The odd thing is that while I lived in Gloucestershire from 1987 to 1990, I visited people in Birmingham about once a month. I don’t remember them ever talking about Balti restaurants nor ever seeing a Balti restaurant. It’s possible that I did see or hear mentions of them but it simply happened so rarely that I’ve forgotten about it.
It seemed to originate around Birmingham about that time. Initial theories I heard were based on it being named because of the bowl served in, however, the chef who taught me Indian cookery (and had learned to cook in indian over quite a few years), believed it was more based on the region where it originated from as being ‘bowl shaped’, near the mountains in Northern India… But yes, its a British mutation of indian cusine…
Some people here seem to be confusing a pub which sells a mediocre curry as “curry pub”, or indeed one which has a special night where it sells curries ("curry club’, which the weatherspoon chain has) as a “curry pub”.
However, it refers to the recent phenomenon (especially in the midlands again) where indian people have taken over a pub and offer a full (and often very very good) indian menu as well as normal pub fare. You can treat it as a pub, you can treat it like a curryhouse…
It might also coincide with the closing of a lot of pubs in the uk due to a combination of rising prices and the drop in trade from the smoking ban (a taboo to speak of this in the uk at the moment with its nannyish busibody culture of recent years). Allows the restaurant trade to expand, and the pub trade to survive harsh times.
Balti was one of the words whose earliest use was searched for by the BBC programme Balderdash & Piffle. The earliest reference they have found to “balti” is in an advert from Balsall Heath in Birmingham in 1982.
Going back to the OP - I can’t think of an actual “curry pub” as opposed to a pub that does curries around here. We have got at least two (country) pubs that have Thai chefs and do an extensive range of Thai food but they also do other standard pub food - baguettes, pasta, giant bacon burgers, etc. You know - good old fashioned English food 
I agree. Also, take into account naming conventions. What’s known as a Madras curry in the UK may not be such here. It could very well just go by another, more specific, name. As far as I know, “Madras curry” is a rather generic name for a curry that is principally British nomenclature, but I may be wrong. As well, that culinary area is highly regionalized. Madras curry is named after a south Indian city. Most of the places I frequent are north or western Indian, so it’s quite rare for me to see coconut in an Indian curry. (I’m using “curry” as the catch-all term for all these meat-and-sauce dishes.) I would not expect to find anything resembling a Madras curry on these menus.
Weatherspoons chain of pubs run Curry Clubs here. Some evenings they have special Indian cuisine etc but otherwise it’s just a normal pub setting. I’ve never seen a Curry Pub in my neck of the woods. 
Wikpedia, FWIW, suggests that any curry dish with a red or reddish-orange color are likely to be what’s known in the UK as a “Madras Curry”, in opposition to yellow-colored curry dishes.
Really? I started going to pubs serving genuine curry food in the Midlands at least as far back as 1990
That’s because whereas some Northerners like to ‘claim’ the north is the centre of the curry universe, us Brummies know better 
You were clearly mixing with the wrong type of Brummies - perhaps posh people from Solihull who’d never dare park their Mercs in the Balti Triangle (did you ever venture into Balsall Heath or Sparkbrook?)
They were science fiction fans and the group met in a hotel conference room in the middle of Birmingham. People would get a pint or two of beer at the hotel bar before the meeting.
I’m not sure… I ate Chinese food in London? It was on the East Side, I tink.
I’m sorry but I’m a crusty traditionalist,Curries should be eaten in small establishments decorated with flock wallpaper and plastic flowers with reedy Indian pop music always sung by females in the background.
There should be lashings of lager beer including Kingfisher and everyone should be half drunk.
All dishes should be cooked in one rather large pot.
I have eaten in the ethnic versions in the Leeds/Bradford area which was strange,nine o’clock in the morning,NO decoration and NO cutlery and definitely no alcohol.
But horror of horrors I’ve eaten in resteraunts(definitely not Curry houses)in Dublin where they are large well lit spacious creations of chrome and steel decorated with tasteful silver gilt table ornamentation,not a plastic flower in sight.
And in the background I could hear a young business woman telling her friends that it was de rigeur that the Chateau Bollocks 76 was the ONLY wine to go with a Madras.
At that the manager and I shared a smile as members of the Curry Cogniecenti.
So knowledgeable and yet ignorant of what a popadom was,though I’m only basing that guess on the fact that she tried to order twenty for the three of them .
An Irish girlfriend came over here and asked to try the curry experience and then complained that the place was a dump.
I tried to explain to her that was how it was supposed to be.
It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d gone on to ask why they didn’t just put tiles up on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Philistine!
