Starting Up with Dipesh Patel @ Delhish

I’ve lived, studied and worked in Oxford for over ten years now; my mother, sister and I moved here when I was in my teens, and I went on to study biology at Oxford Brookes University.

Since then I’ve worked in Oxford and London, most recently at a global management consultancy firm, but at the beginning of this year I took the leap to quit my job and set up Delhish in Oxford, an online gourmet Indian food store, specialising in Indian sweets.

The idea grew in my last year at work as I became increasingly aware of just how few of my colleagues and friends had tried Indian sweets, despite all regularly going out for, ordering in or cooking curries. On trying them, they were flabbergasted by the sweets’ shapes, colours and tastes, and by the sheer number of them. I was equally amazed at how difficult they were to buy in Oxford; it’s not like in Birmingham where I grew up.

But even in cities like Birmingham, I realised, these sweets weren’t easily accessible to people outside of British Asian communities because all the sweets are labelled with their Indian names and no one tells you that a lot of them are actually very like English sweets. A gulab jamun, for example, is like a syrupy doughnut, and burfi like fudge. This is why we’ve made a guide on our website to help people choose.

This has been our biggest challenge in setting up Delhish, we’re offering something that is new to the majority of our customers. I want to share Indian culture and the delicious foods I grew up with. Curry is often voted Britain’s favourite dish, but there is so much more to Indian food than vindaloos and chicken tikka and people are missing out!

Another important aspect of this business for me was not only sharing my culture and food in the form of these delicious gourmet sweets and snacks, but giving people the opportunity to actively partake in it too, by learning to cook real Indian curries themselves with the right tools and the right ingredients.

This is why I’m also selling dabbas, traditional Indian spice tins, pre-filled with ten spices so my customers can cook their own Indian dishes. We import the spices, you wouldn’t believe the difference in colour, aroma and taste compared to the ones you can buy in mainstream supermarkets. They’ll improve any recipe, not just Indian ones, and they’re good for you too, there was an article in the national press about it just this week.

Sourcing our products is something we’ve taken really seriously, it was really important to have our products made the Indian way, but in the UK to guarantee freshness and quality. To ensure this we employ highly trained halwais (Indian sweet makers) to make our sweets, whose profession has been passed down from generation to generations via their families in India.

We’re now working on developing a range of our own chutneys and chai mixes, using my mother’s recipes, which everyone loves, so keep an eye out for that! There’s so much more I want to do and share with my customers, that it’s hard to find the time but our stall at Saturday’s Gloucester Green Market is often so successful that we sell out of stock.

Starting your own business takes a lot of work and it doesn’t decrease as you’re always thinking of more things to do and improve. So far the hard work seems to be paying off as people are very satisfied with our products, both those who are new to them, and even more tellingly, people who are already familiar!

TRY IT
Visit delhish.com for 10% off with the code Diwali10 for Oxford Mail readers during October