Smashed Kitchen Legends: An interview with chef Vivek Singh

An in depth interview with the Cinnamon Club supremo

Born in West Bengal, chef Vivek Singh is one of the UK’s most well-known, respected and influential Indian chefs. He is the Executive Chef and CEO of the Cinnamon Collection which currently comprises The Cinnamon Club, Cinnamon Kitchen City, Cinnamon Bazaar, Cinnamon Kitchen Battersea and Cinnamon Bazar Richmond. The Group also includes The Cinnamon Club Dubai. The Cinnamon Kitchen Leeds will open in the Queens Hotel in May.

I spoke to Vivek in January of this year in the bar of his flagship Cinnamon Club restaurant that’s located in the converted Old Westminster Library, a stone’s throw from The Palace of Westminster. Our highly enjoyable conversation was long and meandering - what follows are the edited highlights.

The Cinnamon Club will be 25 years old in 2026 - how do you feel about that?
It's been this sort of constant in my career. It was a risk throughout, but I suspect if you start from a point of abject ignorance, then if you know nothing, you fear nothing. This was my first gig in this country. I never even visited, forget about opening a restaurant. It was my first job in a restaurant setup out of a very comfortable hotel environment. I would've bitten anybody's hand off for a bit of risk and excitement. A standalone restaurant like this with a blank canvas and the opportunity to write a menu with whatever I felt like at the time was an opportunity I was not going to let go lightly.

It was a departure and I suspect it needed to be a departure from everything else that existed then. If not, then it's really not possible to keep a restaurant like this running and therefore there were no half-measures. Even before we opened, Tamarind and Zika both received Michelin stars that year, and they were great restaurants with great chefs. I'm very good friends with them, but none of it had the adventure of what we were trying to do, because this was really challenging, not just for the customer but also very challenging for teams.

At the time, even the best Indian restaurants were probably a hundred seats, the Cinnamon Club seats 230 seats. People were doing curries and food would come out whenever it was ready, quite loose and relaxed. We took a view that every dish would be plated individually. Plated food served for your own individual enjoyment, much along the lines of what the fine dining experience was for other cuisines. In Indian food, nobody was doing that.

We needed the business to do volumes and charge money that Indian restaurants weren't charging then. My chef friends said are you mad? People spend £15 on a meal in an Indian restaurant, not £20 on a dish, and you want them to have three courses, can you imagine how much money this is going to be? We did it anyway. It was a risk, but I think it needed to be that and it’s worked out well.

You launched the restaurant with restaurateur Iqbal Wahhab. Is he still involved with the Cinnamon Club?
He was no longer involved after year two, he moved on to other projects. He did Roast in Borough Market and then he did other things. We remained friends. For the short amount of time that he was here, he had a tremendous impact on how we dreamed about this place.

He was quite visionary, wasn't he?
Very, very, ambitious, very visionary is the word, I suppose.

Are you the last man standing or are there team members who have stood the test of time?
People stay with me a long time. There are at least two people in the team who've been with me from day one and every single one of our head chefs is homegrown. They've all been 15, 20 years with me. My group development chef is 23 years, Hari, my operations guy, is 25 years. We've all worked together a long time. But also there must have been hundreds of people that have gone on and done brilliant things as well so it works both ways.

It's been a journey to say the least. And I suspect one of the greatest things about it is that it is it's never the same. It's never trying to be what we were 25 years. It's always got its ears very close to the ground and it's changing things. The contrarian that I am, I often take a view that if it's very successful, if it's very popular, if it's a bestselling dish, that's not a good enough reason for it to stay. So it has to go. I still take the view that you don't have to do what everybody does, you just have to do your own thing.

Why would you get rid of a popular dish? What reasons might there be to make that decision?
I believe the business is about the consumer and giving people what they want rather than telling them what they want. But it's also about preservation and longevity - preserving the love and the energy that people have. Because I have so many people who've stayed with me such a long time, I've got to keep things interesting and for us to keep trying new things and for them to keep learning new things. Because if people stop learning, the mind wanders and the heart wanders and then the feet wander and they go elsewhere.

