SIR, At first I was surprised, then annoyed and then amused when I saw your front page article about the Indian restaurant (Gazette, May 3).

This restaurant claimed that the reason it did not serve Asian people on Bank Holidays and busy weekends was because they were difficult customers. Difficult in the sense that they asked for dishes to be made the way Indian dishes should be (I thought they were dining in an Indian restaurant) and they simply didn't have time to make these dishes fresh. If you go to a good Indian restaurant you expect to eat good Indian food, the way Indian food should be, otherwise you might as well eat the product out of a can.

Basically, what this restaurant was trying to say was, what they were serving was not proper Indian food, the way Indian food should taste. Asians would realise this.

I'm an Asian lady who loves eating out with my family and friends in Indian restaurants. I always favour places which serve dishes with fresh ingredients, like fresh green chillies, because the aromatic smell is just as important as the taste and that's what an Indian dish is like.

Having quite a few English friends myself I realise that sometimes these dishes are a bit too spicy for my English friends who are not used to eating such spicy food on a daily basis but at restaurants we are always asked whether we would like the food Indian-style or milder. Basically, we have a choice in the way we would like our food cooked. That is a good Indian restaurant.

This restaurant gives a message out, just like your cartoon caption implied, that it feeds English people, bland, tasteless, non-Indian food because they wouldn't know the difference - and that's discrimination!

Shima Devshi

Manchester

May 16, 2003 12:00