The Curry Club was founded by Pat Chapman in 1982, to further the understanding and appreciation of the cuisines of the Indian subcontinent and now has a membership of several thousand. In 2007 it became known as Pat Chapman’s Curry Club.
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Based in Haslemere, Surrey, England, The Curry Club is best known for its publications, particularly its range of cookbooks, DVDs, a regular magazine and the Good Curry Guide a regularly published guidebook, which identifies the UK’s top curry restaurants. In addition the Curry Club carries out cookery courses, demonstrations, trips to Indian restaurants and tours to India.
Until 2006 members paid a nominal subscription to receive a quarterly publication, the Curry Club Magazine with contributions from members and professionals, including regular features on curry and the curry lands, news items, recipes and reports on restaurants. Nowadays membership is free of charge and regularly updated information is sent online.
Curry Club members form the national network of reporters, which leads to the selection of restaurants in the Good Curry Guide, and achievement awards to the top restaurants. The Club holds hands-on private and group cooking tutorials at its Haslemere cooking school[1], and on the social side gourmet nights at selected restaurants and venues.[2][3] Between 1983 and 2009 the Club has organised sixteen gourmet trips to India and other countries, where a small group of enthusiasts engages in sight-seeing as well as sampling the food of each region.
At an early age, Pat Chapman had been taught to cook Indian food by his Memsahib grandmother. After he left school, his friends, knowing his passion for the subject, asked him to teach them the secrets of spices and their cooking. Chapman’s work involved international travel, and during his visits to Asia he continued to amass knowledge of Asian cuisine. By the end of the 1970s, interest in curry was emerging nationwide. Wanting to make information publicly available, Chapman founded the Curry Club as a hobby business in January 1982[4], a time when little information had been published on the subject of curry, and many of the published recipes were complicated and contained hard-to-get ingredients.