When, back in 2001, Vivek Singh and Iqbal Wahhab told their friends and peers that they were going to open a 200-cover Indian restaurant in a disused library in Westminster, that it was going to charge more for one dish than the price of a typical Indian meal, and that poppadums were not going to feature on the menu, a few eyebrows were raised. In fact, the pair were advised in no uncertain terms that this was probably not the most sensible idea either financially or career wise. Had they listened to the naysayers, one of the most important restaurants in London of the past quarter century, and not just in the Indian space, would not have come into being.
With the benefit of hindsight, the pair’s belief that London was ready for a new kind of Indian restaurant, one that not only challenged the somewhat lowly perceptions of Indian cuisine in the UK thanks to the proliferation of the ‘curry house’, but which tried to get it spoken in same terms as other cuisines was spot on. Yet at the time it did feel like they were rowing against the tide of popular opinion, admits Singh when we meet at his beautiful restaurant in Westminster.
“There was a real dilemma with the team over whether we could charge £19 for a dish,” he recalls. “Chefs were saying we were nuts, and that people pay £15 for a whole meal in Indian restaurants.
“They also said there was no way I could fill 200 seats, but if I really wanted to do that, had I considered doing a buffet? And I said, I want to charge £19 for two courses and £23 for three. The set menu idea was quite divisive at the time.
“I don’t think the customers batted an eyelid, but I did get a fair amount of push back and well-meaning advice from colleagues in the industry. The number of times I’ve had property people or commercial people tell me what a load of rubbish this area is. We found something and made it work.
“There is something to be said about being young, foolish and audacious and giving it all you’ve got.”
The Cinnamon Club is born
The opening of The Cinnamon Club came about through a meeting of minds. Singh, who had trained at the Oberoi School of Hotel Management in Delhi before becoming senior kitchen executive at Oberoi Hotels & Resorts for four years, had grown frustrated with how Indian restaurants were treated differently to that of other fine dining spots in the group.
“I had always wanted to cook Indian food and worked hard to get into Indian kitchens,” Singh says, “but I couldn’t access the fantastic ingredients at the hotel that other restaurants were using. There was amazing Pacific salmon and New Zealand lamb, but none was ever sent to the Indian restaurants. There was a feeling there was so much more I could do.”
Singh moved to London in December 2000, where he became reacquainted with Wahhab, who he had met a few years previously and who was selling his Tandoori Magazine to open a restaurant to change the way people viewed Indian dining. “It was two parallel universes meeting at the same time,” says Singh. “When we met, I was surprised at how similar our line of thinking was - we were both ‘why not?’ people rather than ‘why?’ people,”
It’s a restaurant but it’s so much more. It has grown to become a bit of a philosophy
The Cinnamon Club was by no means the first high-end Indian restaurant in the UK, or indeed the first to encourage diners not to share dishes. Back in 1982 Bombay Brasserie in Kensington had set out to refine Indian dining in this country and Chutney Mary had been serving its sophisticated, regional Indian cuisine in Chelsea since 1990. These restaurants were later joined by other notable Indian establishments, including Tamarind, which launched in 1994, and Zaika and Quilon, both of which opened in 1999.
However, The Cinnamon Club took a different approach in that it eschewed focusing just on traditional and authentic Indian dishes and moved beyond the classic Indian restaurant aesthetic for something a bit more European in its approach.
“The Cinnamon Club was born out of an idea of going on an adventure and exploring new things that weren’t available to people back then,” says Singh.
“We were looking beyond authentic. There was no point flying fish from 1,000 miles away, cutting it into small pieces and serving it in a brown sauce just because it’s authentic. I have no shame in saying we de-constructed traditional Indian food to create a new experience and give people the appreciation of good quality seasonal ingredients.
“As a result of that it paved the way for the kinds of restaurants you wouldn’t have previously dreamt of in this country.”
