UK ethnic restaurants, particularly Indian restaurants are struggling to find skilled cooks capable of serving the dishes we have come to know and love.

Currently UK regulations state that any non-EU chef must be earning a minimum of £28,260 per year in order to work here. This is of course much more money than most chefs are on and more than many employers can afford to pay.

Authentic Indian restaurants are actually quite rare, with most curry houses being Bangladeshi. Ethnic restaurants are naturally most successful lead by chefs who have a deep understanding of the native cuisine of their home countries. Scotland is most at risk of losing out as the majority of non-EU Indian chefs who have the right to work in the UK flock to London.

Gulu Anand, founder of The Brilliant in London explains that the restrictions means he cannot get the staff he needs. “We do not need executive head chefs, we need commis chefs who are going to do practical cooking. We’ve already got managers, but we need people who have the practical skills to do the cooking.”

To tackle the problem the government put forward funding to open ‘curry colleges’ to train homegrown chefs in the art of Asian cooking. However these colleges have faced problems such as a lack of applications, low standard of trainees and simply the short time frame of six weeks not being enough to grasp the knowledge needed.