Another journey across the City to visit an old favourite … The Khyber Pass. A warm welcome, good service and excellent food. Starters were chicken tikka and onion bhaji. Whilst they were verging on fire engine red this shouldn’t detract from their freshness an excellent flavour.

Mains were a balti chicken korma for her and a balti lamb and mushroom for me. Tender meat in a rich sauce served up sizzling in traditional black Balti bowls. Nice doughy garlic naan was the accompaniment.

Incidentally, there is a sweet centre next door and we took home a rich buffalo milk barfi … a rare and unexpected treat!

I was kindly invited by the Centre of Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship to an event co sponsored by the Bangladeshi Restaurant Association to look at sustainability issues in a hard pressed section of the private sector.

The Centre kindly sent out a questionnaire of mine inviting restaurants who cooked an authentic Balti to complete to check if they were the Balti ‘real deal’.

Surprise surprise (or maybe not!) despite some of them having the word ‘Balti’ in their restaurant name, not one of the thirty odd restaurants at the event rose to the challenge. Maybe that says something about the Bangladeshi Restaurant community and the Balti!

Last week, I talked to some students at Queensbridge School about the history of Balti as part of their excellent project highlighting all things Birmingham. It was great to see Balti featuring in their poetry highlighting their love for their City …. definitely some budding poets and artists and a credit to their School!

Balti seems to have made a good impression in Canada, thanks to a press visit during the Commonwealth Games! ….