So, in other words, Lust4Life, you’re like an American who’s eaten no “Mexican” or “Chinese” food except for the one supposedly Mexican restaurant and the one supposedly Chinese restaurant in his small town which both served hopelessly Americanized versions of Mexican and Chinese food. Then one day he goes to the big city for a visit where there happens to be fairly authentic Mexican and Chinese restaurants full of actual Mexican and Chinese customers. He’s horrified to discover that they don’t serve the food he’s grown up with, so he returns to his small town vowing never to venture outside his own patch of ground again.
Not really Wendell Wagner, Lust4Life is just commenting on the sophisticated culinary machine that is the British curry house. This icon of Great Britain is considerably evolved from it’s roots in authentic Indian cooking - it is of limited relevance to compare the two. One is a prototype, the other is a fully-realised vision of gastronomy. So you have things backwards in your rather fatuous analogy. A denizen of the UK curry house is reluctant to expose their sensitive palate to the coarse flavours and rude constructions found in curry establishments overseas.
The American palate is not yet ready for the orchestral experience of the lamb Madras. So we see Indian restaurants in the US serving up simple, authentic fare of the kind considered passe in the UK around 1968. That will change in time, with the efforts of curry enthusiasts such as yourself and the OP. But if you ever need to remind yourself just what transformative Indian cooking is all about, then you know where to come.
Actually I was being just a trifle tongue in cheek there.
I do believe you were slightly wooshed.
But dont feel bad about it,its a Brit insider joke that Curry houses MUST have naff decor or you dont get the full benefit of the Curry.
Currys were actually an invention of the Colonials in India,many of them British but Vin De Lieu for example was a creation of the Portugese.
The Chilli peppers used in currys were actually introduced by the Europeans from S.America.
The Indians pre Curry cooked with the normal sort.
Baltis as mentioned up thread were created in the W.Midlands and I believe was Lamb Tkka Massala?was also invented in England.
Someone correct me if I have the wrong one.
I have actually passed through India and I have also travelled a good deal more of the world not I hasten to add on package holidays.
So having eaten the real thing I can assure you that the food in Thai restaraunts over here bears very little relation to the food you actually eat in Thailand,similary Western Chinese food is a breed apart from that which you get in China(Haven’t seen asses penis on the menu in any American/British Chinese restaraunts for some time,make that ever)and I would also make so bold as to assert that Tex/Cal Mex restaraunt food is not the same as ordinary Mexican fare except for those establishments catering mostly for the American tourist .
I could carry on with a world tour of my impressions of the native cuisines and their bastardised expatriot versions of but I’d need a shave at the end of it so I’ll leave it at that…Except…
While I’m on the subject can I also add that Irish theme pubs in the U.K.(and for that matter in Russia )and "English "pubs in the U.S. are bugger all like the real thing and Cinderellas castle in Disneyworld has very poor defensive characteristics and would be totally unsuited as a stronghold in Medievil Europe.
And now I’ll shut up.
Perhaps you might have had better luck if you’d asked for a lamb Chennai?
It really does depend where you go. Some restaurants make a very good go at authentic ethnic cuisine, and I have seen bull’s penis on the menu at a Vietnamese restaurant, as well as frozen penis at a Mexican fruteria, of all places. Not all the restaurants are Westernized. You can find balut (fertilized duck egg) here. Insects are a little more difficult, but you can find preparations made with worms, grasshoppers, caterpillars, ant eggs, and the like at actually one of the more mainstream Thai places here.
Busy Scissors writes:
> The American palate is not yet ready for the orchestral experience of the lamb
> Madras. So we see Indian restaurants in the US serving up simple, authentic
> fare of the kind considered passe in the UK around 1968. That will change in
> time, with the efforts of curry enthusiasts such as yourself and the OP. But if
> you ever need to remind yourself just what transformative Indian cooking is all
> about, then you know where to come.
As I said, many Indian/Pakistani/Bengali/etc. restaurants in the U.S. do do lamb Madras. The fact that the one you went to didn’t happen to offer it shows nothing. Furthermore, I went to quite a few of the sort of Indian/Pakistani/Bengali/etc. places that Lust4Life was talking about while I lived in the U.K., the sort that do their best business at night with people just out of the pubs. They have their own charms, but that doesn’t mean Lust4Life has to disparage people who go to different (and often more authentic) sorts of /Pakistani/Bengali/etc. places. That’s what I objected to, not the fact that Lust4Life praised the sort of restaurants that he likes, but that he felt it necessary to criticize other sorts of restaurants.
“Lamb Madras” wouldn’t typically go by that name in the U.S., except perhaps if the proprietor were Anglo-Indian.
“Lamb curry” – provided the curry was red – should have been close. Of course, there are so many idiosyncratic ways to prepare curry that perhaps what’s known as “madras” in the UK is just not done much in the U.S. after all.
Admittedly, I am taking blind stabs at a lot of this, going from printed descriptions of recipes and such. I’ve not had “Lamb Madras” in the U.K., nor have I sampled more than about a dozen U.S. Indian restaurants, all in Lousiana and Mississippi.