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Our kitchen

Three generations.
One tandoor.
No shortcuts.

A short note from the family that runs the place. None of it is spin — most of it is just what we do every afternoon before service.

The family

It started with my dad and a borrowed tandoor.

My dad, Jaspreet, arrived in Wimborne in late 1997. He'd been cooking in restaurants in Amritsar and Birmingham for nearly twenty years. Six months after we landed, he opened Minster Spice on a quiet corner of East Borough with a £4,000 loan and the back-room tandoor he'd carried down from a friend's place in Southampton.

Mum did the books. My sister Priya — twelve at the time — folded napkins after school. I stood on a milk crate to reach the pass.

Twenty-seven years later, dad has retired (mostly — he still comes in on a Friday). I run the kitchen. Priya runs the front. The original tandoor is still there in the corner, on its third lining and still going strong.

What we cook

Punjabi food, the long way round.

People sometimes assume "Indian food" is one thing. It is roughly forty things, depending on who you ask, and they argue. What we cook is North Indian food from the Punjab — the food of the Five Rivers, the food my grandmother fed nine people on every night for fifty years.

That means a lot of dairy: cream, butter, set yoghurt, fresh paneer that we make in the morning and use the same day. It means whole spices toasted in oil at the start of every dish, never powdered shortcuts at the end. It means a charcoal tandoor for the breads and the meats, because nothing else gets that depth of char without burning the surface.

"Slow-cooked" is the bit that gets misused most. When we say a dal takes 24 hours, we don't mean we leave it on a low setting overnight. We mean we soak the lentils for eight hours, simmer them for eight more, rest them, then finish them with cream and butter the next afternoon before service. There is no faster way to make a dal makhani that tastes like a dal makhani. We have tried.

In the kitchen
A short list

What we don't do.

Everyone says they "use fresh ingredients" and "cook with love". That tells you nothing. This is more useful — what you will not find on a Minster Spice plate, ever.

  • We don't use jarred sauces or pre-mixed pastes.
  • We don't microwave anything. Not the rice, not the sauce, not the bhajis.
  • We don't make our curries milder by adding more cream.
  • We don't use food colouring. The red of the tandoori is from Kashmiri chilli, full stop.
  • We don't reheat rice. Service starts at 5pm and we cook a fresh pot at 5pm, then again at 7:30pm.
  • We don't sub frozen prawns when the day boat doesn't run. We take the dish off the menu.
  • We don't outsource the breads. Every naan is hand-stretched and slapped onto the wall when you order it.

Now you know us.

Come and eat.

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