Veeraswamy at 100: Inside the battle for Britain’s oldest Indian restaurant

The word Veeraswamy comes from the Sanskrit veera, meaning brave or courageous – an apt name for a restaurant that has weathered a century of existential threats, from the Blitz to economic downturns and ever-shifting dining habits.

The UK’s oldest Indian restaurant celebrating its 100th birthday would have attracted attention anyway, but the fact that its future now hangs in the balance – after its landlord, The Crown Estate, declined to renew its lease – has ensured its first-floor dining room is a lot busier than normal.

In fact, it is difficult to make out Ranjit Mathrani – one of the Regent Street restaurant’s current custodians – over the hum of the room. “There’s nothing like the possible imminent death of a restaurant to get people through the door,” he remarks dryly, before calmly ordering a bottle of Premier Cru white Burgundy to go with our selection of starters.

Along with his wife Namita Panjabi and sister-in-law Camellia Panjabi, Mathrani has owned the restaurant (see 100 years of Veeraswamy, below) for the past three decades. Their company – now called MW Eat – acquired it when the Indian fine dining landscape looked very different. The Bangladeshi-owned curry house reigned supreme, with only a handful of restaurants offering anything approaching upscale cuisine, most notably Bombay Brasserie in Kensington and the even more innovative Chutney Mary, then in Chelsea.

Both restaurants were connected to the family, with Camellia having played a key role in the creation of Bombay Brasserie, launched in 1982 while she was working for owner Taj Hotels. Chutney Mary was the trio’s debut restaurant, opening in 1990.

Mathrani – for whom the restaurant business is a second act following a distinguished career as a senior civil servant and investment banker – purchased the lease of the restaurant during what he describes as a low ebb for the business.

“After it was sold on by William Steward in 1967 it had a succession of Indian owners. None of them had a passion for food so ended up taking shortcuts. It essentially became an upmarket version of a Bangladeshi curry house and lost much of its reputation.”

This created a blank canvas for the trio, who chose to relaunch the site as a colourful, contemporary Indian restaurant specialising in regional dishes rarely seen in the UK. The menu featured plates such as mussels with moilee sauce; oysters flavoured with coconut and Keralan spices; appam pancakes; and authentic vindaloo — the slow-cooked masterpiece of Indo-Portuguese fusion — rather than the curry house version that usually serves as the penultimate rung on the heat ladder before the even more indigestible phall.

The overhauled Veeraswamy was a hit. A very young-looking Andrew Lloyd Webber, then a critic for The Telegraph, described it as one of the best new dining rooms in the capital. Time Out named it the Best Indian Restaurant in London, noting that while it might charge twice as much as a pedestrian curry house, ‘the beauty of the room, slick service and appealing dishes give a greater sense of luxury than any number of free poppadoms or potted palms ever can’.

While it can no longer be described as the new kid on the block, Veeraswamy has continued to enjoy considerable financial and critical success. In 2016, it received an unexpected 90th birthday present – a Michelin star – joining its MW Eat stablemate Amaya, down the road in Knightsbridge, in holding one.

The trio are formidable, with Namita and Camellia focusing on the creative aspects of running the restaurant group and Mathrani revelling in the numbers and the finer details. “I have a brain that can be across a lot of things, everything from the lighting to the order of the service,” Mathrani says of his role in the business.

David vs. Goliath

Mathrani is happy to answer my questions about the history of the site, but he is understandably more interested in talking about his ongoing battle with The Crown Estate which, as the name suggests, is owned by the current monarch (albeit managed independently as a public estate).

MW Eat was informed in 2024 that its lease would not be renewed, but the company went public last summer after The Crown Estate refused to come to the table. At the time, The Crown Estate told Restaurant that it needed to carry out a comprehensive refurbishment of Victory House, including the removal of Veeraswamy’s ground-floor entrance to make the offices within the building more accessible.

“They want to replace us with an office. They are being irresponsible and uncaring. People are outraged,” says Mathrani, who last month – along with much of the Veeraswamy team – delivered a petition of more than 20,000 signatures to Buckingham Palace before heading to The Crown Estate’s main office in nearby St James’s to urge a rethink.

Mathrani claims that The Crown Estate has been unreasonable in its refusal to engage in a “meaningful and constructive manner” and that its position has shifted repeatedly.

