Desi Food Guide will be available to paid subscribers for £5/month or £50/year. This is the second of four posts that will be free to give you a taste of what’s to be served up every week…
Without a second’s thought, Jay Patel tells me the date he opened his shop. “23rd March, 1980.”
The day itself wasn’t a happy occasion. He was forced into sleeping behind the counter. With a baseball bat.
“Bricks were thrown through my window,” he says. “A couple of people told me: ‘Mr Patel, you’ve made a big mistake.’ One customer told me that I would be bankrupt in six months.”
Jay admits his English wasn’t that good in the early 1980s and he found it difficult to understand Londoners when they came into the shop based in Brockley. “I felt under pressure and didn’t know how to speak to the police,” he says.
Jay didn’t go bankrupt and instead he - and his family - thrived. Decades of hard work paid off and now it’s hard to imagine south-east London without Jay’s Budgens.
In the early days, the shop was a quarter of the size it is now and today the section that sells the Patels’ home-cooked food was where the newspapers etc would’ve been displayed as customers walked in.
And it’s this food that makes the shop so special in 2025. It’s cooked by Meghana, the wife of Jay’s eldest son, Pratik. She noticed that customers were curious about the Patels’ Sattvic diet which focuses on fresh produce and eschews onion and garlic. (It’s not as restrictive as Jain which doesn’t permit root vegetables, such as potato and carrot)
“People were wondering ‘how do you eat Indian food?’,” says Pratik. The answer was to show them at a few tastings and this blossomed into holding stalls at local fetes. The clamour was huge but so was the generosity with the family (and its loyal workers) even dropping off free samosas at parents’ evenings and school quizzes.
“It snowballed and because the public wanted it we did it more,” says Pratik. “Now people will go for a walk and have a samosa.”
Pre-Covid this meant Meghana was cooking by herself when big orders came in, but she now has helpers who are separate to the servers and stackers in the shop.
The samosas have become a Brockley institution - and a bellwether of the economy. 60p at the start and now they retail at 80p. “The price of oil went up and we ate that [margin] for a little while,” laughs Pratik. “We keep [the price] low. We don’t make much on it [but we do it] because people love it. And Saturdays and Sundays it's continuous - batch after batch.”
Ask my daughter. Ask anyone. In fact, while I’m trying to speak to Pratik on a midweek lunchtime, customer after customer have made the trip just for these fried parcels. It’s a guilty pleasure but one that unites us in this part of south-east London.
“I keep coming every day and getting two - I can’t stop!” one shopper says. “It’s a bad habit but I’ll have one every day,” admits Pratik.
The volume of samosas eaten means several batches are cooked a day and, because of this, I’ve never had one that isn’t fresh. There’s just three main ingredients - potatoes, peas and carrots but it’s the deep-fried crunch that stands out.
As well as marshalling the samosa operation, Meghana cooks curries, dals and vada pav three times a week with a helper.
I think it’s fine for me to grab a freebie here having shopped at Budgens for many a year - I even remember before it became part of that franchise in 2007 - and I’m allowed to take one mattar paneer curry and rice.
It comes housed in a very professional sleeve designed by Jay’s other son, Tilak, and really shows how this establishment went from newsagent to an outlet selling luxury food items, such as fresh sushi. This is the kind of ready meal that wouldn’t be out of place in the likes of Selfridges but it is entirely home-made upstairs.
The paneer is slow cooked with green peas, so the lumps of cheese are soft, delicate and indulgent. The sauce is creamy, cashew nuts and actual dairy cream (it’s not a vegan dish) but well balanced with the heat and spice.
In fact, it’s heavily spiced but let’s not reveal too many details of a product that could be scaled up in the future and pitched on a Dragons’ Den-style show. The heat is dialled up but a primary flavour which doesn’t linger because it’s offset by the cream and cashew.
“My wife is the engine and if she didn’t love doing it then we wouldn’t sell it,” says Pratik. “My kids eat this food every day - it’s pure Indian home food and they love the lentils. Indian families are always good at quantity: we have big pots and pans.”
The shop used to sell various macro beers or traditional ales but Tilak around the pandemic convinced his father that selling craft beer would work. It did and nowadays, you can pick up the finest beers from South London from Kernel to Gipsy Hill as well as international imports, such as St Bernardus. (Top tip the West Flanders’s brewery Christmas Ale usually arrives early December.)
Budgens is the ultimate post-racism establishment and shows not only how London has changed but how the people who did this work can still keep giving back to their community. And it makes me feel proud whenever I walk in to see them flourishing despite the obstacles so many years ago.
Mon-Sat: 6am-9pm; Sun: 7am-9pm
Jay’s Budgens: 400-406 Brockley Rd, London SE4 2DH