The Indian restaurant in Reading which has gained national fame for its take-out food Wine News

A small, neighborhood Indian restaurant in Reading has taken the concept of delivery to new heights by delivering its curries nationwide.

Clay’s Hyderabadi Kitchen is well known to the inhabitants of London Street in the town of Berkshire, but, using an overnight courier service, it now delivers food across the country from Devon to Scotland.

“ People told us we were taking a huge risk and that it was insane, ” co-owner Nandana Syamala tells me on the latest edition of the Biting Talk podcast.

“But we know we cook great food, so we thought we would give it a try,” she adds. Other than a kitchen porter, there is no other staff other than Nandana and her husband Sharat.

Each dish is vacuum-packed and insulated, leaves the restaurant at 5 p.m. and arrives at its destination the next morning, to be reheated for dinner or frozen for future meals. The innovation, spurred by the lockdown, stunned friends and neighbors.

“We didn’t do any marketing. It’s just word of mouth and sales are now massive, ”she said, adding that the furthest they’ve shipped their food so far is“ an aristocratic family in Scotland ”.

The couple plan to continue service after the lockdown in addition to serving the restaurant’s regular customers and have no plans to cut their days down to 3 p.m., despite both taking Saturday off.

You can hear the full interview on Biting Talk which also this week features London restaurant Blacklock’s Gordon Kerr on his passion for chops, former Cardiff-based bad-boy chef Tommy Heaney, Pizza Pilgrims co-founder Thom Eliot, and mixologist Farhad Heydari from the House of Heydari mixology empire. Click on the audio player above to learn more.