I’m a bit skeptical about that statistic. A lot, maybe even a majority of Indian restaurants in Leeds and Bradford seemed to be run by Pakistanis.
There are various levels of Indian restaurant in the UK. The base level is the hole-in-the-wall takeaway, maybe with a few plastic tables inside. They mostly offer “curry-pizza-burger-southern fried chicken”. They’ll have a flyer/menu that gets posted through doors in the neighbourhood. The two sides of this flyer are quite distinct. One side is decked out Italian-style, with a picture of the tower of Pisa and a fat Italian chef putting his fingers to his lips in that ‘o’ shape. The pizza names are third-hand Italian such as ‘Cuatro formago con polo’.
Then the other side will have a picture of the Taj Mahal and all the Indian stuff. If they have space, they’ll also cram in a picture/text box with a Mississippi paddle steamer and the Southern Fried Chicken options. The quality of these places is as can be imagined. People say it caters to the British taste - I’m not sure really. The flavours are not complex at all, and there’s a lot of oil. Perhaps it caters to the drunken spent-all-my-money-on-beer-and-now-need-a-cheap-stomach-filler British taste.
The second level of Indians is an altogether more civilised experience and can be enjoyed drunk or sober. They are sit-down restaurants and they’ll have some nice sitar music in the background and gorgeous seventies flock wallpaper (which children like picking the flock off). Actually within this level there are subdivisions. The lower-end places will, like the holes-in-the-wall, tend to use the same base sauce for all their curry dishes, simply adding garnishes of pineapple, tomato or whatever else is dictated by the name of the curry. The higher-end places should make each sauce from scratch with a different recipe for each curry style.
One good type of place to look out for is vegetarian Indian restaurants. The quality of the food tends to be high and in addition they will probably offer a wider range of more authentic dishes; not all with the same sloppy sauce; some indeed fairly dry.
On this latter style of more authentic dishes; there have been quite a few successful and popular Indian cookery TV programmes and books in the UK. They have been very good at introducing a wider variety of Indian dishes and the concept of regional Indian food varieties to the British public. But I have noticed that their recipes are rarely very hotly spiced.
People who have been to India tell me that a lot of the food is very hotly spiced indeed. Yet these UK authors tell us that not all Indian food uses hot spices.
There would seem to be 3 possible explanations for this seeming contradiction, of which a combination may be true:
1 Although the general style is authentic, the dishes are milder to suit the general middle-class UK family’s taste (although of course the general UK drunken male likes to challenge his mates in hot curry eating).
2 The milder dishes are from regions of India where they prefer milder food.
3 It’s to do with Indian social class; I have heard that the royal cuisine of Thailand, a place generally known for its very hot food, is actually quite mild. Perhaps this is a similar phenomenon; the cookery writers/broadcasters are introducing us to higher-class Indian cuisine but the ordinary Indian people like hot food.
Not having been to India, I can’t really judge which of these may be true. My only experience of Indian food cooked by and for Indian people was in various Sikh gurdwaras in Leeds. That food was absolutely delicious, and also pretty mild.
I share Fred’s liking for flavoursome ‘midrange spices’ and feel that they are vital to really nice Indian cooking. That’s another bad thing about the cheap UK holes-in-the-walls; even if they do use midrange spices, they’ll usually be in the form of cheap, stale curry powder and all you can really taste in the end is chilli.