One of my favorite things to cook is butter chicken. A really good butter chicken is very hard to beat because it combines so many different things. There's texture, there's temperature, there's unctuousness, there's succulence, there's finessness, there's finish. But you can actually undo something really good because it sells so much, or it's so popular.

I spent a whole lifetime in restaurants trying to create new experiences and push boundaries and get people to eat things they wouldn't normally try. And then I look back after a few years and I said, well, what the hell, all I've been doing on television is doing all the cornerstones. I cooked a prawn curry once, and James Martin said it was the best thing he'd ever eaten. I cooked a butter chicken and he called that his food heaven. Everybody who came to the restaurant wanted to have the butter chicken because of James Martin, nobody wanted anything else.

Very reluctantly, at the 15th anniversary of Cinnamon Club, I put the butter chicken on, but it was on as on the bone for two people and it was the most expensive butter chicken in the world. I thought that was going to deter people, but it came with lentils and bread and rice, it was a full meal. I sat in a restaurant one night and I thought, this is so morbid, this procession of butter chicken after butter chicken after butter chicken. After that dinner, I took it off the menu. I can't have 40 butter chickens going out on a Saturday night. It is just destroying everything else that I worked for so hard. So we took it off, and the curry chef has loved me ever since.

Your father ran a colliery in West Bengal. What took you into hotel school rather than following in your father’s footsteps?
I suspect a lack of academic achievement. The importance of academic achievement in India has always been there. You really had to be quite accomplished to be able to even get into some average engineering or a medical college and I wasn't that way inclined. I came across a hospitality course where you work for six months and they actually paid you a little something. You were always in an air-conditioned environment, which was a big draw because if you grew up around a dusty coal mine and your father was always inhaling coal fumes and sometimes not being too well for it, you think, oh, this is not bad. It was mostly the food though. I didn't know I wanted to be a chef, but I definitely thought hospitality sounded good. Very posh, very civilized people, bon viveurs, people who have good taste and love good things - it sounded like the kind of thing I'd like to do.

I got an interview and I got the place. My father rather reluctantly sent me to Delhi. I did about three months of hotel school, and then they received a letter from some engineering college, a somewhat forsaken, really small place and they said, oh, now you've got a place, please come and join. But I said, no, I've just done the hardest part in Delhi. I'm staying put. So I stayed in hotels.

You worked for the Oberoi Hotel Group in India which would be the equivalent of a British chef working at The Savoy, The Dorchester or one of the other great London hotels?
That's right. The best training programs, the best exposure to a wide variety of cuisines, lots of skills, but more importantly, really good ingredients. It was, and it still is the breeding ground for some of the finest talent that comes up.

When we opened the Cinnamon Club I had six Indian chefs with me. We all came from different parts of the country, had different experiences, and that kind of reflected in the menu because we could effortlessly go from a Bengali influence to a Keralan influence to a Ragistani influence.

Grouse at the Cinnamon Club. In season, game is always a feature of Singh’s menus.

It's not that the customer wanted it or needed it or knew it at the time, but it gave us a dimension that would otherwise not have existed. I was very fortunate we were setting up a team, and therefore I managed to get that over the years, many, many more. And then of course, we went through a period from 2010, say to 2022 when it was impossible to get chefs from overseas. Staff retention helped because you were growing and people were growing with us.

I ran apprenticeship programs, we ran our own internal sous chef training programs and other things. We threw a lot at it from a growth and progression point of view and that saw us through. Post Covid the work permits opened up and so there was another spate of quite a lot of chefs that came into the country, not just with us, but everywhere.

Was there anything like Cinnamon Club in India at the time you worked there?
We had expensive Indian restaurants and we had glamorous premium Indian restaurants, but we were very traditional in our format. I suspect the restaurant scene at the time wasn't as energetic and burgeoning as it is now, or as experimental or experiential. At the time, the best restaurants were in hotels but they had this sort of thing set in stone that people travel halfway across the world to come and visit India, and they have certain expectations and we are not in the business of reinventing food. We are in the business of giving them what they want.

Is there anything from that time, either as a child or your career in India that you cooked when you first opened here or that you still cook now?
One of the first things that I learned, which opened my mind and opened my heart just completely, my jaw dropped as to how is this possible, was a Hyderabadi biryani. They sent me to Hyderabad for a couple of months to train and among lots of other things, one of the things that I learned was this biryani. I came back to Delhi and I described it to my chef trainer, and he said, ‘This is not right. This is not possible. How can you take raw meat at the bottom of the pan and cook rice on top and then cover the whole thing and it'll cook together? It defies science, it defies logic. You're just making it up.’

It had a profound impact on me. I must have made it hundreds if not thousands of times now and it still has the same effect on me. I find it very therapeutic, very meditative, I go into a zone. It's one of those few things that I have cooked for my mother. I asked her, ‘What's the one thing that you have ever eaten that has that kind of just touched you?’ and she said, ‘The one thing that has really stuck with me was the biryani you made me’.

Are your customers more knowledgeable and informed about Indian cuisine now compared to when you opened?
We have a Cinnamon Club, a franchise operation in Dubai. It has its own challenges vis-a-vis what people expect Indian food to be. It's the same battles that we were fighting 25 years ago here. It's an ongoing thing. We are all on that same journey, just at different points. I opened a restaurant in Richmond this year, and I had deja vu - you don't have to go as far out as Dubai to experience it.

Galouti kebabs at the Cinnamon Club

But I definitely feel that people understand the country, the cuisine, the micro cuisines and hyper regionality a lot better than they did when I first opened up. It would sometimes be a struggle for me to explain a Kashmiri mustard or a clove-smoked dish or Rajasthani soola spice to my customers. I do feel that people understand their Kerela from their Kolkata and Raj from Rajasthani a lot better. There's a lot more travel, there's a lot more awareness around that with travel, but also social media. I think with Instagram and things like that, people have exposure. We never did.

There were traditional Indian restaurants in Southhall which were catering to only that demographic, but they were not mainstream enough. You wouldn't have heard of chaat even though Wembley had been serving chaat for the best part of the 25 years as well as savoury chickpea sponge cakes and all sorts of snacks. I don't think it ever made an appearance in central London, not in premium restaurants, but now you find it everywhere.

How has Indian food in the UK changed since you opened Cinnamon Club?
When I first opened Cinnamon Club, if you put street food on the menu, people would probably not trust it, because I think they would have memories of the Delhi belly, it wasn't premium enough. Now, I think people are willing to embrace that. There's a lot more street, not just on the menu here, but in Cinnamon Bazaar, we specialize in street food, in chaats. We celebrate the colour, the bustle, the boisterousness, the explosion of flavours and textures. It's a brilliant genre of cooking. It's taking inspiration from something very street; in Bengal where I grew up, it was very important to me.

How much of India’s regional cuisine is reflected in the menu here or at the other restaurants or are you working beyond those regional differences?
A lot of our cooking is informed by all of that. A dish that has stayed on the menu forever is the tandoori breast of squab pigeon. The spice marination for the breast has got a smokiness from cloves and a paste of fried onions and coriander stalk so that is a very Rajasthani influence. It's only cooked for a couple of minutes, it's very pink. But Anjou pigeon is so succulent, so delicious and beautiful, it would be a real shame to cook it completely and all the way and cook it like a kebab, it requires that adjustment to technique.

It comes with a spring roll made out of the legs and the offal. It's very kind of meaty and gamey and quite earthy from beetroot as well. There is a bit of a masala peanut, and my mother's hot, sweet pumpkin chutney. Every year we tweak, and tinker with the garnish or with the presentation of it, but it has stayed. It's very complex. It's very restauranty. It's not something that you eat every day.

The venison that we cook in a tandoor, no sous vide no technology, we cook it really rare. People get very surprised by how well it eats. Hundreds of years ago, my family originally would've been from Rajasthan. As I've grown older, I think I’m probably drawing more from that than I used to before. So there is a pronounced Rajasthan influence on our food, there's always one or two or three components or dishes that take that inspiration.

Char-grilled Balmoral Estate venison loin, rock moss and dried lime, masala mash

But it's also informed by our non-conformism. I may have a tandoori halibut, tandoor being North Indian and that spicing being very north Indian but I'm applying that to the finest Scotch halibut that you can find and I'm combining that with a Keralan onion and coconut sauce. So here is a dish that combines North India and South India, and I might combine that with a Bengali aubergine.

This is possibly one of the reasons we have managed to keep ourselves engaged in this entire journey, it's like a meandering river that is going along and collecting stuff along the way. There are things that I like now and then tomorrow I turn my back to it and may or may not do it. What it offers to the guest as an experience as well as what it offers to our teams is this sort of constant finding yourself and finding the next thing and the next step.

Where do you source your ingredients from?
I always have imported all our spices directly from India. Just before Christmas, I had this particular rice that only is found in Bengal and it's very small grain not at all the basmati that we think of as de rigueur for Indian food. We do that with one eye firmly on sustainability because it's really important for us. We have three sustainability stars from the Sustainable Restaurant Association and we take it very seriously. I think in the context of fish and meat and everything else, which is so much more local from small farms and small holdings, three tons of spice balances itself out.

The former double Michelin-starred French chef Eric Chavot is namechecked on the Cinnamon Club menu. How did that come about?
Eric hasn't been involved since year one or two, but this is my homage to our friendship and the fact that he more was instrumental in shaping my thinking and giving my cooking a bit of perspective than most people realize. He was a consultant in the pre-opening when I launched the restaurant with Iqbal.

I arrived in this country in December of 2000 and we opened the restaurant in on March 21st 2001 so I had three or four months where I was setting it up or setting up suppliers and I spent a fair bit of time in Eric's kitchen at The Capital Hotel. I was amazed at that intensity and that complexity of cooking and those standards. I was incredibly stimulated by it. We went out to eat in a few places and I would kind of always benefit greatly from his take on it. Eric didn't write the menu, he didn't say, oh, you should have these components or that but he had a very significant impact on how I was feeling about cooking and how I was thinking. After the first month or two the arrangement came to an end but we remained friends.

We are a big restaurant and there are many people who come who don't have a say in the choice of the restaurant that don't like spice. In those early days I would really reluctantly and begrudgingly do them a stupid salad, some vegetables chopped up, or we'd do them frozen fish and chips from the staff meal. Eric said, ‘I’ll give you a recipe and I’ll train your guys. Why don't I do a crab risotto with truffle cappuccino for their starter and then a steak with red wine sauce and fondant potatoes and confit mushrooms?’ So I went to his kitchen, we spent some time, we put it on the menu and that hasn't changed for the best part of the 24 years. He's a very passionate chef. He's incredible.

So what about the future - what lies in store for you over the next five years?
I don't think the world needs another chain or another massive enterprise but I think this journey is going to continue. There are a couple of other restaurant projects, some franchisees internationally and some here we are working on. There is definitely room for a new kind of experience. Restaurants are no longer just about putting food on the plate and bringing it in front of the guests - it's about engaging them more. So whilst we did our grills and open kitchens in the Cinnamon Kitchens, I think the future is a lot more interaction. I have a plan right now for something slightly more experiential, more interactive, but with the same values of cooking. It doesn't necessarily have to be a modern take but it still has to be fine ingredients because I think eventually, the dialogue that we are having with our customers and the experience is so greatly determined by the quality of the ingredients.

There are lots of really fascinating experiences, be it Asma Khan’s Darjeeling Express or be it Kricket - I think it does it amazingly well for that price point and that level of creativity. Dishoom would not have existed had it not been for places like the Cinnamon Club. We made it, not mainstream, but we were the bridge - if you liked your halibut but you had never had it with curry, we did it.