THE chef is a qualified nutritionist and they have eliminated a large amount of cooking fats and oils from their kitchen, making dishes healthier by more than a third.

It sounds like the set up of a clean-eating restaurant where you might find trendy health food ingredients like tofu, quinoa and kale.

But far from it. Curry on the Curve is one of Newport’s newest Indian restaurants which claims to give the traditional Indian curry a makeover, making it healthier and lower in fat.

It all started with an idea more than two years ago, when owner Anil Karhadkar, who has worked in the hotel and food business for the last 20 years, was asked whether it was possible to make Indian food healthy.

He thought about it, did a lot more research and then eight months ago opened Newport’s first healthy curry house on Clarence Place, Newport.

Mr Karhadkar told the Argus: “There’s a bit of a history with Indian food that it is loaded with ghee, something which is very high in fat and cholesterol.

“So we eliminated all that straight away.”

The kitchen has not had a single drop of ghee in it since it opened and all of the sauces are free from cream, which is normally a staple of Indian-British cuisine.

Instead the sauces are made with lentil puree which Mr Karhadkar said “takes out some of the richness of the sauce in terms of calorie content”.

Yoghurt is also used as a substitute, and the sugary dips like mango chutney have been swapped for alternatives made with jaggery – a non-refined sugar popular in Asia and Africa which keeps some of the goodness from the sugar cane to produce dips like the chilli tomato chutney.

Mr Karhadkar said: “What we are trying to say is the traditional Friday night curry with a couple of beers, can still have a healthy twist.

“You can still have have all the goodness without the richness from fats, people don’t realise this.”

The restaurant owner, who worked in hospitality in both India and Britain also worked in food retail categorising foods under the traffic light system which rates nutritional information as red, amber and green.

He was tasked with helping to change the ingredients and recipes to make food move from a red category to an amber.

Mr Karhadkar said his experience in nutrition helped him develop the restaurant, and he now works with his chef who is a qualified nutritionist.

The way the restaurant is able produce the healthy versions of Indian food without all the fats is partly down to the process.

“We do a lot of slow cooking and cooking in the clay oven,” Mr Karhadkar said.

“From a chef’s perspective, lots of oil cooks the food quicker. Food takes longer to get softer without oils. So in other restaurants people want to put the fats in there because it’s quicker and costs less money.

“What we are doing is a lot of slow cooking, effectively using a very slow heat input. We use a minimum amount of salt and moisture in the slow cooking, and that’s how we achieve making our meals with around 30 to 35 per cent less fat.”

Even the nutrition of the spices used is carefully considered. All spices are ground on site so the chefs can mill them at a lower heat to retain their goodness.

“Spices like turmeric has antiseptic properties and fenugreek cuts down blood sugar,” Mr Karkhadkar said.

“Tamarind is an antioxidant and anti-allergen. Even ghee is not so bad, if it’s in the wrong hands it can cause havoc, but it has got a bad name across the board even though it does have some curative properties.”

Going for a Indian and seeing your plate free from grease seems far from reality for anyone who has ever had a curry. But that is what Mr Karhadkar said his customers have been telling him, saying they also do not get the usual “bloatedness” feeling after eating a curry.

And the restaurant is proving popular. But why is it that people are seeking more healthy foods – are people becoming more health conscious?

One of the managers at healthy food eatery Cedars Cafe, in Newport, said the healthy, vegan curries at the cafe have proved extremely popular with the health-conscious.

Manager of the cafe, in Skinner Street, Melanie Heames, said: “It’s really, really amazing, it’s really taken off,” she said. “We surprise a lot of people. Vegan and healthy food is not boring, we have people phoning up asking if we have the vegan curry on the day.”

Ms Heames said the customers who choose the vegan curries do so for a range of reasons; for the flavours, because it is vegan or because of the health benefits.

She added: “But I think more people are into healthy options at the moment, knowing every meal is started and cooked from fresh and all the flavours come through.”

Mr Karhadkar agreed that vegan eating is also another way for diners to be healthy, and he has adopted some vegan dishes at the restaurant.

“For vegans you can dry roast an aubergine, take the skin off and make a masala sauce. You get the most of the nutrition and with all the flavours.”

He said he thinks people “have always been health conscious”. He said: “This is what prompted me to start this restaurant.”

He added that cutting out fats and eating healthier is often an easier way to control our health and it fits in with our lifestyle.

“What is happening is historically people people are in a lot of pressure so don’t have the time to cook.

“Our lifestyle nowadays is really sedentary, we don’t do as much physical activity as we did in the past.

“But if you can’t burn it off you might as well control the ingoing quantities. The achievable way is to cut down on the fat and that’s what works.”

Flavour seems to be at the heart of both the cooking at Curry on the Curve and Cedars and both are keen to point out that healthier food does not mean less taste.

“We are not compromising on the taste,” Mr Karhadkar said. “You are still getting the same experience of all the freshness and heat from the spices.”

And looking at the response from the public, it looks like he may just be changing people’s perceptions of how healthy a curry can be.