Amongst the South Asians, the Sylhetis (from Bangladesh) were the first to establish a significant presence in Britain. By the late 1920s, the Shah Jalal Restaurant at 76 Commercial Street, Aldgate, run by Ayub Ali, and his lodging house nearby at 13 Sandys Row were magnets for all Sylheti seamen whose ships had docked in London. These early initiatives served the simple needs of visiting seamen, but during the course of the Second World War, several entrepreneurs decided to move up-market, and opened much smarter establishments to serve English customers.

These also provided much needed employment for relatives and fellow-villagers, who had also migrated. This experiment proved to be a roaring success, so much so that once young men had learned the trade as waiters and cooks - for the English taste in curries was very different from their own Bengali cuisine - they promptly left to set up their own businesses. In doing so, they built the foundations of Britain's Indian restaurant trade, with restaurants now found even in the smallest of towns. The vast majority are still owned and manned by Sylhetis.

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