Sake Dean Mahomedthe WildfireENFP

In 1810, at about 51, Sake Dean Mahomed opened a restaurant at 34 George Street, near Portman Square in London. He called it the Hindoostane Coffee House. It was the first Indian restaurant in Britain.

Coffee house was the familiar London word for a place to sit and talk. Inside, he offered things London had never had: hookahs with proper tobacco, and curries cooked the Indian way. All of it was the real thing, offered to people he was sure would want it.

He had come a long way to that room. He was born in Patna in 1759, and as a boy he followed his late father into the East India Company's army. In 1784 he followed his patron, an Anglo-Irish officer named Godfrey Evan Baker, home to Cork, and married an Irishwoman, Jane Daly. In 1794 he published The Travels of Dean Mahomet, the first book published in English by an Indian.

Until then, Europeans wrote about India and Indians were written about. He told the story himself, in his own name.

Wildfires will know the temperament. He stood on the border between two worlds and could not see why the good things on one side should be kept from the other. A story, a cuisine, a custom: he carried them across.

In London the carrying went wrong. The people who came to the Coffee House liked it. Too few came. There was no scandal and no enemy, only too many empty tables, until the money ran out. By 1812 he had lost the business, and he was in his early fifties with everything he had built in London gone.

Plenty of lives turn bitter at that point. His turned toward the sea.

In 1814 he moved to Brighton with another idea from home: champo, the Indian art of massage, given after a medicated vapor bath. He called it shampooing, signed himself Sake Deen Mahomed, Shampooing Surgeon, and printed letters of thanks from his patients.

This time the public came. Within a few years he had his own baths on the seafront, and the town knew him as Dr Brighton. Then two kings in turn, George IV and William IV, appointed him their shampooing surgeon.

Look at what changed between London and Brighton. His talent stayed the same: the instinct for carrying India into England, and the flair for an advertisement. The audience changed. In London he had furnished a room for a public that did not yet exist. In Brighton he offered comfort and the feeling of being looked after to people already standing at the door.

When a first venture fails, Wildfires are often tempted to blame the fire and put it out. He kept the gift and pointed it at a different door.

He died in Brighton on 24 February 1851, in his early nineties. He had been past fifty and broke when he started again, and the second door stayed open for nearly forty years.