BY AFP

Sitting in the garden of his newly-opened restaurant in Dhaka, Miah beams with pride as diners tuck into his mouthwatering “Bangla fusion” culinary creations.

Dubbed the “curry king” of Britain, Miah arrived in the United Kingdom in 1969 as a ten-year-old immigrant without a word of English.

Today his “Raj” restaurant in the Scottish capital Edinburgh has achieved worldwide fame.

Queen Elizabeth II wrote the foreword to his latest book, a move described by Buckingham Palace as the queen’s first and last celebrity endorsement.

Miah also bagged a place in the Guinness Book of Records for cooking the world’s biggest curry, while his International Indian Chef of the Year competition is now in its 14th year.

Miah’s latest venture, “The Heritage Restaurant” in Dhaka, is his fourth eatery but his first in Bangladesh.

“I always wanted to open a restaurant here because my heart has always been in Bangladesh,” he told AFP. “I’ve had success in Britain but there’s something in me that says I have to be here, that I have to put something back.
 

“My father was a rural labourer. We were so poor we couldn’t even afford a ball to play football with so we used grapefruit instead,” he said. “Dad wanted a better life for us so we went to Britain.

“He worked in a factory and we lived in a tiny set of rented rooms. It was very cold and I missed my grandmother in Bangladesh whom I loved to bits.

“At school, I couldn’t speak English. The other children teased me so a teacher suggested I stop calling myself Ajman and call myself Tommy instead.”

But Miah didn’t waste time feeling sorry for himself. He left school before the end of his final year and found work washing dishes in restaurants.

Soon he was pestering chefs for tips and practising recipes at home.

At the age of 17, Miah and his wife Rina opened a takeaway restaurant in a suburb of Birmingham, northwest of London.

To make ends meet, Miah paid staff in free curries and worked the morning shift at a factory making teddy bears.

A few years later, “The Verandah” restaurant, a joint venture in Edinburgh, paved the way for the success of the “Raj”.

Recipe for success

Miah sums up his recipe for success as “hard work, more hard work and marketing”.

His second restaurant caught the public’s imagination after an advertising campaign promised diners “everything except red flock wallpaper”, a reference to the embossed wallpaper then standard in most Indian restaurants in Britain.

Later, when he opened the “Raj” Miah spent every penny on the restaurant, leaving nothing to hire a celebrity for the opening.

Instead, he made headlines by asking a local zoo if he could borrow a tiger, eventually settling for an elephant that had appeared in the film Gandhi.

“Of course, the food has to be good, of course, you have to work unbelievably hard,” he added, “but if you don’t market yourself, no-one will want to know you.”

Now, Miah hopes to promote his beloved Bengali culture through his new restaurant.

“I was full of tears when it opened,” he said. “It was like a dream come true, to come here and put something together that I am proud of. I still have my business in the UK but I’ll be coming back here at every opportunity.”