Most “Indian” restaurants, started as fish and chip shops that sold a bit of curry and rice on the side, run by Bangladeshi boatmen from the predominantly Muslim district of Sylhet, which at that time was still part of British India. This was not a region ever famed for its cuisine, which is one of the reasons that some British Asian people used to dismiss curry house food as the clumsy cooking of untrained sailors. However, food journalist Vikram Doctor, who writes for the Economic Times in Mumbai, told me that there were good cooks in Sylhet, namely the Mug or Mogh cooks who catered for the British Raj in Calcutta, whose great talent was to make inauthentic concoctions such as roast dinners jazzed up with masala spices. “I’ve always wondered,” Doctor told me last year in Mumbai, “whether the Mug cooks were among the first Sylhetis who cooked in British curry houses. It would make sense, if so, because they knew how to adapt a curry to please the British.”
Bee Wilson, 'Who killed the great British curry house?', The Guardian
