Pyramid scheme

"As for all men who shall enter this my tomb... impure... there will be judgment... an end shall be made for him... I shall seize his neck like a bird... I shall cast the fear of myself into him" — inscription on the tomb of Khentika Ikhekhi (sixth dynasty); Jack Walton, 19 April 2025, in the back of a taxi

I’ll say this: I enjoyed myself in the taxi. When my bobble-hat-headed driver asked, “Where you off to, mate?” I’d had my line prepared days in advance. “Valley of the Kings, boss. Hope you’ve got aircon”. 

We both enjoyed that. Yes, when I got carried away and started talking about seizing his neck like a bird the poor guy started shifting awkwardly and turned up Magic FM, but in fairness I was distracted. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fifth Earl of Carnarvon.

On his deathbed, Lord Carnarvon is said to have entered a state of delirium and repeated the words, “A bird is scratching my face”. Two days prior, Howard Carter had unsealed the burial chamber in the tomb of Tutankhamun, where he had rested for more than 3,300 years, an excavation project of which Carnarvon was the chief financial backer. At the moment of Carnarvon’s death, it has been said, all the lights went out in Cairo, and his dog wailed.

The Valley of the Kings, the desert valley necropolis where many of Ancient Egypt’s pharaohs lay, has often been said to carry a curse. Carnarvon wasn’t the only figure involved in its excavation to meet a grizzly end (I have to lean forward to shout this over the radio… my driver is now shooting furtive glances at the rear-view mirror). Far from it! There’s George Jay Gould, one of the tomb’s first visitors (contracted a fever; then died of pneumonia); Egypt’s first Egyptologist, Ahmed Kamal Bey (fatal infection); Egyptian government representative Prince Ali Kamel Fahmey Bey (killed by his wife); Governor-General of Sudan Sir Lee Stack (killed by a group of students); Hugh Evelyn White, another of the first to enter (killed by his own hand).

We pull up and I climb out. Before I can finish telling the driver about Carnarvon’s brother Aubrey Herbert (struck blind, then developed fatal blood poisoning), the taxi is already back on the other side of Levenshulme. No bother, I think. Before me stands a glass ziggurat (yes, a ziggurat. You may be thinking ‘isn’t it a pyramid?’ but that’s because you don’t have the first clue about Ancient Mesopotamian architecture, so keep your comments to yourself) which is affectionately known (by philistines like you) as the Stockport Pyramid. It’s a huge glass structure which for many years bore the words: THE COOPERATIVE BANK. These days it reads: ROYAL NAWAAB. 

The Valley of the Kings, Stockport, is not unlike its Theban sibling. Though conceived 3,500 or so years later, and with the primary function of a business park rather than tombs for some of the most powerful rulers of antiquity, it too is said to carry a curse. Originally, the site plan called for four glass pyramids, but the developers went bankrupt, and only one got built. In 2013 Co-op Bank almost collapsed amid enormous debts, later moving to NOMA in 2018 and leaving the building empty — further fuelling dark rumours. Sometimes I like to imagine a quizzical Graham Hancock, on a podcast, insisting on the unseen hand of a lost Ice Age civilisation in the construction of the Co-op Bank building. 

The man hoping to lift the curse is Mahboob Hussain, an entrepreneurial force with a strongman’s slab of tache resting on his top lip — half Stalin, half buckaroo. Hussain first earned his stripes in the 1980s, developing a successful restaurant with an award-winning dish: the Nirali special — a now-iconic Yorkshire creation (the special ingredient, apparently, is the cream) that Princess Diana once tried. He expanded the business to Manchester, Huddersfield and abroad but in the late 90s, everything changed. Mahboob Hussain had a vision: a huge all-you-can-eat banquet-style curry house serving hundreds of diners at a time. Those who enter would have 90 minutes to enjoy as much food as they like for a set price. Such a venue now exists, in London, located in the iconic art deco Hoover Building. But the Stockport’s Royal Nawaab is even grander in scale, apparently the largest Pakistani restaurant in the world — renovation costing £15m. Last week, the doors finally opened, and I walked through them, blithely dismissive of the curse…

