‘When you know very little, you fear even less’: Vivek Singh on 25 years of The Cinnamon Club

A 25-year run is a rare thing in the life of a London restaurant. Rarer still is one that’s permanently altered, broadened and reshaped an entire cuisine. Set inside the soaring former Westminster Library, The Cinnamon Club has done just that, opening with a small, constantly changing menu built on game and seasonal British produce, at prices other chefs called madness.

Its chef and co-founder, Vivek Singh, strides into the velvet-heavy Cinnamon Club bar from the kitchen, dressed in black, silver-haired, and with the assurance of someone who’s spent a quarter of a century successfully making the case for Indian cooking to be taken seriously.

But when Singh first arrived in December 2000, by his own account, he knew almost nothing about London or the people he was about to cook for. Someone suggested he rent a flat in New Cross, largely because the number 53 bus then ran straight up the Old Kent Road to Westminster. ‘No change, nothing,’ he says, grinning. ‘I could sleep on the bus. It was fantastic.’

‘I didn’t know anything about the kind of restaurants, the amount of money people spent, and the backdrop of it culturally.’ But Singh did know kitchens. He’d been cooking at Oberoi Rajvilas in Jaipur, where he quickly became restless: ‘We were just spending one day after the other, running around, trying to give people what they want, rather than actually taking a moment to say, “What else could be done?”’

What drew him to London was co-founder Iqbal Wahhab’s artist’s impression of the library dining room. ‘It was a blank canvas,’ he says. ‘I could have written or painted anything on it.’

‘When you know very little, you fear even less.’

‘I think it was also born out of audacity,’ he says, almost still disbelieving. ‘Slightly, dare I say, naivete. When you know very little, you fear even less. I suspect I hadn’t quite taken on this thing about, oh, what if it doesn’t work?’

With no websites or Instagram accounts to study, Singh learned the city by talking to people. An obvious identikit template emerged: Indian restaurants everywhere offered lamb, chicken, fish and prawn in set sauces graded by region or heat. They were loved, but rarely admired. The curry house, he realised, had become ‘this trusty old friend that you could lean on every time you were having a bad day, but you didn’t particularly respect it. And so you could sometimes be rude.’

He didn’t want The Cinnamon Club simply to be the best Indian restaurant. ‘We’ve got to try and work towards people looking at this cuisine and this restaurant in the same way as they would look at any other top London establishment.’

Doubters at every level

Opposition came from every direction. Some of it was inherited: as editor of Tandoori Magazine, Wahhab's outspoken criticism created a ready-made set of enemies who wanted the restaurant to fail, and said so openly.

Though polite, friends and well-wishers were no more encouraging. Singh wanted guests to spend £35-£40 a head when £15 was the norm. He had 230 seats to fill and hoped to serve 80 at lunch, when the best Indian restaurants in town struggled to book 20. The British, they told him, didn’t eat Indian food at lunchtime.

What was a blank canvas is now home to beautiful dishes like Anjou pigeon breast teamed with beetroot and squab leg filo rolls.

On the first day, a critic stopped Singh in the dining room. ‘He said, “We Brits, we love a curry. We don’t expect much from it. Why are you trying so hard?”’

The South Asian community wasn’t entirely convinced either. One busy Friday, a table of ten demanded saag aloo, or they’d walk out. ‘I said, the option of leaving, you always had,’ Singh recalls. ‘But what are the chances you’d get a table of ten anywhere else on a Friday night? You may as well try it. You may not like it. Or, you may experience something new.’

He barely registered most of it. He was working seven days a week, his wife was pregnant, and there were no Google reviews to monitor. ‘We were quite cocooned,’ he says.

‘Why is it not authentic? And why must it be?’

The comment that stung most came, ironically, from contented guests on their way out. ‘They’d say, that was excellent. But it’s not very authentic, is it?’ Singh says. ‘And I’d think, I was born in India, I lived there for 30 years. These are recipes I’ve grown up around. Why is it not authentic?’

He found an answer in the Japanese chef Masaharu Morimoto, who’d heard the same thing cooking sushi in New York. As Singh tells it, Morimoto replied with two questions: why isn’t my food authentic, and why must it be? ‘I found a lot of solace in that, and I stopped getting offended.’

Singh’s since taken the argument further: tradition is rarely static. ‘No two regions cook the same way. Who’s going to decide what is authentic? Scratch the surface, and even the most authentic dishes travelled from somewhere else. The samosa did. The biryani did.’

He told his teams not to be offended when people didn’t get it straight away; one day they would. It took seven or eight years to get there. In 2008, a young professional thanked him: whenever colleagues claimed Indian food lacked subtlety, she booked them a table and proved them wrong.

‘We’re doing exactly the same thing, and we have stood in exactly the same place,’ Singh says, ‘but we’ve gone from being the most inauthentic Indian restaurant to perhaps one of the most authentic.’

The Michelin question

The doubters were right about one thing: the money was hard. In the first few years, despite a dining room full of politicians, City boys and corporate clients, the restaurant sometimes couldn’t pay its team on time. ‘The anguish,’ Singh says with a sigh. ‘It was unbearable.’ About a dozen people had followed him from India, with mortgages to pay and families back home relying on them.

