Canadian billionaire Prem Watsa is taking the U.K.’s Indian restaurants global

The London restaurant Veeraswamy, founded in 1926, forms part of a chain of fine-dining Indian eateries that was purchased in November by Canadian Prem Watsa. Photo by Paul Marshall /Postmedia

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Last week’s centenary celebration dinner at Veeraswamy, Britain’s oldest Indian restaurant, was a bittersweet affair. Over Chicken Supreme Mumtazi and slow-cooked tandoori Welsh lamb encased in a light pastry, loyal customers reminisced about the Michelin-starred restaurant’s history and its welcoming staff.

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But Veeraswamy, founded in 1926 by the great-grandson of a British East India Company general and a Mughal princess, may soon be gone. Its lease has expired and the Crown Estate, owner of the Grade II listed Regent Street building where the restaurant is located, wants it to make way for offices.

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Veeraswamy’s trio of former owners has been mounting a fierce rearguard action, presenting a protest petition signed by 20,000 people at Buckingham Palace and taking the estate to court. “They are being utterly unreasonable,” says Ranjit Mathrani, co-founder of MW Eat, the group that owns Veeraswamy and other restaurants, including Chutney Mary in St James’s.

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It would be a sad story except that Anglo-Indian fine dining, a movement pioneered in London by Mathrani and his wife Namita Panjabi, along with her sister Camellia Panjabi, has never possessed greater culinary and financial power. Among last week’s hosts was Prem Watsa, a Canadian billionaire and founder of Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd., which acquired MW Eat in November.

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“London is very competitive for Indian food because you guys understand it,” Watsa told me. He was born in Hyderabad before emigrating at the age of 22 and becoming known as Canada’s answer to Warren Buffett. The deal has sentimental value since he is an old friend of the trio, but he called it “a very good quality investment with potential to expand all over the world.”

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This would have been implausible until recently, since Britain’s imperial heritage made the food offered by chains such as Dishoom more popular in the United Kingdom than America. “It has always felt like a given: Indian restaurants are better in Britain than in the U.S.,” Priya Krishna, a New York Times food writer, noted in August.

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But the culinary world is evolving. MW Eat’s rival JKS Restaurants recently opened branches of its Mayfair restaurants Gymkhana and Ambassadors Clubhouse in Las Vegas and New York respectively. India’s growing wealth, and its diaspora of business people and bankers wanting the country’s food everywhere from the Gulf to the U.S., have expanded the market.

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MW East’s founders trod carefully after opening Chutney Mary in 1990: “We are unusual in being profitable as well as focusing on quality,” Mathrani says. They acquired the faded Veeraswamy in 1997 and founded the casual-dining chain Masala Zone in 2001, then Amaya in Belgravia in 2004. The group made a £4.4 million pre-tax profit on sales of £32 million last year and paid a £4.7 million dividend.