Where to Start with Dan Toombs
Dan Toombs, known online as The Curry Guy, is a food writer who has built his career around one obsessive pursuit: figuring out how British Indian restaurants make their food taste the way it does, and teaching home cooks to do the same. Originally from California, Toombs moved to the UK and fell in love with curry house culture. He started a blog in 2012 documenting his attempts to reverse-engineer restaurant recipes, and the project grew into a bestselling cookbook series. His approach is systematic and generous with detail, always focused on the specific techniques and ingredients that separate restaurant-quality BIR cooking from the recipes you find in most Indian cookbooks.
Start here
The Curry Guy
Dan Toombs · 160 pages · 2017 · Easy
Themes: British Indian restaurant cooking, curry house classics, base gravy technique, tikka masala
The definitive guide to recreating British Indian restaurant food at home. Dan Toombs spent years travelling around UK curry houses, learning the kitchen secrets that make takeaway curries taste the way they do, and this book distils everything he learned into a clear, repeatable system that any home cook can follow.
Why Start Here
Most people who want to cook curry house food at home hit the same wall: the results never taste quite like the restaurant. The spices are right, the ingredients are familiar, but something is missing. That something is the base gravy, and Toombs puts it front and center. He teaches you to make a large batch of the slow-cooked onion sauce that forms the backbone of BIR cooking, then shows you how to use it to produce any dish on a curry house menu in under ten minutes.
The book covers all the classics: tikka masala, korma, dopiazza, pasanda, madras, dhansak, rogan josh, vindaloo, jalfrezi, bhuna, balti, and keema. Each recipe follows the same core method, which means you are really learning one technique and then varying it. By the time you have cooked three or four dishes, you understand the system well enough to improvise.
Toombs writes with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely loves this food and has spent years figuring out how to make it work at home. The instructions are precise where they need to be, especially around spice quantities and cooking temperatures, but never fussy. He assumes you have a normal kitchen with normal equipment.
What to Expect
A compact 160-page hardcover focused entirely on BIR cooking. No detours into authentic regional Indian cuisine or fusion experiments. Every recipe is built around the restaurant-style base gravy method. You will need to stock a small spice shelf (cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala, paprika, chili powder, fenugreek) but nothing obscure. The photography is clean and appetizing, and the layout makes it easy to follow recipes while cooking.