CURRY BY AIR | BBC WORLD SERVICE
[Music] I've always been a bit of I suppose what you would call a chilly head I love always ordering the hottest thing on the menu and if the hottest thing isn't on the
menu then I asked for it especially James Emory is a 31 year old pilot his favorite Indian restaurant is the Akash in the City of Portsmouth on the south coast of England I guess my first experience of curry would have been going to that restaurant and I suppose you just kind of develop a natural attachment with the first kind of restaurant like that that you go into that I would say nine times out of ten the old always order exactly the same thing which is a chicken fall basically when when the chef just gets a big spoon from the chili powder and drops it in the pan when when he's cooking Okemah naan which is the one with the red mincemeat inside it and and some some onion bhajis it's not particularly authentic or traditional but it's just something that I've I've always really really loved but eight years ago James moved to southwest France and he hasn't yet found a curry to Matt I would say French people have perhaps a more nuanced palate they don't like things quite as hot as you might have them in the UK and then the sauces and the sort of the various accoutrements that go with the courier sort of quite toned down and it was kind of a tradition at home when you come home after a sort of a long day and you get in and you could be bothered to cook so you just pick up the phone and and ask someone to deliver a load of containers for the hot curry and that kind of thing in France I mean you get some places where they do a something similar but it's not exactly the same thing so it really was a question of just missing not just the food itself but just the comfort aspect of getting a bag of food dropped off and opening up the containers and and all the smells and everything that goes with it so at what point did you decide you wanted to have your curry from Portsmouth in the South of England flown over to France what in fact the idea came initially from faz who's one of the brothers who runs the restaurant almost of the one of my trips home I would go in and have a meal and we sort of chat a little bit not always joke that the curry in France was always a little bit toned down a little bit boring maybe for British tastes and he kept on joking that one day he was going to deliver me a curry to France and I thought well if we're gonna do it it might be quite fun to do it by air but the aircraft that I fly are very small and can't carry a lot of weight but I was actually very lucky and that a couple of my aviation contacts were happy to come on board and provide a bit of sponsoring for the event so it as it turned out we had sponsoring which covered the entire cost of it so essentially what we did was the aircraft itself is based in Brest in sort of the northwest of France so I went up to Brest a couple of days in advance to get everything set up and on the Saturday morning we took off from Brest and we flew over to Leon Solon which is just near Portsmouth on the south coast and it was probably about 3/4 of an hour flight something like that and then we landed I think we must have been late morning in Italy on Solent loaded up all the curries which had been cooked and we're in sort of your standard takeaway containers put them all in the cargo hold at the back of the aeroplane and then I think about 3/4 of an hour later we were off again and how much curry was there I think in total we let we loaded 80 main courses and we loaded I think something like 75 portions of rice and a hundred Papa Dom's so you flew the curry to France what happened once he got there we had a room set up with some tables and chairs and sort of us you could call it a field kitchen with an oven and a couple of microwaves to warm up all the food and the people came in to the about 7:00 p.m.
and chem sat down in the little room in the in the corner of the hangar and we just served up all the food and I think that's been about between 30 and 40 people there and they all seemed to enjoy it very much with these English people living in France both just so that everybody could sort of get something out of the event so we got the sake of it but they really enjoyed it actually they thought it was something a bit novelty and and a bit sort of yes but did they like the curry I think they really did yeah I mean I spoke to most of them afterwards and they seemed very happy with it can you estimate the total cost for us of flying over these good question I would say about 6000 euros just for the plane itself and then I think to remember the guy from the restaurant saying the curries were about six or seven hundred pounds and on top of that of course we had airport fees which were probably a couple of hundred pounds so yeah probably somewhere in the region of about seven or eight thousand pounds I would say about ten and a half thousand US dollars then so why do this really is this a publicity stunt and if so who's it for what's the point so I mean obviously the restaurant has got a lot of publicity out of it for me personally I didn't really get anything out of it at all apart from a nice day out in an aeroplane Carrie way of getting a free takeaway wasn't it an elaborate way well to be perfectly honest I didn't actually eat any curry until I got home about one o'clock in the morning because I'd been spending so much time helping faz the guy from the restaurant serve all the food so it was even less fresh and even less warm at all no but I have to say I think once I finally got home and warmed up my own curry and ate it in my own living room I think the satisfaction of actually doing it and sort of they're just a completely crazy feeling of having done such a stupid thing that's kind of made up for the any lack of freshness so the food had become sort of secondary in the whole thing you didn't really get to sit down and enjoy your curry in the way that you'd usually enjoy a takeaway that I suppose is one of the things that happens when you take an ideal and you get to the pinch of the practical aspects of doing it sometimes they're not exactly the same thing [Music].
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