Curry Lounge

What happened after

Owner Arfan 'Raz' Razak was convicted in 2017 of a GBP 64,741.54 VAT fraud (18-month suspended sentence); the restaurant closed under new management at the end of 2017.

Closure date on record: 2017

What happened on the show

Ramsay took against Curry Lounge quickly, from its atmosphere to its billing as Nottingham's best restaurant, with the word runners-up buried in small print. Owner Arfan Raz Razak was proud of his make-your-own-curry gimmick, but Ramsay told him it was exactly what would sink the place: the kitchen had to stock huge quantities to cover every combination, none of it tasted good, and even the staff could not tell the curries apart. At Ramsay's urging, head chef Khan put a family-recipe lamb korma on the second night's menu, and its success won Raz over. Ramsay sold him on delivering curry to city-centre offices and rebuilt the menu around regional flavours, and the reopening was a hit. The turnaround was real enough that on the revisit Ramsay could not find a free seat, though he still took against the ugly naan bread stands enough to have them scrapped.

After the cameras left

The on-air success did not describe how this one ended. Owner Arfan Raz Razak was convicted in 2017 of a VAT fraud running to just over sixty-four thousand pounds, drawing an eighteen-month suspended sentence, and the restaurant closed under new management at the end of that year. We hold this at high confidence: the Nottingham paper ran two separate dated pieces, in 2017 and again in 2024, that corroborate both the fraud case and the closure, making it the strongest single-business evidence chain in this batch. The busy, reinvented restaurant Ramsay left behind ultimately fell to its owner's own conduct.