Months after celebrating its centenary, Veeraswamy was back in the headlines in November 2026 for a reason no restaurant would choose. The London institution, which has served diners from the same Regent Street address since 1926, went to court to challenge the Crown Estate’s refusal to renew its lease. The landlord wants to refurbish Victory House and turn the restaurant space into offices; Veeraswamy’s owners argue the work need not force them out. They have rejected relocation, saying the restaurant’s identity is inseparable from its address.
In February, supporters took a petition with more than 20,000 signatures to Buckingham Palace, asking King Charles III to intervene. The Palace said the matter was for the Crown Estate, an independent property business whose profits go to the Treasury. The estate has offered relocation assistance and compensation; Veeraswamy says the sum is far below the cost of moving. The court has heard the case, with a decision awaited. Behind the property dispute is a larger question: what does a city owe the places that have helped shape its cultural life?
From a Food Business to Regent Street
Veeraswamy’s story began before it became a restaurant. In 1896, Edward Palmer, a retired British Indian Army officer, established E. P. Veerasawmy & Co., selling Indian food ingredients under the Nizam trademark. Palmer, whose family linked an English military line with an Indian princess, also wrote Indian Cookery for Use in All Countries, first published in 1915.
His route into restaurants came through the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. Palmer advised the Indian Government Pavilion’s restaurant, which reportedly served around 500 curries a day. Its success led him to open a permanent restaurant at 99–101 Regent Street in 1926. Modelled on British clubs in India, it initially attracted former officers, civil servants and other visitors with ties to the subcontinent. It was an upmarket dining room at a time when Indian food in Britain was still a novelty for much of the public.
That background makes Veeraswamy’s history more complicated than a simple story of culinary exchange. The restaurant emerged from the colonial encounter and initially catered to people who had experienced India through the structures of the Raj. Yet it also became a meeting place for Indian visitors and political figures. Diners have included Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin and Marlon Brando; its chefs later catered at Buckingham Palace for events involving Indian dignitaries.
A Menu That Travelled With Britain
The menu changed as Britain’s appetite for Indian cooking changed. In its early years, Veeraswamy served Anglo-Indian dishes such as dhansak, dopiaza, Madras curry and vindaloo, prepared in a style familiar to the British officers and expatriates it attracted. By the 1950s, korma, poppadums and tandoori chicken had joined the menu. The restaurant introduced what was described as Britain’s first tandoor oven, helping make the technique familiar to British diners.
By the end of the 20th century, diners were looking for a wider, more regionally specific picture of Indian food. Veeraswamy responded with dishes associated with Punjab and Kashmir; its present-day menu draws on regional and royal kitchens, from Hyderabad and Patiala to the Mughal tradition. Its appeal lies partly in this layering: it is not a frozen reconstruction of a 1920s menu, but a dining room that has repeatedly adjusted its idea of Indian food.
There is a story, too, behind the curry-and-beer pairing often associated with British Indian restaurants. Prince Axel of Denmark is said to have enjoyed a meal at Veeraswamy in the 1920s and arranged for barrels of Carlsberg to be sent there. The beer became popular and was carried into other restaurants by staff who moved on. It is a pleasing origin story, though the association between beer and curry was already being noted in Britain by the early 19th century.
The Longer Story of Indian Dining in London
Veeraswamy was not Britain’s first Indian restaurant. That distinction belongs to the Hindoostane Coffee House, opened in Marylebone in 1810 by Sake Dean Mahomed. It served Indian food and hookah to London’s fashionable clientele; Mahomed’s venture ran into financial difficulty in 1812, although the establishment continued under other management for some years. Veeraswamy’s distinction is that it is Britain’s oldest surviving Indian restaurant.
London has since lost other institutions that connected food with the history of the Indian community. The India Club, founded in 1951 as a meeting place for Indians in Britain and a dining club on the Strand, closed in 2023. Its story was as much about political networks and belonging as it was about the menu. Losing Veeraswamy would raise a similar question about how the city values its older spaces of Indian social and culinary life.
The Michelin story offers another measure of how far Indian dining in London has travelled. Tamarind and Zaika became the first Indian restaurants in the UK to win Michelin stars in 2001. Amaya followed in 2006, while Gymkhana, which opened in 2013, earned its first star in 2014 and a second in 2024. Veeraswamy received its star in 2016, on its 90th anniversary, and has retained it since. These restaurants represent different generations of ambition, from early fine-dining pioneers to a newer wave of regional menus and tasting-room experiences.
Veeraswamy’s place in this company is distinctive. It is neither the first Indian restaurant Britain knew nor the first to earn a Michelin star. Its significance is that it has witnessed the changing relationship between two food cultures: from the curry-house expectations of returning colonial officials to a more confident appetite for regional Indian cooking. At 100, the restaurant is still serving diners. Whether it will be allowed to do so from the same Regent Street rooms is now a matter for the court.
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