Potli Indian restaurant in Hammersmith raises money for Hogarth Youth & Community Centre

Uttam Tripathy, owner of Potli in Hammersmith

Potli offered a range of dishes for a charity fundraiser, raising £1,000 for the youth and community centre’s summer trip

Potli restaurant in Hammersmith has given £1,000 to the Hogarth Youth & Community Centre in Chiswick to help fund their summer activities programme.

Restaurant owner Uttam Tripathy offered a set menu to guests of the charity, charging £30 a head, and gave the entire profit from the evening to the centre.

“I feel it is our responsibility to support and help those who are helping others”, Uttam told The Chiswick Calendar.

“At least once a year we should be doing something”.

Uttam organises charity events regularly and has been doing so for the past eight or nine years. Past beneficiaries have included the Hope Foundation and Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Friends had a severely disabled child, cared for by Great Ormond Street and he was impressed by the accommodation the hospital offered parents so they could stay close by.

“It’s a drop in the ocean of what they need but I thought if I could subsidise even one family for a week it was something worth doing”.

Uttam is also a director of The Saffron Kitchen Ltd, based in Chesterfield, which provides subsidised food to disadvantaged people such as victims of domestic abuse and successful asylum claimants.

In London he gets together with fellow Odias – people from the eastern state of Odisha where he grew up in India – to cook for two or three hundred people during the Nuakhai harvest festival.

“One of the rare festivals where all the communities come together to offer grain to God”.

Children and young people on one of the Hogarth Youth & Community Centre’s previous summer trips

Hogarth’s Summer Residential takes 35 children and young people on holiday

The Hogarth Youth & Community Centre is raising funds for its annual Summer Residential. They are aiming to take as many as 35 young people away over the school summer holidays and give some respite to their parents and carers.

The Hogarth Trust hopes other local restaurants will take up the idea. Some already help the centre in other ways – La Trompette in Devonshire Road offers a ‘dinner for four with accompanying wines’ voucher for them to auction.

“I’m pretty sure there are more people who would like to do something but aren’t sure how to”, Uttam told me.

The connection with the Hogarth Trust came about because one of the trustees, Tony Bowden, has been a fan of Uttam’s cuisine since Potli opened in King Street, 15 years ago.

Potli – ‘pouch’ in Hindi – refers to a chef’s special blend of spices they like to keep to themselves

Once Uttam started on the subject of food, our interview very quickly became a masterclass in the history and traditions of Indian cookery. He is passionate about it.

One of four children of academics at Sambalpur University, he was expected to become an engineer or a doctor, but with two elder brothers already on those career paths, he rebelled, despite having been offered a place to study engineering.

“I didn’t want to do either of those things and I enrolled at the Institute of Hotel Management and Catering in Chennai, which has a history of producing top chefs, including Atul Kochhar, [the first Indian chef to be awarded a Michelin star].

“Actually, my father was very supportive, it was he who suggested it. He was very open-minded and progressive. It transformed me”.

Uttam worked first for the Radisson group in New Delhi and came to England in 2002 when he was headhunted to run a restaurant here.

He is fascinating on the history and development of Indian cuisine in Britain. I knew it had a distinct identity and was not like the food you would find anywhere in India, but I didn’t know why.

A brief history of Indian cooking in Britain

Uttam explained the first Indian restaurants were opened here by Bangladeshis – there are some 10,000 Indian restaurants, 85% of which are Bangladeshi – but Indian food as we know it is not the kind of food you would expect to find even in Bangladesh.

“People came here in the 1930s and ‘40s, mostly from the part of India which is now in Bangladesh. Those people started cooking. They were not chefs and they used the ingredients that were available”.

The nation’s favourite dish, Chicken Tikka Masala, came about by accident Uttam told me: “when someone with some rather dry roasted meat put something with it to make it moist”.

Vindaloo was the result of Portuguese influence on the cuisine of Goa, but the traditional mix of vinegar, garlic and black pepper was only used with pork or wild boar. Beef, chicken and prawn vindaloos were British additions.

There are of course multiple claims as to who invented what, as success has many fathers.

The best of market food from different regions of India

King Street in Hammersmith had a lot of Indian restaurants quite close together when Uttam arrived in London, but they were all offering very similar menus.

Realising there was a lack of authentic Indian food here, Uttam created Potli to bring the food of the Indian markets to his west London customers.

“It is not street food, but the food of the markets. After Independence the excellent chefs who had been employed by the rulers started opening shops where they cooked specific dishes local to that area.

“Every market had a particular dish or kind of food. Lucknow, for example, a Mughal city, was known for its kebabs. The north-west frontier was celebrated for its roasted meat; Biryanis were from Iran, made popular in Hyderabad”.

Uttam took the best of the food on offer in markets in Lucknow, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, Hyderabad and his own home city of Sambalpur and replicated them in his menu.

Goat is the meat which is the most consumed in India. One of Potli’s most popular dishes is the goat curry on the bone, ‘Champaran mutton’ for which all the ingredients are marinated together, and the meat is cooked for five hours.

The Odia prawn curry is his mother’s recipe – voted one of the top five dishes in London by Hardens restaurant guide. The vegetable chops are another Odia dish, using grated beetroot, caramelised carrots, potatoes, peanuts and a special blend of spices.

Potli’s head chef Babul Dey has been with the restaurant since day one.

Every dish has its own special blend of spices, which Potli’s chefs roast and pound themselves. ‘Potli’ means ‘pouch’ in Hindi, Uttam explained. The top chefs all put their own blends of spices in little bags which they would take away with them after cooking so they could not be copied.

“The nearest thing here I think is a bouquet garni”.

Potli offers cooking classes which offer customers an introduction to spices. Participants make a starter, a main and a side dish and watch a demonstration of how bread is made in the tandoor, before sitting down to a three-course meal. So popular are these courses that there are often 80 people on the waiting list.

The set menu for the fundraiser offered a selection of starters to share and a choice of three or four mains – great food, good value for money and the additional satisfaction of making a donation to something worthwhile.