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looking for something else,” explains Anna. “James<br />
used to go out for a lot of curries with friends and<br />
he used to really complain about the food, and one<br />
evening one of his mates said ‘well if you think you<br />
can do better then why don’t you do it?’. And James<br />
was thinking, ‘you know what, I can!’<br />
“We’ve had a tandoor oven in the garden for about<br />
ten years. James’ chicken tikka masala is out of this<br />
world, he makes his own naan breads which are<br />
amazing, and our friend Jon Toovey, who runs Sauce<br />
Fine Foods, suggested we do curry nights at his<br />
sister’s pub in Colton.”<br />
The local curry nights went down a storm, but it<br />
was a trip to Digbeth Dining Club, Birmingham’s<br />
popular weekly street food event, which sparked the<br />
idea that James could combine his love of Indian<br />
cuisine with a new venture.<br />
“We ate food there and I just thought James’ food<br />
was better than what we were eating,” says Anna.<br />
“These guys were really busy, flat out, and I thought<br />
‘hold on a minute, we could do this.”<br />
Getting into Digbeth Dining Club proved to be<br />
a huge challenge for the fledgling business. The<br />
organisers – James and Jack – are inundated with<br />
traders wanting a pitch and Anna and<br />
James were concerned that their application<br />
would get lost. Emails, tweets and Facebook<br />
messages were getting them nowhere.<br />
“So we came up with the idea that we should<br />
take our cooking equipment there one night<br />
when the owner was there and cook for<br />
him,” says Anna. “Anyone can say their food<br />
is brilliant so we wanted to prove ours was.<br />
“We spoke to a lovely lady who said we could<br />
set up behind her gazebo, we took a camping<br />
stove and a frying pan and we made our kati<br />
rolls and pani puri. And that was it; we were<br />
in.”<br />
As regulars at Digbeth Dining Club, James<br />
and Anna were soon a mainstay of the<br />
burgeoning street food dining scene. But<br />
something just wasn’t quite right.<br />
“So after a year we decided to change the<br />
type of food we were serving,” says Anna. “It<br />
was delicious, and amazing and lovely but we<br />
just weren’t competing with the other street<br />
food traders. We’d do an event and I’d be<br />
looking around and seeing other traders with<br />
massive queues, but I knew our food was<br />
better.<br />
“It was frustrating and we didn’t know what<br />
the problem was; what were the other traders<br />
doing differently, what did they have that we<br />
didn’t? A lot of them had a bit of theatre<br />
going on, maybe their stall looked really<br />
good, and perhaps the customer understood<br />
7
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