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DOCUMENT 1 Who killed the great British curry house? When, aged 23, Oli Khan first set eyes on Linlithgow, a modest town about 30km north of Edinburgh, he saw a prize greater than anything to be found at home, which was then in Kent, south-east England. This chilly Scottish town
DOCUMENT 1 Who killed the great British curry house? When, aged 23, Oli Khan first set eyes on Linlithgow, a modest town about 30km north of Edinburgh, he saw a prize greater than anything to be found at home, which was then in Kent, south-east England. This chilly Scottish town was the perfect place, 5 Khan decided, to set up a curry house. With help from his brother-in-law, who was in the restaurant trade, he opened his curry house in 1995 and named it Kismet- destiny. Khan’s father, who arrived in Britain from Bangladesh as a waiter in 1962, had taught him that there was money to be made from selling curry to the British, if you could 10 adapt to their taste for predictable sauces on a sliding scale of heat. For thousands of Bangladeshi immigrants in the 60s and 70s, working in Britain as OCs (“onion cutters”) and DCs (“dish cleaners”) was a way out of an even more precarious existence back home. From the experience of his father, who worked his way up from waiting tables to 15 owning a curry house in Kent, Khan knew that opening a new curry business anywhere in the UK was a low-risk proposition, because many locals, especially those who drank, would soon become hooked on “going for an Indian”.[…] By the late 1990s, curry had come to represent a newly cosmopolitan Britain. Though hardly acknowledged by restaurant critics, except for mocking asides about their red 20 flock wallpaper, curry houses were one of the great successes of the postwar UK restaurant industry.[…] Now, however, the curry house’s place in British life looks precarious. Thousands of Indian restaurants are short of both staff to cook the food and customers to eat it. Across the industry, two or three curry houses are closing down each week. This is a 25 crisis with many causes, the effects of which extend far beyond curry. Since the Brexit vote and the subsequent collapse of the pound, independent food outlets of all kinds have been hurt by rises in rents, rates and food prices. Meanwhile, in families that run curry houses, younger generations have moved away from catering to more lucrative jobs in medicine or tech. The real blow came when a harsh new politics of 30 immigration came in, which made it harder for skilled south Asian chefs to work in the country, just as