Birmingham Curry History From The Darjeeling to the Balti

From Ship to Steelhouse Lane: Abdul Aziz and The Darjeeling

Long before the balti made Birmingham a byword for curry, the trade was seeded by Bengali and Sylheti seamen, cooks and café-keepers who had helped build the labour networks and foodways of Britain's ports. The clearest candidate for the person who brought curry into Birmingham's mainstream dining culture is Abdul Aziz. A labourer on a British Navy ship, Aziz jumped ship at Newcastle-upon-Tyne around 1940 and made his way to Birmingham.

There he met Violet, an Irish waitress at a café on Coleshill Street. His son David later remembered her as Aziz's "rock" — the person who taught him English and helped him navigate British life. The couple lived on Ladywood Road and worked in factories to save capital, and in 1945 they bought and ran John's Restaurant on Steelhouse Lane. Over the following years curry and rice were added to the menu, and by 1954 the venue had become known as The Darjeeling, remembered in later research as Birmingham's "first proper curry house".

That two-stage sequence matters. John's Restaurant was bought in 1945; The Darjeeling, as a recognisable curry house, belongs to 1954. Aziz's importance, though, was never only culinary. He trained later generations of restaurateurs, employed newly arrived Bangladeshi migrants as chefs and waiters, and often housed them in rooms above the restaurant. David Aziz also recalled his father's links with policemen from the nearby Steelhouse Lane station, solicitors from the courts, and invitations to the Council House — the marks of a man who had become both a restaurateur and a recognised community intermediary.

The Kazi Family and the Birmingham Curry Takeaway

Birmingham's early curry history was shaped not only by what was cooked, but by how it was sold. Mozamil and Rachel Kazi had been running Rae's Cafe on Bristol Street since the early 1950s, serving steak, eggs and chips and similar café fare. Once curry was put on the menu, demand grew strong enough to force a move to larger premises on Moseley Road in 1957, where the restaurant became the Jinnah. Among their customers was a young John Bonham, before his fame as the drummer of Led Zeppelin.

The family testimony is valuable because it shows labour divided across gender and generation. Mozamil was remembered as a shrewd businessman who handled the finances, while their son Steve recalled his mother Rachel — "a bubbly character" who nonetheless "ruled with an iron rod" — as the public face who ran the day-to-day business. Their son John Kazi developed a delivery service after customers said they could not get to the restaurant. "I would bring a curry to them," he recalled. Curries were carried to the door, and some regulars even brought their own pots to be filled with food and rice.

Nurujuman Khan and the Professionalising of the Trade

Nurujuman Khan's story shows how quickly Birmingham's Bangladeshi restaurant world became more sophisticated. He arrived at Heathrow from Bangladesh in the summer of 1957, followed a cousin to Birmingham, and saved quickly — within a year he had co-owned restaurants in Wolverhampton and Worcester before returning to the city. After training in silver service at The Plough in Monkspath, Solihull, he became manager for Abdul Samad at the Bombay restaurant in Essex Street.

There, Khan and Samad are credited with introducing a hot-food trolley and developing fresh dishes, among them "chicken mossman", described as bhuna chicken topped with sliced egg. Khan's recollections are especially useful on the diners themselves. Many early customers were former colonial "expats" who had served in India and already had a taste for the food; others were English customers who had to be gently coached through an unfamiliar menu. His testimony captures a moment when Birmingham was still learning how to "go out for a curry".

More Than Restaurants: Curry Houses as Community Hubs

These pioneers were not simply restaurant owners; they were settlement brokers. The Darjeeling, the Jinnah and other early houses did not just feed customers — they helped newly arrived men find work, learn the trade, and build lives in the city, sometimes housing them in rooms above the business. Around them grew the supporting infrastructure of a community: in the 1960s Syed Abdur Rahman is remembered in oral history as an early supply-chain pioneer who opened a wholesale chicken business, feeding a trade that was steadily consolidating. A booth from the Koor-i-Noor, a curry house opened in 1962, was later collected as part of the city's heritage record.

To write curry only as a food story is to miss its role in migration, labour and community formation. The restaurant sector was, in effect, a labour market, a welfare system and a cultural bridge rolled into one — and it was often a mixed-household story, in which Violet Aziz taught her husband "the ways of British culture" and Rachel Kazi animated the front of house of one of the city's best-known restaurants.

Two Histories: The Bangladeshi Pioneers and the Later Balti Era

Birmingham's curry history is best understood in two overlapping layers rather than one. The first is the Bangladeshi and East Bengali restaurant story of the 1940s to 1960s: city-centre cafés, mixed marriages, family-run premises, mild curry and rice, migrant lodgings above restaurants, and the gradual education of British customers. The second is the later balti story — associated above all with Pakistani restaurateurs in the Balti Triangle of Sparkbrook, Balsall Heath and Moseley — that came to dominate Birmingham's popular culinary reputation. Both matter, but they are not the same history, and neither should be allowed to erase the other.

Keeping the two layers distinct is not pedantry. It restores to view a generation of Bangladeshi pioneers whose work predates the balti by two decades, and whose restaurants were among the first places in the city where curry was served to the public at all.

Preserving the Story: Knights of the Raj

Much of this history was recovered through the Knights of the Raj project, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and staged at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery between 2016 and 2018. The project gathered memories from around fifty people across the trade, fixing in public memory a set of stories that had survived largely in families and community recollection. Its curator, the Birmingham artist Mohammed Ali — whose own father, Watir Ali, arrived from Bangladesh in 1957 and later worked in the restaurant trade — put the case plainly: "These stories need to be heard." Of the pioneers he said simply, "They deserve a voice."

The memory of the community also owes much to the writer and photographer Yousuf Choudhury. Born in Sylhet in 1928, he arrived in Birmingham in 1957, worked in heavy industry and catering, and later became an author whose books on Bangladeshi settlers, seamen and Birmingham's Bengali community remain foundational references. He died in Birmingham in 2002. Where documentary dates are thin — the exact birthplaces and death dates of several restaurateurs remain unrecorded — this page follows the strongest available evidence rather than filling the gaps by assumption.