Jim White on Friday: A price war hotter than a vindaloo: Cheap curries are the order of the day in Hampstead. But the restaurant owners are finding full houses cost them dear

MR KHAN looked around the Fleet Tandoori, packed, on a Tuesday night, with lager-swilling curry-shovellers, and expressed himself delighted with his night's work.

''We are doing this for the hard- pressed consumer,' he said. 'We are the consumer's friend. At our prices the customer can eat at the Fleet for dinner every night for less than the cost of breakfast.'

It may seem unlikely, but if you want a cheap curry to warm you up this autumn, forget Brick Lane, Bradford or the Balti houses of Birmingham. Head instead for Hampstead, the plushest of London districts, where you can indulge in Bombay duck, onion bhaji and vindaloo and still have enough change from a fiver for a packet of extra strong mints and an iced toilet roll. Along Fleet Road, in the south of the borough, four curry houses are now engaged in an oven-roasted, fully marinated, generously spiced tandoori price war that makes Rupert Murdoch's newspaper cuts look like shaving nicks.

The opening skirmishes came in September, when the Light of Kashmir, restaurant, operating in Hampstead since 1962, started a 'Sunday Madness' promotion, halving, at a stroke, its prices.

'The recession was not kind to us,' said Mr Uddin, son of the Light of Kashmir's owner. 'It cost us a lot of money to redecorate this place, and nobody was coming in. We had to do something. This is our family business, we have been here 31 years, we all work for nothing just to save this building. Before, we had nobody in here, after we start the half-price thing people came in. We don't make a profit, but at least we have people coming in.'

Within a fortnight, the restaurant had extended its half-price offer to Saturdays and thence to every night of the week. 'Seven-Day Madness' proclaims the sandwich board propped up on the pavement outside. The ploy seems to have worked. Even on a traditionally quiet night there was a respectable sprinkling of people around the Light's plush new interior. All the customers seemed decidedly cheerful, which was no real surprise: curry for three (chicken dhansak, meat bhuna, meat kebab and trimmings) came to an astonishing pounds 10.10. Lager, sadly, remains at full price.

Two doors down on Fleet Road's parade of shops, on the other side of a Mexican restaurant that offers an 'eat- all-you-like-buffet' for just pounds 4.99, is the Fleet Tandoori. A week after the Light started its Seven-Day Madness, a sign appeared outside the Fleet advertising meals at half-price. This, its ebullient owner, Mr Khan, insists, is purest coincidence.

'It is nothing to do with the restaurant down the road, nothing at all, nothing,' he said. 'Why would I follow them? They would have to be here another 30 years to know how to cook a curry like us. I cut my prices to give my customers something. They are the most important people in my life.'

As he spoke, Mr Khan moved between tables, telling diners how fortunate they were. Which, at pounds 17 for our dinners for three (two butter chickens and one lamb bhuna, plus nan bread, saag bhaji and pilau rice), we could probably have calculated for ourselves.

'If I make this much,' Mr Khan said, holding his thumb and fore-

finger half an inch apart, 'and my restaurant is full of smiling faces, then I am happy.'

Farther up the road, just past a Polish wine bar, the Curry Paradise has yet to adopt the price-slashing trend. And, according to Rafique Uddin, its manager, it won't.

'I don't believe you can run a quality restaurant at those prices. This is a quality restaurant,' he said, indicating the waiters in military jackets scuttling between potted palm fronds and white cotton-bedecked tables. ' And is the offer working? I think not. Have you been to the Fleet?'

Well, yes, actually, and it had rather more than the Paradise's half-dozen diners tucking into their full-price chicken dhansak.

'Oh, really,' said Mr Uddin, looking somewhat alarmed at the news. 'But they are riff-raff they are attracting. We have Mr Jonathan Ross, Mr Michael Foot, Mr Bill Oddie coming here regularly. These are people who would be insulted if we were to lower our prices.'

Just round the corner, in the window of the Bombay Tandoori, a poster carried a variation on the familiar theme: '50 per cent off all meals', it proclaimed. Unfortunately, after a bloating session in two other restaurants, I am unable to report how little a curry for three costs at the Bombay these days. Nizan Khan, the owner's son, however, was happy to tell me.

'Not enough,' he said.

According to Mr Khan, none of the local owners was expecting the Light to go through with its scheme.

'It caught us all on the hop,' he said. 'I've heard of Indian restaurants in London trying it, and all the other owners in the area get together and suggest it would not be a good idea. But the Light wouldn't listen. They've got a screw loose.'

So the Fleet, the Paradise and the Bombay agreed to go half-price at the same time.

'We wanted to go together because at this rate the Light is going to drag us all down with them. I don't know why the Paradise didn't do it with us. My grandfather owns the place, actually, he's a resilient man, but he'll have to go down soon. Believe me, none of us wants to do this. It's frightening.'

Like a member of the England cricket team on their Indian tour a couple of years ago, Mr Khan is particularly worried by shellfish.

'If someone orders king prawns, we've had it,' he said, sitting in the cramped back room of the Bombay. 'The cost of prawns from the wholesaler has rocketed at the moment, but in this madness, we're selling a King Prawn Tandoori for just pounds 4.50. I have nightmares of a whole party coming in and everyone ordering king prawns. If that happened, we might honestly just as well pack it in and go home.'

What has upset Mr Khan even more than the prawns, however, is that all the curry men of Fleet Road are friends and neighbours from way back: like the owners of 12,500 of Britain's 14,000 Indian restaurateurs, they all come from the Sylhet province of Bangladesh. Over the years they have shared staff, poached each other's chefs, cartelled their prices. But the recession put an end to camaraderie.

'We were the first here, and when the Light opened we gave them a lot of help because my dad knew them from back home,' explained Mr Khan. 'But what they have done now is not neighbourly. It was the recession that did it. I had to drop out of university to help my dad because he couldn't afford waiters any more. Now this ridiculous price war.'

His father had, as a result, decided to sell up in Hampstead, Mr Khan added. They had their eye on a restaurant in Whiteleys, the shopping complex in west London, where, Mr Khan explained, there was no other Indian restaurant to provide suicidal competition. As he spoke his father, grey- haired and wearing a worried expression, emerged from the kitchen. He had overheard our conversation.

'Seven-day madness?' said Mr Khan Snr, looking in an alarmed fashion at the till receipts. 'Don't talk to me about seven-day madness. It's completely bloody madness round here.'

The curry consumer, however, may not agree.

(Photograph omitted)