By Samuel McIlhagga
If London has the long stretch of Bangladeshi Brick Lane, Manchester a series of ‘Rice and Three’ Thali cafés tucked into corners, then Birmingham has always been famed for its resplendent Kashmiri-origin Balti Triangle. However, with the relative decline of the Balti, another West Midlands gastronomic speciality is rising to national attention: the Punjabi-influenced Desi pub.
Increasingly, it seems like Birmingham is trading the understated offering of the Balti for the social media-friendly visual explosion of the Desi pub's infamous mixed grill or sizzler. The West Midlands South Asian-owned public houses have transformed over the last 20 years, from something close to a regional particularity into a trend capturing the attention of the national press and online food bloggers.
Like any gastronomic phenomenon over the previous couple of decades, Desi pubs are trying to capitalise on this spike in attention whilst retaining their ability to serve local communities. Can the Desi pub preserve its vital position as a local, working-class, ‘third space’ while also scaling to the heights of internationally recognised brands like Dishoom?
I must confess, as a Southerner, there has always been something of a culinary iron curtain between booze and curry. Growing up, there were pubs, and there were curry houses — and sometimes, if you got lucky, there were pubs that would happen to serve an approximation of lamb Rogan josh and Methi chicken while retaining portraits of the Queen, open fires and turgid playlists consisting of Cliff Richard and Vera Lynn.
At best, one might venture into Brighton, and experience the sitting room-style intimacy of Planet India. Otherwise, you were stuck with the same old. The closest the Sussex coast now comes to a Desi pub is Easy Tiger. As a result, I had laboured under the delusion that a full gastronomic and aesthetic fusion of two of my favourite things: pubs and curry, had yet to be attempted. But I was wrong — that union exists in the West Midlands.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of Desi institutions are scattered across Birmingham and the Black Country (there are also a few in London and the East Midlands). These pubs have their origins in the racist colour bar policies of the 1960s, where drinking rooms were often segregated by race. In response, Punjabi immigrants would open bars or take over licences of establishments that banned them, creating culturally pluralistic places, combining English and Desi influences.
In a fit of historical irony, the Blue Gates Hotel in Smethwick, which in 1965 had refused Malcolm X and the Asian activist Avtar Singh Jouhl service in a white smoking area, would later become a Desi pub. The tale illustrates the scale of change in West Midlands boozers, and South Asian attempts to save, if not reinvent, British pub culture. Products of this new wave of British landlords include Birmingham institutions like the Red Cow, or The Vine to newer spots riding the bull market for spicy grilled meat and pale ales.
Until the 2000s, these places remained male-dominated — spots for Indian blokes to gather over an M&B mild. Many Desi pubs were ethnically mixed long before they became open to the opposite gender in the Noughties. “The Grove in Handsworth has really changed,” says Nina Robinson, a lecturer at Birmingham School of Media and a frequent Desi pub punter. She tells me how many Desi pubs used to be rundown drinking dens. “The renovation has opened the space up to women and families. There’s a whole new clientele now.”
She recalls when The Grove was a place that, as a South Asian woman, she wouldn’t go into alone. “I begged [my brother] to take me, because he’d told me the fish pakoras were to die for. I didn’t want to go on my own. It was such a preserve of the Indian man. It was a cultural divide in my mind.”
Decades on, now far more inclusive, Desi pubs are being graced with national media attention once reserved for the Balti in the 1980s and 1990s. This is good timing: old veterans from the 1970s and 1980s are still soldiering on, perfecting their craft, while new kids on the block are pushing forward with experimentation. Over the last two years, Jay Rayner, restaurant critic for The Observer and now Financial Times, has reviewed two Desi pubs in the West Midlands: the Sportsman Club in West Bromwich and the Desi Yew Tree in Wolverhampton.
For a man with a huge slate of potential spots to visit across the country, it seems the West Midlands South Asian pub is a consistent draw. Rayner, who has seen the inside of more restaurants than most of us will in a lifetime, admits that the libidinous image of “smoky kebabs, deep-sauced curries, and bubbled and blistered naan breads the size of satellite dishes” keep pulling him back to these institutions. Last year, he even produced a BBC Radio 4 episode of his show Kitchen Cabinet in Wolverhampton dedicated to the Desi pub.
At the local level, aficionados like journalist David Jesudason and food blogger Meat & One Veg obsessively chronicle these watering holes. Jesudason has even published a book: Desi Pubs, an encyclopedia of tandoori grills and Indian lagers. He seems to see his subject, not just as a culinary phenomenon, but as a place of multicultural intersection, if not reconciliation: “there was a certain section of the white working-class culture that also needs to be — finally – recognised and celebrated… I was taken aback [by] how the white population loved their — and ‘their’ is crucial here — desi pubs.”
This year, we can expect a documentary about the phenomenon, ‘Desi: A Pub Story,’ by filmmaker Zaki Solosho, to hit film festivals. Alongside these more sensitive cultural productions, dozens of YouTube food vloggers have piled into places like the Soho Tavern, producing videos featuring huge plates of steaming ribs, chicken wings and kebabs with titles like “BEST INDIAN GASTROPUB in BIRMINGHAM!”