Not just another Indian restaurant
It’s hard to argue with this last statement. With The Cinnamon Club Singh and Wahhab - who left the business in 2003 to pursue other projects, including Roast in Borough Market - created a restaurant that attempted to put Indian food on an equal footing to that of its fine French counterparts rather than just being seen as serving high-end Indian cuisine. With its grand light-flooded dining room lined with old fashioned books, light parquet flooring, leather banquettes and modern tables and chairs, diners walk through the double doors of the smart red brick building on Great Smith Street into a restaurant that could as easily be serving Italian or French food as Indian.
Dishes are Indian but often with a modern European sensibility (chef and friend Eric Chavot has even created a number of dishes for people ‘challenged on the spice front’ that include crab risotto with truffle cappuccino and pan fried king prawn; and 28 day dry-aged Hereford beef with fondant potatoes and a red wine sauce) with dishes such as char-grilled Chalk Stream trout fillet with curry leaf lime crumble and green pea chutney; filled jumbo morels with morel and pea stir-fry and saffron pilau; and a black cardamom brûlée with a sesame crisp.
Game also features heavily, and is a passion of Singh’s, with Anjou squab pigeon, wild mallard, venison, and partridge all having appeared on the menu when in season.
“The Cinnamon Club has played a really significant role in getting people to sit up and take note of Indian cuisine and not just think of it as a cheap and cheerful curry house for a Friday night,” says Singh, reflecting on the past quarter century.
“That’s not to say in any way there wasn’t affection for Indian restaurants. Even before we opened there were 8,000 Indian restaurants up and down the country, practically one on every high street, but there was not quite the same sense of occasion as going out to eat in fine French restaurant.
“Even the ones cooking really good Indian food were never as focused and unabashedly ambitious as The Cinnamon Club. We only had a three-course menu, we plate our food so you can’t share, and by the way there are no poppadums on the menu. It created attention.”
Overlooked by Michelin
Given the attention it did create, and the quality of the dining experience on offer, one element that is conspicuously lacking from the history of the restaurant is a Michelin star. While Singh’s peers at Tamarind, Zaika, Benares and Quilon went on to win one, and while the UK is now home to a brace of two-starred Indian restaurants (Gymkhana and Opheem) as the guide continues to embrace food from the subcontinent, The Cinnamon Club has been routinely overlooked by its inspectors. Is this something that bothers him?
“Many times within the course of my career have we had the best of the alternatives,” says Singh philosophically, admitting that he hadn’t heard of Michelin until he moved to the UK and read Marco Pierre White’s White Heat. “When you don’t have a star, you’re not afraid of losing it, and yet everybody thinks you have one or that you should have one.”
When the restaurant was in its infancy as star was a consideration, he adds. “When we started, it would definitely have been a motivation because the kind of cuisine we were doing then was unheard of in Indian restaurants at the time. But we are a 200-cover restaurant and for a number of years I thought we weren’t going to get it because we were just too busy and noisy and changing the menu too frequently. But it was important to cook seasonally.
“If that meant we weren’t of a level to achieve recognition from Michelin that’s fine. It needed to work as a business.”
One of the things Singh says he would often discuss with his team is that he wanted The Cinnamon Club not to be considered as just another Indian restaurant. “We wanted people to think ‘shall I go to Le Caprice, Nobu or The Cinnamon Club? At the time none of them had a Michelin star so it was less about the star and more about the role it plays in the London restaurant scene.
“I’ve seen so many restaurants and chefs crash and burn trying to get or keep a star. It’s a question to ponder over but the good thing it that it hasn’t defined what we do. In spite of not having a star we have gone about our business with the same passion, same diligence, same ethos and convictions.”
Life with Boparan
One factor that could have more easily derailed Singh’s ethos and convictions is the purchase of Cinnamon Collection, the company of which Singh is CEO, by Boparan in 2016. The then owner of Giraffe, Ed’s Easy Diner and Harry Ramsden’s and which now owns brands including Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Carluccio’s, and fried chicken concept Slim Chickens, as well as 2 Sisters Food Group, took The Cinnamon Club and its sister restaurants Cinnamon Kitchen and Cinnamon Bazaar under its wing, removing the existing ownership of 50 different shareholders, which Singh admits sounds untenable but worked really well.
