Meet the man who forever changed Indian restaurants in the South West
The Mint Room founder on why ‘Indian’ restaurants aren't Indian, the Dishoom effect, and how British appetites for chicken tikka built a city in Bangladesh
In 1994, a 21 year-old Luthfur Rahman upped sticks from East London – where he was born and raised by Bengali parents – to the quiet market town of Yeovil. There, he and friends took over the running of the Taj Mahal – an Indian restaurant on Middle Street that’d been going since the ‘60s – and named it Viceroy Tandoori.
So begins the story of a man who arguably influenced Indian food in South West England more than any other.
Not without its troubles, however. As a journalist for The Independent wrote from the frontlines in 1995, most people of this ‘small, uneventful’ deepest Somerset town had had little contact with anyone non-white before: ‘The restaurant was urinated on, eggs were thrown, graffiti was sprayed on the outside walls saying “Pakis go home, Pakis smell.”’ Luthfur, who with colleagues had barricaded themselves inside, referred to the experience at the time as “no better than a prison sentence.”
It didn’t stop him though. Three decades and several more restaurants later, including a placating of locals often via their stomachs, Luthfur’s back to one main event – the Mint Room, a more-on-the-side-of-casual fine dining restaurant on Bath’s Lower Bristol Road (another Mint Room branch enjoyed an almost decade-long spell in Bristol until 2024).
One of the things about the Mint Room is its leaning into regional Indian cuisine. Those familiar with what happened in London in the mid-2010s, when restaurants like Dishoom, Gymkhana, Kricket, and Gunpowder (not without their eloquent critics) first opened with their industrial interiors or aesthetic nods to the British Raj, large marketing budgets, and concise menus of black dahl, chaat, vada pav, butter chicken, and so on. As such, they caught the attention of non-resident Indians but also impressionable white middle class featherbrains like me, not dissimilar to what curry houses did in the ‘50s onwards for a British public seeking something different on a Friday night.
Anyway, with the exception of restaurants such as the Mint Room and Bandook (the latter which, incidentally, Luthfur’s brother founded), regional Indian food is still a rarity in the South West. The Mint Room’s £60 tasting menu takes you on a figurative tour of the subcontinent, stopping off at the likes of Lucknow for chicken seekh kebab; Rajasthan for lamb skewers marinated in chili and yoghurt then roasted in a clay oven; and Goa for salmon recheado masala.
It’s a warm introduction to at least a semblance of what Indian cuisine is really like, as much as it is to Luthfur’s legacy itself. Which now stretches back generations – from his former Yeovil guests who remember the “fantastic” Viceroy for their “first Indian meal”; for having “never tasted anything remotely like it”; and for “a hot cloth I thought was a pancake roll”, to yesterday’s diners seduced by the Mint Room’s “carnival of flavours” and (from and Indian) “tastes the same as in my country.”
In the interest of getting to know the guy who heavily influenced eating out on Indian food in the South West as we know it, the following – edited for clarity and brevity – was recorded just after lunch at the Mint Room, Bath.
Below the paywall: Luthfur on why ‘Indian’ restaurants aren’t Indian, the Dishoom effect, and how British appetites for chicken tikka built a city in Bangladesh.
This post unlocks for free subscribers in one week’s time — come back then or subscribe for £35/year to read now and get access to various seasonally-updating guides on food and eating in Somerset.