LASAN

Lasan Restaurant
3-4 Dakota Buildings
James Street
St Paul's Square
BIRMINGHAM
B3 1SD

Indian food is the food of Kings and Emperors; it’s not slap up food at 3am in the morning.

Having been among the live audience who saw Birmingham boys Lasan crowned the F Word’s ‘Best Local Restaurant’ last month, flavour Editor Holly Aurelius-Haddock caught up with head chef Aktar Islam…

Congratulations on winning Aktar, you must be over the moon…
It’s absolutely fantastic; even though it’s only been a matter of weeks since we won, the feeling is just as strong it’s going to take quite some time to get over this!

How did it feel, the moment they announced you were the winners?
I wouldn’t say I was worried, I suppose in any competition the best party will win and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Jay and Liam are fantastically talented guys who’ve got a great restaurant, I really enjoyed what they did on the day and it was good to be up against competition of that level. Yes I wanted to win but I would have walked away a happy man even to have made it to the final and have competed against guys like them. It was fantastic to win not only on the points that night, but also to have been given chef Ramsay’s deciding vote.

Why do think you won?
I think we take a unique approach to Indian food at Lasan. First of all, we’re not region specific so try to give our customers an insight into the cuisine from all over the subcontinent. We don’t just look into what’s available now either, we delve into a lot of the culinary practices that have been lost. Take for example dum cooking, where you add little or no moisture apart from what you’d find in the vegetables or the meat, and then you fill the clay pot with dough, cover it with embers and slow cook it in a very low oven. It was very prevalent in the Mogul court but has become less popular now because it’s labour intensive. The results nonetheless are fantastic and as you can imagine, the meat is some of the most tender you’ll ever taste.

How did you come to take part in the show in the first place?
The whole process usually starts off with nominations from your customers on the F Word website, and they started to send through mystery diners even before they’d contacted us, one of which was the chief producer who handles all the food and recipes on the show. It’s an incredibly thorough process.

What are some of your standout moments from the show?
A lot of people talk about it, and for those who know me it came as quite a surprise that I cried – I can’t remember the last time that happened! It just goes to show how important that was for me, to the point where the whole point of crying was such an alien emotion that I found it very hard to control it. All I can say is that the next day I felt absolutely fantastic so I can only thank chef Ramsay for that.

What’s Gordon like to work with?
There’s a lot about Gordon that people don’t realise or don’t care to look into. Ultimately you have to understand that he is a family man with a lot of friends and you have to be sociable in order to have that. What you see on television, I suppose that’s his persona in the kitchen, but when the cameras are all off he’s a very, very nice person to be around. The amount of support he gave to myself and all the other teams throughout the whole process was absolutely amazing.

What have you taken from the show?
There have been times in the past where I’ve questioned my methods and motives because of what mainstream market trends are, but the show has taught me not to question myself and to stick with your gut instinct because with enough hard work, it pays off.



The award itself was for the ‘Best Local Restaurant’ – do you think it’s particularly poignant that an Indian restaurant won?
In the past, Indian food has tended to come at the end of an evening of drinking, with people ordering the hottest thing possible, going home and complaining about it in the morning! It’s sometimes tough for us because that’s what British people expect from the dining experience, and there are those who feel we’re breaking away from that. Indian food is the food of Kings and Emperors; it’s not slap up food at 3am in the morning. I am partly thankful for the British curry model as it’s given us a platform to work from, but on the flip side, it’s also done an injustice to the food. I think curry has probably been one of Britain’s most popular dishes for a lot longer than the 10 years that I have been a restaurateur, but what I believe is happening now is that people are respecting Indian food a little bit more, and hopefully we are encouraging that respect.

Perhaps the most noticeable of your recent awards was the Men’s Health Award for Healthiest Restaurant in 2009. Would you describe Indian food as healthy?
When it comes to people’s perception of Indian food being unhealthy, I think that again comes down to their understandably misguided perception of it. Real Indian food is a lot lighter than the thick, stodgy, ghee laden sauces that we’re used to – it’s an expensive commodity in India so it’s only really used for celebratory meals. The concept of Ayurveda, the science of using food and spices to enhance one’s life, is thousands of years old and is entwined in the food culture too. We’ve worked very closely with York University Medical School to ensure our methods are sound and actually wrote a book together that was distributed through GP surgeries. I can say with confidence that Indian food is most definitely healthy provided it’s served in the right way