Restaurants as meeting points: Beyond the UK Nepali community societies and other organisations and entities such as the Embassy of Nepal and the NRNA UK in particular, many Nepali restaurants double up as major local (sometimes national) community meeting place hubs.
The heart of every restaurant is of course the Kitchen. In the case of the some 200+ UK Nepali restaurants – flagship representative examples being for instances the Everest Inn Group restaurants in Blackheath, London, and in Kent, and the East Midlands ‘Gurkha Oven Restaurant, and the Bhet Ghat Gurkha Restaurant (Aldershot Hight Street), and The Aile in Reading. This still largely first generation settler community, finds restaurant work to give invaluable opportunities to maintain and strengthen in-community Nepali community bonds and friendships.
Food is a particularly important dimension of Nepali culture, and it is across South Asia as well as the UK, generally known that Nepali culinary expertise is second to none for skills and creative expertise (so important is this topic that the information resource has developed a parallel Nepali cuisines component and accompanying booklet). It is to the general public little known, but within the Asian catering sector, especially amongst the largely Bangladeshi owned and run UK Indian restaurants world, that if you can secure an experienced chef or even sous-chef who is Nepali, then such restaurants will have the best possible opportunity of succeeding and establishing great reputations for the quality of their food. In the case of Nepali owned and run Nepali restaurants, the kitchen sees experts come together from a number of different families, engaged in an activity all of those experts have a great passion for and proficiency in that is a major facet of Nepali culture itself.
Beyond the Kitchen many restaurants also form the setting for key meetings on community support and issues. Of an afternoon and sometimes of an evening for instance one can find the restaurant ‘pre-booked by a private party/group for a function.’
For example the Bhet Ghat Gurkha Restaurant (above) of Aldershot High Street commonly services such meetings where the main restaurant dining space is occupied on a block of seats facing a film/display screen, or one long room/hall length table, basis for community leads events. An example of this at the restaurant named included lead officers of the ONS/Census providing a three-hour consultation, information and engagement event organised by the NRNA UK and UKNFS with senior officers of the Census/Office of National Statistics (ONS) on the UK 2021 Census (image above).
The same restaurant – its name ‘Bhet Ghat’ in fact means ‘meeting’ in Nepali – also supports an NRNA UK office (to the side of the main restaurant banqueting area): key meetings taking place in that room for national to local (Rushmoor area) level NRNA UK affairs and UK Nepali community voice needs meetings (such as with the leader of Rushmoor Council: image below).
