Bangladesh and bhorthas: The many lives of Brick Lane
Keir, the King and the political significance of Graam Bangla, by Jonathan Nunn
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Vittles Reviews is a column dedicated to critical reviews of London restaurants, written by Jonathan Nunn. You can read all the previous reviews here.
Bangladesh and bhorthas: The many lives of Brick Lane
A review of the historical and political significance of Graam Bangla, by Jonathan Nunn
There is no road in London whose reality is as distorted by the weight of its own fictions as Brick Lane. On a recent stroll down from Shoreditch, I heard the high-pitched shrill of an American voice. ‘Look, it’s Brick Lane!’ they said, with the same excitement you might expect a tourist to say ‘Look, it’s Big Ben!’, or ‘Look, it’s Bill Nighy!’. What they were looking for on Brick Lane, I’m not sure. If they were looking for the old East End then I hope they would have been less delighted with the relentless, prurient Jack the Ripper tours than the Caribbean builder three storeys up from the street, bellowing songs from Mary Poppins (“I does what I likes and I likes what I do”). If they were looking for Jewish East London and the two beigel shops, then they would have been disappointed to find only one still open (although the Yellow One reopened last week after resolving a byzantine family dispute). If they were looking for the best curries in the city, then they would have spotted curry house after curry house proudly displaying photos of fake Gordon Ramsays and real Harry Redknapps, gaming Google Reviews by guilting customers to leave them five stars through QR codes they force upon you with the bill. And if they were looking for the mythos of Bangladeshi Brick Lane, the Banglatown that has been marketed to us in guidebooks and Bengali street signs, then they may have assumed that it could be found in the one restaurant with a cutout of the actual King of England in the window: Graam Bangla.
When I first heard about the royal visit last February (‘Wtf, King Charles is in Graam Bangla’ blew up the group chat), it seemed just as unlikely as hearing the Queen was in Cafe Oto. Despite Bangladeshi restaurateurs creating what is essentially England’s second cuisine, actual Bangladeshi food has had a minimal impact on national tastes; back in the early 2010s, Graam Bangla was almost exclusively frequented by Bangladeshi men and white guys who like to eat with their hands as a flex. Then, as now, it was one of only three restaurants on Brick Lane (the other two are Cafe Grill and Amar Gaon) serving food from Sylhet in the country’s north-east, from where the majority of London’s Bangladeshi community hail. Here, there is an emphasis on fish that look like fish, whether it’s the thousand eyes of keski, a tiny sprat abundant in the Ganges, or the thousand bones of elish, a buttery river fish that requires precision and patience to pick apart. There are various types of bhortha, a mash that veers from breathtakingly fresh and herbal, like a Northern Thai salad, to a vehicle for the medicinal bitterness of mustard oil. And there’s shutki satni, a fermented fish paste of such potency that just a spoonful is enough to turn a bowl of white rice into a whole meal. When Graam Bangla closed in 2016 after almost two decades in business, it felt like a huge loss for London. Its unexpected reopening at the tail end of the decade, as good as ever, was miracle enough. That there was now a non-zero chance that the new Queen had tried Graam Bangla’s shutki seemed almost too much to take in.
The real reason for the visit of Charles and Camilla to Graam Bangla is that appreciation for Bangladeshi culture in this country is well overdue. As far as I can tell, no restaurant serving Bangladeshi cuisine has ever received a national review, while ‘Bangladeshi’ as a descriptor is still used as a kind of shorthand for something subaltern, in the way Pakistani and Indian used to be. Just witness last week the comments of Keir Starmer, our new Prime Minister, who used Bangladesh as an example of a country we should deport migrants back to, claiming at the Sun newspaper’s election debate, ‘at the moment people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed’. This rightly outraged the British Bangladeshi community, including the group British Bangladeshi Power and Inspiration, who organised the royal visit to showcase the cultural contribution that the Bangladeshi community has made to this part of the East End. The tour had a thoughtfully curated route: it started with the King and Queen meeting local residents who had organised on the street during the 1960s and 70s before they planted a tree in memory of the Bangladeshi textile worker Altab Ali, who was murdered in 1978 in a racially motivated attack. They then got a takeaway from Graam Bangla and finished at the Brick Lane mosque, a building that serves as a living metaphor for the area, having previously been a chapel and a synagogue before it was converted during the 1970s. The tour was a small encapsulation of the road’s strong links between political, religious and food spaces, which are really one and the same.