“Initially it was about the ground-floor lobby. We came up with several proposals that would allow them to create a reception area downstairs but were met with total silence. They then told us they had a statutory duty to maximise returns. We submitted proposals under which we would match the office rents. Again, we were met with silence.”

‘Disruptive works’

Mathrani says The Crown Estate is now arguing that the upcoming modernisation works would be too disruptive for a restaurant to operate.

“This is despite the fact that hundreds of offices and commercial buildings across the country have undergone refurbishment while remaining occupied.

“We have said we would be willing to close for lunch for several months to allow them to complete the works. We have also suggested that their experts meet with ours to explore a solution, but they now say they have done all the necessary research and that a meeting would be pointless.

“This is truly astonishing and unreasonable. They present themselves as responsible landlords, but that is simply untrue. They have not behaved responsibly towards us.”

The Crown Estate would not answer any of Restaurant’s questions due to the ongoing legal case, but provided a generic statement: “We need to carry out a comprehensive refurbishment of Victory House to both bring it up to modern standards, and into full use. We understand how disappointing this is for MW Eat and have offered help to find new premises within our portfolio so that the restaurant can stay in the West End, as well as financial compensation.”

It added that refusing the lease was not a decision it had taken lightly.

“With external advice, we have reviewed alternative proposals including those put forward by MW Eat, and unfortunately there isn’t an alternate scheme which meets our responsibilities as stewards of this heritage listed building, our legal obligations and our responsibilities to manage public money.”

The Crown Estate has offered slightly more than £500,000 in compensation - a sum understood to be only marginally above its statutory obligation. Under the relevant legislation, tenants in occupation for 14 years or more are entitled to twice the rateable value of the property.

Mathrani describes the offer as derisory, estimating that it would cost at least £5m to relocate Veeraswamy - a figure that combines both moving costs and the likely loss of trade.

“On top of that, we would struggle to achieve the same level of turnover in a new location, because a proportion of our customer base comes here precisely because this restaurant has been on Regent Street for 100 years.

“They have also said that they have offered us other suitable premises. This is not the case. They have not offered us anything satisfactory or available within an appropriate timescale.”

“Our lawyers think we have a decent chance. We have appointed one of the best KCs in the country to work on this. One of our key arguments is that the works to the building would not be nearly as disruptive if planned sensibly with us. But legal action is expensive and the outcome uncertain - we would much rather find a solution before it goes to court.”

The court case is understood to hinge on complex provisions under the Landlord and Tenant Act, which allow landlords to take back possession of premises for their own use, with MW-Eat challenging several of the grounds being relied upon.

A court hearing is scheduled for late June, with a judgment expected the following month. If Veeraswamy is unsuccessful, it will likely be gone by the end of the year.

Sale complications

Further complicating matters for Mathrani and his co-founders is the recent sale of the MW Eat business to Canadian firm Fairfax Financial Holdings in a private deal. The trio had been looking to sell for more than a decade, but the process was repeatedly delayed - first by the move of Chutney Mary to St James’s in 2015, then by Brexit, and finally by the pandemic.

Grudgingly accepting that he must at some point retire, Mathrani decided last year that enough was enough.

“We decided we would come to market towards the end of 2025, after our 2024–25 accounts were audited. We had started working with our lawyers and were selecting accountants to prepare everything for a sale. However, while we were doing so, Prem Watsa, chairman of Fairfax Financial - whom we had known for a number of years - approached us out of the blue.”

Mathrani ultimately struck a deal with Watsa, a long-time admirer of the group’s restaurants, that shields Fairfax from any fallout from the dispute with The Crown Estate.

“Veeraswamy is part of the group for operational purposes, but Camellia, Namita and I have taken full responsibility for handling the dispute. The campaign is ours, and ours alone,” says Mathrani.

With The Crown Estate standing firm, the dispute now appears destined to be settled in court. If anything, the brave fight for Veeraswamy’s future appears to have energised Mathrani.

“There’s a lot of petrol left in the tank,” he says.

“Clearly, find having a restaurant in between offices inconvenient and difficult to manage. There also seems to be a level of cultural insensitivity. They do not understand the significance of the oldest Indian restaurant in the UK. I wonder whether they would have taken the same position had it been a British restaurant of the same stature.”

While the future of Veeraswamy hangs in the balance for now at least, the dining room remains full, the cutlery polished and the kitchen busy - much as it has been for the past hundred years.