Birthday cake, bank balance, bathtub. Very often bigger is better. But sometimes it’s not – say queues, kidney stones or meteorites heading for Earth. Most would probably put restaurants in that latter group: mass catering is rarely as nice as a meal at an intimate spot.
But not the 10,000 customers a week who visit Pakistani Indian restaurant Royal Nawaab in Stockport, claimed by its owner Mahboob Hussain be “the biggest in the whole world”.
Its launch last year and day-to-day operations were documented in World’s Biggest Curry Restaurant (Channel 4, 22 May, 8pm), which made clear that its enormous scale doesn’t mean shoddy food and poor service.
The stats are incredible –and there were plenty shared. Its weekly ingredients bill is £100,000. Three lorry-loads arrive a week, delivering three tonnes of lamb and chicken, half a tonne of rice and thousands of litres of oil. Its 150 staff (40 of them waiters) serve up a choice of 181 dishes a night, including 20 curries, on a 50m buffet bar that one chef says you’d “probably need binoculars it’s that long” to see the end of.
But Hussain is exacting. He “checks every single thing” leaving the kitchens. “All the spice and everything is my own recipe,” he says. “They only follow that, I won’t let them follow anything else.”
Which sounds tyrannical, but he’s a well-loved boss who says “my success is my team – without them I’m nothing”.
An engaging, behind the scenes look at the life of a mega-restaurant, and the people that make every meal eaten there special.
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