Balti (food) - Balti Houses

Balti Houses

Balti restaurants are often known in Birmingham as 'balti houses' ('house' here meaning not private residences, but, rather, 'establishment,' as in 'customs house' or 'public house'). Some balti houses have a sheet of glass on the table top with menus secured underneath. Balti houses often offer very large "Karack" naan bread pieces, meant to be shared by the whole table.

Balti houses originally clustered along and behind the main road between Sparkhill and Moseley, to the south of Birmingham city centre. This area (comprising the Ladypool Road, Stoney Lane and Stratford Road) is still sometimes referred to as the 'Balti Triangle' and contains a high concentration of Balti restaurants, as well as some of the oldest to be found in the city. On 28 July 2005, a tornado caused extensive damage to buildings in the Triangle, forcing many restaurants to close. A clean-up operation ensured most had re-opened by the beginning of 2006.

Balti restaurants have now spread beyond the triangle, and are also based in the south of Birmingham along the Pershore Rd. Lye near Stourbridge to the west of Birmingham has become known as the 'Balti Mile' with up to a dozen restaurants clustered along the High Street.

The food and its style of presentation proved very popular during the 1980s and grew in the 1990s; Balti restaurants gradually opened up throughout the West Midlands and then a large part of Britain. The expanded curry market in Britain is now said to be worth some £4 billion annually; but some still claim that it is impossible to get a 'proper' Balti outside the urban West Midlands.

Outside Britain, there are a small number of Balti houses in Ireland and many other English-speaking countries, particularly Canada and Australia.

Since the late 1990s, British supermarkets have stocked a growing range of pre-packed Balti meals and the Balti restaurant sector has since faced increasing competition from the retail sector and from changes in customer tastes, along with other traditional South Asian and Indian restaurants.