Inside the world's biggest curry house serving 10,000 meals a week

[Celerity]

The Royal Nawaab in Stockport is a spectacular all-you-can-eat restaurant that has served both Tyson Fury and Lisa Nandy

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/food-drink/article/worcurry-house-royal-nawaab-manchester-bhd635ggn

https://archive.ph/kZJ9o


There are more than 180 dishes at the Royal Nawaab Rachel Adams for the Times

It is remarkable that Abdullah doesn’t spend his whole working day in tears. Sitting statuesque on an upturned bucket at the back of a bustling kitchen, his job is to peel hundreds of onions that will make their way into vast cauldrons of dal, curry and bhajis. It is repetitive, eye-watering work. Yet it takes exactly this kind of military-style discipline to run the world’s largest curry house.


Abdullah preparing onions for dishes Rachel Adams for the Times

At least, that is the title bestowed upon the Royal Nawaab, an upmarket all-you-can-eat restaurant which is the subject of a new documentary airing on Friday. The building housing it is already a local celebrity. The blue glass pyramid that towers above the residential streets of Stockport, Greater Manchester, is an incongruous sight. Built in 1992, it was supposed to be one of five pyramids in the town’s very own “Valley of the Kings”, but it stands alone after the main contractor for the project went bust. It housed the Co-op bank between 1995 and 2018, before sitting empty for five years until the restaurateur Mahboob Hussain took it over.


Mahboob Hussain outside Royal Nawaab, housed within the Pyramid Rachel Adams for the Times

“I wanted to do something massive. This is my legacy now,” Hussain told The Times. The 71-year-old, who sports a chunky gold watch, has been running buffet-style restaurants in both London and Manchester for decades, including a curry house in the Hoover building just off the A40 in Perivale. This restaurant, which opened last year and serves 10,000 covers a week, is his most ambitious to date. “It was a big risk,” he said. “People said that this place is in the middle of nowhere, it’s not on the high street, but I don’t call my place a restaurant, it’s a destination.”



Despite the rather uninspiring backdrop of the M60 and the sound of low-flying planes coming and going from Manchester airport, inside the building feels more like a Dubai hotel. There are marble floors, polished around the clock, a glass chandelier hovering over a cascading fountain and hundreds of gleaming baubles which are shined fortnightly by a member of staff in a cherry picker. Most customers stick to the ground floor, where the enormous restaurant serves more than 180 dishes for £31.99 a head. But upstairs lies a labyrinth of reception rooms hosting weddings, sweet sixteenths, and corporate board meetings, all serviced by adjoining kitchens providing a constant stream of authentic Pakistani cuisine.



Famous guests have included Tyson Fury and Lisa Nandy, the culture minister and MP for Wigan. Other VIPs have been known to fly into Manchester airport specifically to visit the restaurant. Every dish has been conceived with the approval of Hussain, who opened his first restaurant in Bradford in the Eighties, having moved to the UK in the late Sixties at the age of 15. The head chef, who goes by “Honey”, made no secret of his boss’s exacting standards; the entire pyramid is covered by high-definition cameras, allowing Hussain to examine dishes remotely. If the presentation isn’t exactly right, he has been known to call in from afar and order that the dish be sent back to the kitchen.

snip

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Mr. Abdullah so vulnerable to technological innovation