Nostalgia vs Innovation
To gauge the dynamics of the Desi pub in 2025, I set out to do the best reportage: talking, eating and drinking. As a caveat, The Dispatch’s budget would not stretch to a grand tour of West Midlands Desi pubs, and many readers’ old favourites will be absent from this piece. Instead, I landed on two recently opened institutions, one run by veteran landlords and the other new and experimental. The latter is apparently more reflective of the current landscape. “Desi pubs have come along so much, it was kind of weird that Jay Rayner chose to visit the old-school ones,” Robinson tells me. “Because really, the surrounding hype [comes from the fact] they’ve developed into something else.”
“[It’s] the decline of the Balti and the rise of the Sizzler!” she jokes. “There’s only really Shababs holding the flame for the Balti. The people want something more organic, more authentic, and more rooted in place. The Desi pub reflects the younger generation's preferences.” Robinson points to the Indian Brewery Company (IBC) as an exemplary example of this millennial innovation.
The IBC, which was founded in 2014, by the now 30-year-old Jaspal Purewal, is a rapidly growing Birmingham start-up, with a restaurant location in Snow Hill and a recently acquired warehouse conversion in the Jewellery Quarter called the Taproom. “The Taproom is like the pinnacle,” Robinson tells me. “It’s like we’ve arrived. Given the current economic climate, I hope it survives. It’s a huge space to run.”
Despite such optimism, she’s sceptical about how far the IBC’s model has come from the locally orientated Desi pub: “I do think the Soho Tavern has a better business strategy than the Indian Brewery Company. Because they’ve chosen their locations carefully. They’ve opened a branch in Walsall. They’re still rooted in the working-class Asian community, while also branching out to middle-class places like Hampton-in-Arden. They’re catering to the different strata: so to speak.”
I have visited the IBC’s Snow Hill location before, and had left underwhelmed at the railway arch conversion, which felt like 2015’s idea of cool: all neon signage and bare lightbulbs. Snow Hill’s decor, alongside some rather limp masala chips, distracts from the frankly excellent ‘fat naans’: a combination of deep buttery bread heaped with curry and hot sauce. However, the new Taproom is a different beast: gone are the wry signs declaring “nobody gets out sober” and “nothing without labour.”
Instead, one is greeted with an immense industrial space that feels like the turbine hall of the Tate Modern. If the Taproom is a cathedral dedicated to Indian beer, then Jaspal Purewal is its high priest. This iteration of the IBC is the Desi pub model geared towards international markets and mass popular appeal. “The long-term plan is to export overseas, to get our beer into the Indian market,” Purewal tells me.
The IBC was founded in 2014, when Purewal was still a teenager. The company has grown rapidly off the back of its brewery operation, expanding into food and entertainment. It now has supplier agreements with Aston Villa Football Club and Wetherspoon’s craft beer section. Purewal insists they haven’t taken any outside investment: “We’ve had no angel investors. We started as a two-man operation with the savings I had in the bank. We made no money for the first year.” Instead, this rapid expansion seems to have been on the back of sales, a testament to Purewal’s modernised Desi pub model.
The Taproom offers an Indian-inflected pizzeria to its drinkers: a far cry from the adapted home cooking that normally characterises a West Midlands Desi boozer. However, Purewal informs me that: “at the Snow Hill location, we’ve kept the tradition of having a mixed grill on the menu. That’s a nod to the scene of the Desi pubs which we grew up in.” The kitchen is closed, so I don’t try the pizza — which is a good thing, because I’m a purist when it comes to Italian food. However, the beer is fantastic: striking the right note between hoppy and fruity.
An hour out from the Jewellery Quarter, sits The Maggies in Hall Green. This is a sleek flat-roofed art-deco pub designed in the 1930s to look like a cruise liner: it appears almost afloat in Birmingham’s vast suburban sea of semi-detached housing. The pub interior, with its huge sweeping ceilings, resembles a ballroom out of an Agatha Christie novel. Inside, I’m greeted by the landlord, Bik Singh and huge steaming piles of grilled meat, bowls of curry and buttered naans. Singh and his uncle Mac took over the building two years ago, and had their soft opening eight weeks before serving us.
Singh seems to know what he’s doing. The clientele averages middle-aged, but the place is almost full on a Thursday night. There’s a mix of white and Desi punters, with lots of OAPs hungrily staring at the mixed grill menu. The Maggies, although new, offers old favourites, no-fuss service and a sense of community. “We’re very traditional. We’re an old-school pub, we’re big on community.”
I asked Singh how he understands the Desi pub tradition. “I was always a consumer first. Then I had older friends who would take me out to the Black Country to Desi pubs. It was always a special occasion. The go-to places [back in the day] were The Sportsman, The Grove, and The Vine. They were the pioneers.” Singh got his start when his father, a long-term pub landlord in central Birmingham, opened a grill to attract more customers.
Now the market is changing. Many pubs are true to the original model, Singh tells me. “But there are other businesses [in the Desi pub space] that are tapping into other markets, that are looking at fine dining”. I ask him if it's important that Desi pubs stay true to their working-class roots. “The thing is it's going to evolve. It depends on what works for you.”
For now, the Desi pub seems on the up and up — pushing into new markets while retaining a loyal following of older drinkers familiar with the model’s Black Country and Birmingham roots. In a perfect world, places like the Indian Brewing Company and The Maggies, and what they offer customers, should be able to coexist. However, there are hurdles on the horizon. Could the Desi pub buck the UK-wide decline in nightlife? Or will it just be a flash-in-the-pan? I have no answers yet — only lots and lots of leftover naan.
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