What makes a good curry great?
Is it the spice? The endorphins? The feeling you get from spending £500bn?
Alistair Darling: Chancellor of the Exchequer, bankers' friend and curry-lover. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters Even before the Chancellor's efforts to bail out the economy last night over a curry, we all knew that Indian food is officially our favourite scoff. 24 million of us, about 40% of the population, love it, joyfully swallowing three and a half million curries every week in one form or another.
In restaurants alone it's a £3.2 billion business, no mean sum even in comparison to the £500bn Alistair Darling has pledged in an effort to end the crisis in the banking sector (not to mention the £245 on takeaway food - although according to this anonymous review, dining in at Ghandi's in Kennington might be the worse option).
But what is it that makes us crave it? Why do curries seem to activate all the senses at once, more than any other cuisine we consume? Is it the spice? The rice? The lager?
Jay Rayner's astute observations from the London Restaurant Awards last month resonate beyond the boundaries of the capital for good reason. The excellent Tayyabs deservedly won over stiff competition.
I wasn't at the awards ceremony, my email invitation apparently got stuck in a server in Pinner and a stray dog ate the hard copy. So while the great and the good were scarfing partridge in Mayfair, I was but a short spit away at Amaya, which narrowly missed out on the top gong - good news for Tayyabs, but bad news for those of us who queue outside.
Amaya specialises in grills, from the tandoor to charcoal sigri and tawa hotplates, and in a reverse of one-pot-gravy dominance the sauces take a back seat. After a tongue-tingling fresh'n'lite goat's cheese and citrus salad, you get stuck into sharing plates of marinated and flash-roasted shellfish, vegetables, chicken and meat, all served atop puddles of delicate little sauces.
The plump, juicy, barely grilled scallops' green pepper sauce had a delightful, short, sharp chilli kick that lasted all of three seconds; the griddled oysters floated on a bright yellow, light, tangy coconut pool; and two squat black peppered chicken fillets, spicy and meltingly tender, were almost unadorned save for what appeared to be rosewater.
In between the oohs and the aahs, the conversation, by coincidence, turned to how many visits we could make to Tayyabs for the price of what we were about to pay here. The agreed estimate was six. Then we ordered a prawn bhuna and another bottle of Chenin Blanc and made it seven.
Tayyabs is at the opposite end of town and the financial spectrum, but their lamb chops are worth traveling to the East End for any day, as is the mutton curry on a Monday.
What is it about this stuff, cuisines from around 11 different Asian countries all lumped together under the one generic heading? It's not as if we need to artificially flavour meat because of the heat, and was that Glaswegian chef actually forced to invent a masala sauce for chicken tikka? All that mumbo jumbo about pain receptors releasing endorphins resulting in addiction, is that really true? Or do we simply like the digestive qualities of turmeric and the taste of ground coriander seeds?
What makes your curry great? The smell, the taste? Does hot equal good? And does the idea of dropping upwards of a ton in posh surroundings (or to feed a gaggle of hungry colleagues in the office) just turn you off?
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Thursday October 09 2008. It was last updated at 11.18 on October 09 2008.
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