What have you been up to recently?
I have been busy with the restaurant, while also concentrating on my charity work, international work and my biography. And my son got married recently. It’s been a very busy time indeed!
What have you got planned in the restaurant this year?
We’ve got a really busy year in the restaurant in 2010. We are celebrating our 10th anniversary and we’re determined that it will go with a bang! We have an event planned for every month of the year, and we’ll be offering some VIP tickets to our loyal customers for some of the events. We are celebrating everything from Bangla New Year to the Beltane Fire Festival, so there’s going to be some really great nights throughout the year.
How have you found business has changed during the ten years Britannia Spice has been open?
Myself and my good friend and partner Ranil Saparamadu launched this restaurant when there were very few down in Leith. We took over what had been a derelict bonded whisky warehouse and turned it into the restaurant it is today. At the time, we were extremely ambitious with our launch, hiring an interior designer from Paris to create our vision in the interiors and ensuring we had the very best chefs available.
To be honest, on that side of things, very little has changed. We’ve kept the interiors fresh and the food tasty, just as our customers deserve. Of course, we have experienced the recession like all other businesses, but we have always strived to keep our prices low and our customers appreciate that. We have been lucky enough to win many awards over the ten years we have been in business and we are pleased to be still receiving these – we try to keep our standards at the highest and our awards and our happy customers tell us that, hopefully, we’re still managing! Our food is always fresh and prepared with skill – that’s all people want from us!
One way I have found the business has really changed is that we can use the internet and modern technology to reach our customers. We are now bookable online and we also have pages on Facebook and Twitter. We can also, of course, use the website to talk directly to our customers and we intend to make the most of that this year, offering discounts and VIP packages online and on our social networking pages. We certainly couldn’t have imagined that 10 years ago!
You are well-known around Scotland for the charity work you do – do you have anything planned for this year?
Britannia Spice is spearheading quite a big charity campaign this year. To tie in with our tenth anniversary, we have teamed up with the international charity, Concern Worldwide to launch an appeal to help street dwellers in Bangladesh. As the population of Dhaka continues to swell, the problem of street dwellers in the capital continues to get worse every year. We will work with 50 other restaurants and we will all be asking for just £1 from each diner. It’s not a lot but this appeal will allow Concern Worldwide to carry on with the fantastic work they already do in Bangladesh. Just one pound can go some way to building safe and secure shelter for people who currently live in horrendous circumstances. We have a responsibility to do all we can to help people who cannot help themselves and I am proud to say that Britannia Spice is at the very forefront of this campaign. It has been a lot of hard work organising the participating restaurants with Concern, but a lot of the owners are personal friends. Hopefully together we will be able to change the situation in Dhaka – so many people live on the streets with no shelter or access to medical care.
Check back on the website for updates from Dr Wali Uddin throughout the year.