It is almost unthinkable to imagine Mr Darcy, Jane Austen's dashing hero, rounding off a night out with his friends at a curry house.

Sake Dean Mahomed was an Indian cuisine pioneer
But according to a recent discovery, he could well have done. Historians have found that Britain's first Indian restaurant was opened in 1809, in the midst of the Napoleonic wars and during the period in which Austen set Pride and Prejudice.

The Hindoostane Coffee House was established by Sake Dean Mahomed, an Indian-born entrepreneur, as a purveyor of Oriental food of the "highest perfection" in Marylebone, London, which at the time was a residential district for the well-off.

Mr Mahomed, who had served in the East India Company army and was married to Jane Daly, an Irishwoman, hoped to cash in on the area's popularity with former merchants and servicemen who settled there after making fortunes on the subcontinent.

It was a high class affair, decorated in the colonial style of the Raj, and offering "what the greatest epicures of the time said was unequalled to any curries ever made in England".

Even though the British had already developed a taste for dishes such as kedgeree and mulligatawny soup, the venture failed after just two years. The problem was not the food, but a lack of an appetite for eating out.

Yesterday a plaque was unveiled commemorating Mr Mahomed's achievement on the site of the Georgian building, which has since been replaced by a 1970s apartment block.

Peter Grove, who co-wrote Curry Culture - A very British love affair with his wife Colleen, said: "We were researching the book and I just wanted to know which was Britain's first curry house.

"We came across Mr Mahomed, who was a remarkable man.

"He was Britain's first man of curry. His place would have been very different from most curry houses today. It was very posh and colonial and catered for a very genteel crowd.

"It was designed to cater for those who had been over in India at the time of the Raj and could not get their servants to reproduce the food they had on the subcontinent.

"Unfortunately the venture failed, mainly because there was no culture of going out at the time.

"Everybody, especially of that class, ate in their homes and the only restaurant scene as such was in the City where merchants would have lunch."

Mrs Grove added: "In a way it was clever positioning because a lot of wealthy men had mistresses in the area and they could bring them there for a discreet meal away from their wives.

"But it seems there wasn't enough repeat business to keep it going."

The restaurant was called a "coffee house" to cash in on the craze for coffee, a new discovery, at the time.

All restaurants were called coffee houses whether or not they sold the drink.

Mahomed, whose surname was sometimes spelt Mohamet, was born in 1759 in Patna, in Bihar, East India of a middle class Bengali family.

His father reached the rank of subadar in the East India Company's Bengal Army, the second highest rank that an Indian could hold at the time.

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