That settled the Michelin question. ‘Our north star had to be a full dining room,’ he says. ‘I always walked in here knowing there were 230 seats. For me to then say I only wanted to do 40 guests a night because I wanted a Michelin star would have been really disingenuous.’

The star never came, and he’s relaxed about it. ‘When you don’t have a star, you don’t worry about losing one. And the best part is that most people think you should have a star when you don’t. It’s not something that I resent.’ He's right about that: in 2016, trade coverage mislabelled the restaurant as the Michelin-starred Cinnamon Club; the assumption is common today.

Premium ingredients, like Balmoral Estate venison (pictured right), come combined with classic Indian flavours. 

If one arrived tomorrow, would it matter? ‘I don’t think it would, no,’ he says, shaking off the question. ‘We have the affirmation of the guests. And we’ve remained true to our idea of being this nursery of ideas and talent.’

A nursery of talent

That’s the legacy Singh is proudest of. There was a time, he says, when almost any well-run Indian restaurant in Britain had one or two senior chefs who’d passed through The Cinnamon Club. ‘It is more gratifying to have helped and supported people who wanted direction or guidance.’

Many of them stayed. Rakesh Nair met Singh in Delhi in 2002 and rose from chef de partie to head chef; he now oversees all restaurants as group development and training chef. Hari Nagaraj, who co-wrote The Cinnamon Club anniversary menu with Nair, is another. Santosh Shah went from Sous Chef at The Cinnamon Club to Head Chef at Cinnamon Kitchen, and later finished runner-up on MasterChef: The Professionals.

‘It is possible to have a good restaurant, a good business, a good team and considerable success,’ he says, ‘without being a dick.’ For Singh, it’s simple: ‘Because we were so passionate and so proud about what we did, our doors were always open.’

That openness spread well beyond his own kitchens. Singh points to Asma Khan’s Darjeeling Express as the kind of personal, regional restaurant that simply ‘wasn’t possible in those days’, modestly leaving out his own part in it. After attending one of Khan’s early home supper clubs, he invited her to host a pop-up at The Cinnamon Club, a moment Khan calls a major turning point.

‘It dawned on me that the clue was in the name; there must be a way to connect with the younger audience’

By the late 2000s, The Cinnamon Club was serving close to 100,000 guests a year, but Singh was already wondering where the next generation would come from. When he answered the phone, callers asked about the dress code, whether they needed a jacket and tie, or whether it was a members’ club.

‘It dawned on me that the clue was in the name,’ he says. ‘There must be a way to connect with the younger audience, and get them in to experience this whole philosophy of spice and good, seasonal ingredients.’

Cinnamon Kitchen was his answer: cheaper and livelier than the library, with an open kitchen and a team happy to share recipes.

Cinnamon Kitchen Leeds, the brand’s first franchised site in the north, joins the group's owned portfolio of Cinnamon Kitchen City, Cinnamon Kitchen Battersea and Cinnamon Bazaar.

It brought in fresh talent along with new diners. Will Bowlby spent eight months at Cinnamon Kitchen City in 2014, after two years cooking in India, later launching Kricket. He’s since said, with some irony, that he learned most of what he knows about Indian cooking from Singh and from Abdul Yaseen, his head chef there. ‘Will Bowlby is one of ours,’ Singh says. ‘We are incredibly proud of him.’

Cinnamon Bazaar followed, lowering the price again. ‘Somebody said to me, I love your good, better, best model,’ Singh laughs. ‘It wasn’t a model I’d thought about. But it ended up being a pyramid.’

A new Indian orthodoxy

Modern Indian cooking is no longer new; it’s everywhere. That raises a new question: could it become another orthodoxy of its own? ‘It runs the risk,’ Singh says, ‘if it’s not done from a place of genuine care or curiosity. If it just becomes a formula.’

He’s careful not to look down on what came before. He admits his early criticism of the curry houses ‘may come across as dismissive’, and recognises that the appetite for Indian dining created by Sylheti operators made his own work possible. ‘What that generation did to keep this British love for India alive is invaluable. I think it’s incredible what they achieved, especially when you look at where they came from.’ That goes for existing highly trained chefs in 2001 too, working at restaurants like Tamarind, Zaika, Quilon: ‘The tide was lifting all boats.’

As for the modern wave, he expects something like a reckoning: ‘Every now and again, there will come a correction.’ He remembers opening Cinnamon Kitchen in the City in 2008 as the financial crisis hit, and a critic’s words that stuck: ‘These are hard times for bad restaurants. Good restaurants will be just fine.’ Cinnamon Kitchen City is now approaching 20 years.

His idea of success has shifted too. Back when he was catching up on sleep on the 53 bus, he simply wanted a restaurant that expressed what he knew was possible. That soon grew: ‘I wanted to be a part of something that would far outlive me.’

‘The biggest success, both for me and for many in my team, is that we’ve done it for as long as we’ve done it,’ he says. ‘And we’re still not out of love with it. So many people get into this for all the right reasons and come out the other side slightly bitter and twisted. The fact that we’ve not got to that point is a bigger success than anything.’

‘I’d do it all over again.’

Want to know more directly from the chefs shaping how we eat? Head over to peruse SquareMeal's Female Chef of the Year Awards, or check out our interviews with SquareMeal Top 100 winners, Jan Ostle and Aaron Potter.