I was foolhardy — I can see that now. I was Carter. I was Carnarvon. I didn’t pay my dues. But the curse got me all right… it got me the morning after, when I found myself jack-knifed; barrelled-double over the toilet bowl — certainly not food poisoning, but clearly paying some kind of penance. I’ve since been informed that at the precise moment the pakora passed my lips (in the sense of an excavation, that is), my old cat Gustav began demonically lacerating his scratching post. In the days since, he’s been little better — roaming from room to room like a Victorian hysteric. Lightbulbs have been flickering across Manchester.

There is a particular strain of historian, and I’ll refrain from using the word killjoy, who will try to tell you that Lord Carnarvon was simply an aging man with a predisposition to respiratory issues. Not dissimilarly, in the days since my own brush with death, some have tried to suggest the handful of beers I drank before entering the Royal Nawaab that night might be a factor worth contemplating. But I’m only here to present facts — not theories. Howard Carter himself dismissed the notion of a curse as “tommy rot”, but then Howard Carter’s pet canary was apparently slain by a king cobra the night he entered the tomb (and note the similarities between tommy rot and tummy rot). 

I’d entered the Nawaab suspicious, I’ll admit to that. Suspicious of the very concept of an all-you-can-eat banquet curry. Sure, the evolution of curry is as changeable as the evolution of anything — there isn't one model that has to be conformed to. My dad often tells a story about a holiday he took in Pondicherry, a city on the south-eastern coast of India, surrounded by the Bay of Bengal and populated with mustard-coloured colonial villas, where he met a pale British man in a small eatery. The man was enjoying his meal but was taken aback by how rudimentary the setup was; he described the place as “a little bit canteen”.

The pomposity of describing somewhere as a little bit canteen is funny in its own right, obviously, but there’s also the amusing implication here that the curry houses in Pondicherry, in the actual country of India, ought to conform to the aesthetic standards of the British balti house: the paper table cloths, the plastic chandeliers, the evocation of poor Ruby Murray — whose impressive run of charting singles through the 1950s no one remembers. As I stood in the massive atrium of the Royal Nawaab beneath a galaxy of lights, I imagined that man and how he might describe the sight before me. A little bit Majesty of the Seas?

Clearly, scale is an obsession here. Note also the obsessive approach to numbers, literally any numbers, in the press coverage of this place: there’s a 400-capacity restaurant, a 400-capacity banqueting hall, an 800-capacity banqueting hall, 91,000 square feet, a total of 1,500 covers, 40 electric charging portals, a chandelier that weighs 650kg (does pure heft equal quality in the high style of chandeliers…maybe?). I guess it stands to reason since the main selling point here is eating as much curry as possible in 90 minutes. Look at me go, I’ve had NINE pakoras, TWENTY SEVEN BOWLS OF SAG ALOO, TEN THOUSAND POPPADOMS, 4 MILLION spoonfuls of chutney, my blood cholesterol is OFF THE CHARTS, my life expectancy is SIX YEARS lower than when I walked through the doors. Did I mention how much the chandelier weighs? Did I mention how much charge my phone has? 

What to say of the food? Well, not content with serving about 450 different curries, Nawaab has thrown in a few curveballs: things like nacho cheese, pizza and lasagne. The lasagne tastes like the sort of lasagne you’d expect at a curry house, and to be honest, the curries taste like the sort of curries you’d expect at a lasagne house. This wasn’t just a little canteen, it was more like the canteen of a free school established with the sole purpose of making Jamie Oliver have a spectacular nervous breakdown. There are fundless paediatric wards with more culinary guile.  

