Ghee club: Indian cooking at Cinnamon Soho His mother must be thrilled, I tell him, to have her hard work finally recognised. 'Probably she will send me a bill for royalties,' Singh replies with careful irony. So, even if his mother has been an unacknowledged influence over the years, she has clearly been a potent subconscious one, because the one thing that shines forth from Singh's menus in both the Cinnamon Club, the Cinnamon Kitchen in the City and at his newest venture, Cinnamon Soho, is a devotion to real Indian home- and street-cooking. The new menu at Cinnamon Soho has on it the exotic-sounding aubergine crush, green chilli omelette, potato paratha and paneer bhuji, while at the Cinnamon Club regular evenings were given over to resident chefs and the food of their native regions in India. It means that dinner at either venue could be fuelled by a passion for street food from Gujerat or Bengal, or Goa. Now that he does know something about it, he has launched Cinnamon Soho, a very different beast to the Cinnamon Club, but one which majors in the same kind of inspirational Indian food. Whereas the Cinnamon Club is an august mix of colonial style, parquet, books and fine dining, Cinnamon Soho, just on the outskirts of Soho, in the same broad triangle that also encompasses Hix and Nopi, is all fashionable greys, teal, terracotta, orange neon strip lighting and brown Ercol-esque furniture. What persuaded him to make such a radical move? For the past few years, more and more people have been asking, are you a club, do I have to be a member, is there a dress code? I felt we needed to be perceived as less exclusive, but with the same quality. I didn't want to be catering exclusively for the 60-pluses; I wanted people who are younger and - dare I say it - cooler...' Cinnamon Soho certainly fits the bill. It's on the site of an old Soho drinking den and open 11am-11pm six days a week and for brunch on Sundays. It feeds into today's obsession for sharing plates, featuring tapas-style haleem, Bangla-scotch egg and burnt chilli chicken. 'It draws on my own favourite food,' Singh says. Burnt chilli chicken is what I generally eat late at night; haleem, made of mutton and broken wheat, is a kind of savoury porridge that you would have for breakfast in Hyderabad, bangla scotch egg is like a Bengali egg cutlet that street vendors sell on trains; ours are quail eggs rolled in spiced vegetables. But,' he adds, 'we also wanted guests to be able to have a three-course meal if that's what they felt like.' Many of these are Indian versions of English dishes: Vindaloo of ox cheek or Cumbrian lamb biryani. Keralan seafood pie is fresh fish, curry leaves and chillies in a coconut and ginger sauce under a puff pastry lid, for instance. Today, Singh is giving me some lessons in how to cook the kind of Indian food on offer in Cinnamon Soho. 'Mushrooms with cumin,' he says. 'That's a dish that comes from my travels in France. I was in Bordeaux when the ceps were in season. We had them very thickly sliced and fried in butter with parsley and lemon juice. It reminded me of the thick slices of potato fried with turmeric that my mother used to make. So I adapted it slightly. You need big, meaty mushrooms - chicken-feet mushrooms that you can get from asian supermarkets, or king oysters. Put a smear of green chutney on the toast and finish off the mushrooms with dollops of cold butter. Several different types of kichri, or kedgeree, are made at Cinnamon Soho, including one with hot shrimp. 'It's a dish that I think people will associate with us,' Singh tells me. 'The biryani takes a bit of work, but there's nothing wrong in having an aspirational dish.' Food is very personal, he thinks, born out of the tastes and smells of home, where domestic cooks have devised endless ways of reproducing the simplest dishes. 'All mums cook potato curry differently,' he says, poring over his menu, perhaps detecting his mother's influence once again. Lucknow-style chicken biryani recipe Kadhai spiced mushroom on toast recipe Mango brûlée Cinnamon Soho, 5 Kingly Street, London W1 (020-7437 1664; cinnamonsoho.com)