Today Singh oversees a group that includes three Cinnamon Kitchens in the City, Battersea and Leeds, and two Cinnamon Bazaars in Covent Garden and Richmond. Given its relatively small portfolio and the fact that expansion over the past decade has been muted, compared to say the growth of Slim Chickens, which has swelled to 72 sites in just a few years, what does he believe Boparan saw in the brand?
“When I met Ranjit [Singh Boparan, the group’s founder], I only had one question for him - why did he want to buy it?,” says Singh. “He said to me, ‘the public side of my business was eating at home, and my ambition is to enjoy the private side of my business, which is eating out of home’.
“Ten years ago, it was not the Boparan of today and it has grown exponentially but it has been fantastic for a brand like ours because they brought in so many things they were better at from a systems point of view, finance, safety, legality, so much stuff entrepreneurs and restaurateurs don’t want to do. But we still have complete autonomy over sourcing, pricing, and the entire menu. This is the best of both worlds, we can still be innovative and creative.”
What I have been most surprised and delighted with is the kind of role that The Cinnamon Club has played in the underbelly of Westminster in the past 25 years
The most recent development for the collection has been the opening of Cinnamon Kitchen in Leeds, the brand’s first move outside of London and which is inspired by the grand first-class train waiting rooms found across India in the 19th century. Beyond that, Singh says he’d like to explore a different side to Indian cuisine.
“I’m keen to dive a bit deeper, not do more of the same but something less explored. I’d like a deeply-researched hyper-regional restaurant, that is the kind of depth that I want to take it to. Indian restaurants are so much more layered than they ever were, that’s the reason why there is still space for deeper exploration. Is there more ambition, innovation, audacity, creativity, and seasonality in Indian food? Yes.”
He cites Asma Khan’s Darjeeling Express as an example of this. “There is an expression of a cuisine from a certain part of the country and from a certain time from someone’s memory, family and travel. It’s pretty niche but because it’s so deep and personal. Quilon is also very specific in terms of what it is offering. Relative to that, what we’ve got is something pan Indian. It was great for then but perhaps that’s the kind of thing that we want to explore.”
Harneet Baweja’s approach is another example. “He could have just gone on doing Gunpowder restaurants, but he did Empire Empire. There is a desire to try and express and do something else. In our case it was Cinnamon Kitchen and Cinnamon Bazaar.”
Leaving a legacy
With The Cinnamon Club, Singh has undoubtedly realised what he set out to achieve back in 2001. What would he like the restaurant’s legacy to be?
“What I have been most surprised and delighted with is the kind of role that The Cinnamon Club has played in the underbelly of Westminster in the past 25 years,” he says. “This restaurant doesn’t just live off politicians, or it would have been long out of business. We have a very cosmopolitan clientele that is reflective of the ecosystem we are in.”
He’s proud of the numbers, that the restaurant still serves the best part of 75,000 to 80,000 customers a year 25 years on (pre Covid, when it operated seven days a week for breakfast through dinner it served 110,000 people a year) and that when in January it introduced a retro menu to celebrate the quarter century milestone 7,500 people booked in.
“We are not used to that kind of numbers in January, we were stretched to say the least,” he admits. “It’s a minor miracle that we have served thousands of people over the past 25 years on this street because this area had no history with restaurants at the start.”
When you don’t have a star, you’re not afraid of losing it, and yet everybody thinks you have one or that you should have one
Has he contemplated how The Cinnamon Club might look years into the future? “If you’d asked me 25 years ago what I want, I’d have said I want the business to go on forever,” he muses. “Ask me today what will happen if I’m not there and it will go on forever, or for as long as we want it to because with six of my chefs, we have 160 years of cooking experience.
“This business isn’t going anywhere with or without Vivek Singh. My name is not above the door, and that was very intentional.
“It’s a restaurant but it’s so much more. It has grown to become a bit of a philosophy.”