Don’t follow the herd

Ten days ago I went to one of London’s finest restaurants, the Lahore in Whitechapel. The place was packed with hundreds of eager punters.

Ten days ago I went to one of London’s finest restaurants, the Lahore in Whitechapel. The place was packed with hundreds of eager punters. There were bankers from the City, large families of Asians, Essex chavs. We were served plate after plate, piled high with spiced fodder from a kitchen with a glass façade enabling you to see the troops of cooks preparing kebabs piled on coals, hundreds of pieces of dough turning into breads in a brick oven, and huge vats of bubbling chicken and lamb curries, vegetable concoctions and gigantic pans of rice.

For those in the know, the Lahore is an institution. It was started by the Siddique family in the late 1960s and has thrived ever since. Last year they extended the premises so that, with a push, they can serve over 400 at one service, and they do from midday until the early hours of the morning. The bill for four of us came to £70. We recently held my daughter’s ninth birthday party there and managed to feed 18 people for £170. It leaves you asking, how do they do it?

The answer is, the Lahore doesn’t have a celebrity chef and they don’t have to fork out huge sums to get a restaurant PR person to promote them. It’s a family-run business with a large and varied clientèle.

According to Harden’s restaurant guides, more restaurants than ever opened in London last year. A lot were backed by City money looking for a home and hoping for a return, and the quickest way to do that is to get a celebrity chef endorsement.