Veerasawmy’s India Restaurant, Regent Street, London

United India 1932 Veerasawmy (reading room scan)_WEB.jpg

Title

Veerasawmy’s India Restaurant, Regent Street, London

Description

Interwar London was an increasingly cosmopolitan city in terms of the diversity of religious spaces, its diasporic communities, and its restaurants. While French cuisine dominated most venues, Indian delegates to the Round Table Conference were able to dine on Indian food in the centre of London. Shafi’s Restaurant on Gerrard Street, in what is now Chinatown, posted advertisements in the summer of 1931 attempting to pitch for business during the forthcoming second session of the conference ('The Shafi’s is not merely a public restaurant: It is a proper rendezvous for all decent and dignified people'). Yet it was Veerasawmy’s (later spelled Veeraswamy’s following a printing error), located on Regent Street near Piccadilly, which attracted most conference trade. It boasted of being London’s oldest Indian restaurant, founded in 1926, and claimed to have invented the pairing of lager and curry, after a visiting Prince of Denmark sent a barrel of Carlsberg in appreciation. Organisations such as the Indian Medical Association, the United Punjab Association and the Indian National Congress League used it to host lobbying events with domestic and visiting politicians and businessmen. Veerasawmy's chefs supplied food to the delegate’s social club in Mayfair, while delegates could also use the restaurant to return the hospitality of their hosts, such as a dinner hosted by the visiting delegate for the Anglo-Indian community in January 1931, attended by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for India. The restaurant still operates in the same premises.

Rights

United India, January-February editions, 1932, rear cover / © British Library Board, General Reference Collection 1932 LOU.LON 515 [1932]

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Citation

“Veerasawmy’s India Restaurant, Regent Street, London,” Spaces of Internationalism, accessed March 29, 2024, https://spacesofinternationalism.omeka.net/items/show/41.