Speaker new Rotarian M. Aslam

Aslam said that his older brother Sabir started Aagrah on Westgate in Shipley. Prior to that he had been a bus driver and he and his conductor started the restaurant without any idea of how to cook. Aslam and his younger brother Iqbal did a bit of waiting and sometimes even got paid.

They decided to call the restaurant after the town of Agra. However, they got the wrong spelling. Urdu is a mixture of languages from around the Indian sub-continent and Arabia. Because of long A pronunciation in Urdu, they spelt it Aagrah. This turned out to actually be a good mistake because they could trademark it whereas if it had been the proper spelling they wouldn’t have been able to do so.

Not only did Sabir not know how to cook Aslam couldn't even make a cup of tea and was very shy. Sabir’s wife showed him how to do most of the cooking. Then Sabir returned to Pakistan and left Aslam to look after the restaurant. During this time the turnover went down from £1200 to £250.

When his brother came back Aslam decided to go to London to become a bus driver. His first night in the city he was homeless, but he soon found a room. After a year driving buses in London he yearned to go back to Yorkshire. From there he then returned to Pakistan to look after his father who was not well. However, Sabir was ringing him so frequently that his father eventually said you need to go back to Yorkshire and help Sabir.

After a while Sabir went back to Pakistan leaving Aslam in charge again. This time he watched the chef carefully and realised that he was not working very hard. So, he continued watching him and learnt how to do it. Then one morning he came in early and did all the preparation that the chef had been doing and got it right leading to him taking over the job. His motto is if it’s not broke still change for the better because you have to keep on evolving. After 4 months Sabir came back but this time Aslam had doubled turnover. 

Because of this Sabir opened Pudsey and gave that to Aslam to run whilst he and Iqbal ran Shipley Then they opened Garforth, but they were running out of brothers and had to come up with some new idea if they wanted to continue expanding. Aslam asked Environmental Health for advice on centralising cooking. His brothers thought him crazy. He said if it goes wrong, it's my mistake if it works out all 3 of us will be a success.

Simon Dunn helped with ideas on how to grow the group into 15 restaurants. One day whilst driving back from a cooking exhibition in Edinburgh Simon kept saying I've made 3 people famous. Aslam said to him about himself you need a Racehorse not a Donkey.

At one cooking demonstration at NEC. Mr Singh asked Aslam how he stayed so calm on stage. For a joke Aslam said I have a whisky (even though he is really a teetotaller) but Mr Singh took it seriously and had 2 whiskies before going on and spent the entire demonstration very quiet and sweating profusely.

Today 2 of his sons run restaurants within the chain. A third son got a degree in chemical engineering and now runs the factory where the ready meals are made for the supermarkets. When he was learning from his own wife how to cook, she said to him that he was treating it like a chemical engineer. Aslam said that to move from domestic cooking to commercial you have to do chemical engineering. If I can get it 80% like home cooking, then it will be very good. 

During covid they had to close 3 restaurants as they could only do takeaways, so they closed all the rented premises and just kept the ones that they owned. These days he has taken back seat. All the preparation for the restaurants is done in Shipley then each restaurant does the final cooking to local tastes. Even today his sons still get ideas from their mum and wives.