Translations:English cuisine/72/en
During the British Raj, Britain first started borrowing Indian dishes, creating Anglo-Indian cuisine, with dishes such as kedgeree (1790) and Mulligatawny soup (1791). Indian food was served in coffee houses from 1809, and cooked at home from a similar date as cookbooks of the time attest. The Veeraswamy restaurant in Regent Street, London, was opened in 1926, at first serving Anglo-Indian food, and is the oldest surviving Indian restaurant in Britain. There was a sharp increase in the number of curry houses in the 1940s, and again in the 1970s.
The post-colonial Anglo-Indian dish chicken tikka masala was apparently invented in Glasgow in the early 1970s, while balti cuisine was introduced to Britain in 1977 in Birmingham. In 2003, there were roughly 9,000 restaurants serving Indian cuisine in Britain. The majority of Indian restaurants in Britain are run by entrepreneurs of Bangladeshi (often Sylhetis) and Pakistani origin. According to Britain's Food Standards Agency, the Indian food industry in the United Kingdom was worth £3.2 billion in 2003, accounting for two-thirds of all eating out, and serving about 2.5 million British customers every week.