Minute on the clock: Harneet Baweja, founder, Empire Empire

The founder of Gunpowder has opened Empire Empire in Notting Hill with a home-cooked food theme and a disco soundtrack. He talks to Caroline Baldwin

 

You opened Empire Empire this summer in Notting Hill – tell us how this concept differs from your three Central London Gunpowder sites?

 

Empire Empire is in a residential neighbourhood of Notting Hill, and we choose the location deliberately as we’re cooking different food to Gunpowder.

 

Gunpowder, which has sites in the heavy footfall areas of Shoreditch, Soho and Tower Bridge, is progressive cooking, where we’re trying to push the envelope with produce and ingredients, whereas Empire Empire is more soul food – the kind of food you eat when you’re invited over to a friend’s for a dinner party. It’s your mum’s cooking, and it makes you all warm and tingly inside.

 

Where did the idea come about?

 

During the pandemic we launched a meal kit delivery arm to the business called Empire Biriyani, where customers could buy traditionally-made spicy dum biryani with a golden shortcrust pastry lid and finish cooking it at home. Empire Empire is the next step in that evolution, because what we learned from Covid is that change is inevitable.

 

We’re cooking different food in Empire Empire. In Gunpowder we treat our lamb chops like a steak restaurant would, but here we serve more homely dishes like butter chicken, goat seekh kebab, fish and prawn amritsari pakoras and lamb shank dum biryani.

 

Empire Empire is described as having a ‘disco theme’. Do you think it’s important to have this extra level of experience to stand out in the London market?

 

My dad throws great parties with fantastic food and great music and I convinced him to lend me some of his vinyl collection from the last 50 years. We put a jukebox in the restaurant and we have old Bollywood tracks playing and guests can switch the songs.

 

It was never our intention to do something themed, but we now realise how powerful the word disco is – it’s nostalgic and as soon as you say ‘disco’ people interpret it as dancing, but for us it’s a dinner party with an upbeat disco vibe. Although Empire Empire does get a bit loud at the weekends, it’s still a restaurant.

 

Tell us a bit more about the menu

 

The menu offers dishes from the north and north-west of India and has influence from Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact, one of the specials is from Karachi and is a kebab traditionally from goat and beef, but we serve it with minced guinea fowl and duck, in a sauce, and finished with sweet fruit.

 

I love the slow-cooked curries and our butter chicken. The beauty of being a neighbourhood restaurant is that you can write the menu to your audience, so someone might come in for a lamb dish and a butter naan, and then the other day we had a bunch of boys enjoying whisky sodas, the lobster biryani, a couple of kebabs and a bottle of wine.

 

A lobster biryani? Tell us more

 

This is my favourite dish, and depending on what we get from our suppliers we might only have four on the menu, but we usually between eight and 10. The spices are completely different from the lamb shank biryani – it’s more aromatic with cardamom, cinnamon and cloves. It feels like the sea. And we put the lobster head in the pastry and as it sits in the oven, the meat from the head melts and this butter, garlic and lobster coats all the rice.