three British ‘Super Curry Chefs’ chosen out of thousands of Indian chefs in a competition to represent the region in the Festival with the ambitious task of winning the hearts and minds of gourmets in Kolkata , which is where the great British Curry tradition is thought to have begun.

 

The Hotel Hindusthan International Kolkata, regarded as City’s premier luxury hotel, hosted the 10-day Taste of Britain Curry Festival which was held during April 2010. One of the additional highlights of the festival this year was the launch of a book by famous Indian writer Shankar on the British Curry Industry, who will travel to the UK later this year to research the success of the curry industry in Britain.

Festival Director Syed Belal Ahmed said: “For many years British food has been the butt of too many jokes. But, in recent years there has been a renaissance in the British food industry. There has been a tremendous growth of the multi-billion pound ‘curry industry’ which has restaurants and takeaways in every major British city and town.”

There are nearly 12,000 Indian restaurants in Britain today; it's an industry estimated to be worth almost £4.2 billion a year.

The idea of a British curry being eaten in India is a bit like taking coals to Newcastle or selling ice to the Eskimos and certainly seems to have captured the imagination of the world press: