Shah's Desi Food, Easton: 'Our ancestors believed eating brain would make them cleverer. They weren’t wrong'
A deep dive into offal and several trays of curry
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It’s not every day that brain curry is on the menu. It’s not every day that brain is on the menu, full stop. And in fact responding to polite ‘what are you up to this weekend?’ enquiries with ‘brain curry’ was generally met with horror and perturbation. Offal may be making a comeback but brain hasn’t quite made it into the hearts and minds of the masses yet.
Neither ostracisation from a largely vegan group of friends or the very worst of British weather could deter us from umbrella shuffling to Shah’s, a bhaji’s throw from St Mark’s Road, on a recent Sunday evening. Brain is a delicacy only on offer one day of the week.
Shah’s Desi Food boasts an impressive 4.8 rating on Google, but there are no bells and whistles here. A handful of old service station tables, plastic chairs and peeling laminate walls make up this, well, can you even call it a restaurant? Perhaps a cafe would be more appropriate. Or a home from home for the few well-seasoned locals that are enthusiastically scooping sloppy curry sauces with blistered naans, so familiar with the spot that they might as well be part of the furniture.
The staff, who were hard to distinguish from the customers given that they all seemed to be on some sort of cooking and eating rotation, were bewildered - at our insistence at ordering so much food and that we have come here specifically for brain. The Bristol Sauce team are redeeming white people one restaurant at a time.
Curry is one of very few foods that improves the longer it is sitting around. At Shah’s, at this time on a Sunday, almost all the food on offer is what can be seen in the metal trays behind the counter. The menu printed on the wall is obsolete - this is a point and nod affair. Eventually the kind man behind the counter, owner Tanveer Bukhari*, gave up and told us to sit down. He would bring us whatever he felt like. Perfect.
Thus, dear reader, I am going to struggle to tell you exactly what we ate, or indeed how much it cost.
There was the aforementioned naans, pillowy and blistered and hot from the tandoor. There were silky chicken legs in a rich oily broth with lentils, boasting of warm turmeric and cinnamon. There was the ancient Iranian dish haleem; an inherently comforting and gently spiced slow cooked stew of lentils, barley and chicken.
There were onion bhajis, which unlike the curry, had not improved with time. At Shah’s they had succumbed to atmospheric pressure; losing any crunch they might have once had. Their tray-mate of coarse chicken seekh kebabs had fared much better and retained their moreish juiciness.
Each dish landed with a clang one by one on the metallic surface of our table. But we were missing our raison d’être, the star of the show, the one thing we’d been anticipating. The brain.
Our repeated enquiries for maghaz were met with further disbelief, but the staff eventually relented and told us that brain had to be cooked fresh and would take 20 minutes. Meanwhile, we contemplated offal.
If one was to take a short TARDIS trip back to the earliest days of our hunter-gatherer history, there’s no chance you’d observe our ancestors going to the effort of killing a boar or a bull and then discarding all of its internal organs. No. Back then, offal was seen as the best bit of a beast. There’s even suggestion that our ancestors believed eating brain would make them cleverer. They weren’t wrong - offal generally has very high levels of minerals, nutrients and protein.
This love of offal continued until about 1700s when organs, being more perishable than the rest of an animal, started to get thrown away with the waste in industrial slaughterhouses as they couldn’t be kept. In the UK, offal became very cheap and thus a source of sustenance for the working classes.
The ascension of supermarkets really ended offal’s career as a mainstream food. Due to science (which I sadly don’t have the word count to go into though it is fascinating - another time perhaps) offal won’t last longer than a day or two in a fridge. Generally, it’s not viable to stock it in supermarkets and for the last fifty years or so, supermarkets are where most people buy their meat. So offal disappeared from shelves, plates, recipes and culture.
Until the early nineties. Everything changed when Fergus and Margot Henderson started making a name for themselves in London - later partnering with Trevor Gulliver and Jon Spiteri to open St John, a restaurant which specialises in ‘nose to tail’ eating. St John made offal cool again, and now sweetbreads, kidneys, livers and hearts are darlings of middle-class ‘foodies’ everywhere.
But brain is still very much on the periphery of acceptable eating. With its scrambled egg texture, it’s easy to see why. It has a very high fat content but also a very high water content which makes it a challenging thing to cook well. It’s texturally very different from other parts of an animal which give it the ‘yuck’ factor that many of you will no doubt be feeling while reading this, and there’s also a slight hangover from the terrors of the late nineties mad cow disease. Perhaps there is also a fundamental weirdness for our brains to consider eating another brain.
But if you can get past all that, it does make for quite a nice curry. Soft, oily and deceptively simple, it’s made for naan-swiping. Eating brain curry wasn’t a life changing experience for me - I’d still rather have chicken or lamb - but it’s rare these days to try something entirely new and for that I’m grateful. On other days at Shah’s one can procure chicken liver curry, lamb feet and other offally good delicacies. We will be back.
We can all benefit from stepping out of our comfort zone and trying something different - it’s good for the brain. And my IQ is through the roof now. Mensa have been calling non-stop.
We can also all benefit from spending an hour on a plastic chair in an incredibly welcoming spot in Easton, supporting a family business and tucking into some delicious curries washed down with a can of coke. All that for £40?
It’s a no-brainer.
All words and most photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
Shah’s Desi Food, 2 Roman Rd, BS5 6DH
*Before he opened Shah’s Desi Food, Tanveer Bukhari worked in another Easton favourite, Desi Dera. He also proudly told me he’s a journalist for 92 News - in his words ‘the Asian channel’, and an ice-cream man in the summer months. I only spent 15 minutes chatting to him, but in that time alone he came across as one of the warmest and loveliest people I’ve ever encountered in a restaurant.
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Amazing, I tried calf's brain in Barcelona, in a traditional simple lemon butter sauce. You could not hide the fact you were eating brain but surprisingly, I loved it! Thanks again for your work Meg, this place is right up my alley x
Liking the sound of Shah's desi food. Looking forward to a try out & might well swerve that way after a morning shift at FareShare, the food project where I volunteer. Am tempted by the sound of a plate of haleem and a naan or two.