Genuinely fearing the worst after half a plate of assorted curries, I opted thereafter for the diet of a neophobic child with crippling sensory issues; poppadoms, bread, chips, pizza. It was dreadful, but at least I’ll see my 26th birthday. Once upon a time, Mahboob Hussain won awards for his curries, but here all is ceded to scale. And nobody believes that the way to increase the quality of cooking is to massively scale up the quantities. You see those videos of the catering teams on cruise liners preparing insane amounts of food — enough to serve a small city. It’s impressive, but they aren’t doing that because it makes the food better. They’re doing it because they’re in the middle of the sea.

In the foyer, children spill out of an upstairs function while adults gather and take pictures. Clearly, the Royal Nawaab has been built with a singular purpose: to be photographed; discussed; shared. It’s a neodymium magnet for short-form video content. In fact all forms of quickfire attention; the Tiktok video, sure, but also the tabloid headline (Pyramids of Ghee-za!) or the pub bore factoid (have you heard how many charging portals they’ve got?) or the head out the window of the car passing along the M60 (what the — ?). It feels like the endpoint of a trend that it absolutely did not start: the SEO-era curry house. Look around Manchester at all the newly popular venues. Bundobust, Dishoom, Mowgli, Indian Tiffin Room. While many restaurants on the Curry Mile struggle, these marketable upstarts thrive — often blending a kitschy Bollywood aesthetic with the post-industrial Mancuanian staple of exposed brickwork and pipes. It’s hard to criticise too harshly — the food is often very decent, and the social media savvy is only a means to survive in the new economy. And at least at Nawaab they keep their pipes covered.

Look, curry isn’t sacred. Nothing is. By 2004, when the Egyptian authorities were considering embarking on a new phase of archaeological exploration in the Valley of the Kings, the mass of 40-watt-bulbs crammed into the subterranean corridors of Thebus had caused the temperature to rise so dramatically that the average tourist (picture him: three-quarter length cargo shorts, neck-strap Nikon dangling at crotch-level, I heart NY tee daubed in the pits) would leave an ounce (!) — or an uqiyyah — of sweat in his wake. A single day’s worth of tourists, departing the tombs looking like they’d just enjoyed a Royal Nawaab all you can eat curry banquet, would mean enough sweat to half-fill the Alabaster chalice. Think of it as their gift to the Gods.

The balti houses that emerged in the UK as a result of waves of immigration from the Indian subcontinent in the 20th century often stand accused of imitating the servitude of the British Raj under colonialism; the English barrelling about with their terrace chants and their chicken jail fret zees, their BO and BYOB — the wait staff forcing smiles and politely suggesting the menu option with four chilis next to it might represent a risk. Curry isn’t sacred.

But if the balti house equates to submission to the remnant power structures of the post-colonial world, the Royal Nawaab forces us to ponder: to whom are we now submissive? The answer, of course, is the owners of Instagram, TikTok and all the other social media sites restaurants now have to pay greater attention to than the food that ends up on the plate. But you knew that already. (In the unlikely event Mark Zuckerberg chooses to be mummified upon his passing, let all of our corpses be slung into the tomb with him, alongside the death masks and daggers, to make sure we can continue to serve him in the afterlife.)

Of course, we can point to benefits. A much-loved building which has sat empty for seven years has finally come back to life, like a re-animated mummy, creating 150 jobs in the process. There are obvious benefits to the Stockport economy too, and the fact Nawaab operates a no-alcohol policy makes it an attractive option for nearby Muslim communities (when I visited there were lots of families eating — the place was very busy). Whatever mitigation I can conjure, though, it would be deeply dishonest to try and say a single positive thing about the food.

As I sat basking in a mephitic banquet of spices, I couldn’t help reconsidering the curse one last time. In many ways, that place is a necropolis; of sanity, of taste, of reason. Whether or not my half-hour of violent convulsing and gurgling was related to the curse, what I do know is that Royal Nawaab disturbs something deep, fundamental. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an avid Egyptologist as well as a spiritualist, said after the death of Carnarvon that “elementals” deployed by the pharaoh's priests to protect his resting place might have come after the earl and killed him. From now on, I say we leave the elementals be.