Royal Nawaab Pyramid, the restaurant inside the Stockport Pyramid, serves more than 500,000 diners a year and up to 6,000 customers a day, a scale now set to reach television in a one-off Channel 4 special about what is billed as the world’s biggest curry house. The 37-metre-high building, once abandoned for the best part of a decade, has been turned into a busy destination where the marble floors in the reception are cleaned three times before a single customer walks in each day.
The sheer size of the operation is measured not just in seats but in supplies. The weekly bill for produce comes to £100,000, while the kitchen uses 520kg of rice, 5,000 poppadoms and 220kg of spices every week. It also goes through enough detergent to wash 100 uniforms a day, all to keep a team of more than 150 staff moving through service.
At the centre of it is Mahboob Hussain, now 75, whose path to the Stockport site began far from Greater Manchester. He emigrated from Pakistan at 15, worked in the mills of Bradford and opened his first restaurant at 28. In the 1980s, he expanded to the Canary Islands and pioneered the luxury buffet concept, building a business model that now draws guests from the US and across Europe.
The restaurant is not just feeding casual diners. It hosts as many as nine weddings and events each weekend and has four private spaces, turning the pyramid beside a Stockport highway into a venue as much as a dining room. That mix of volume and event trade helps explain why the business has become a talking point far beyond the town itself, especially in a place not usually described as a culinary hotspot.
That scale also explains the pressure behind the scenes. Bilal said: “There’s a bit in the show they missed out, but one day during filming there were 190 canapés made, he spotted mistakes on FaceTime and sent them all back”. The detail captures the standard the family expects and the way Hussain still exerts control over a restaurant that now runs at a pace few single-site venues could match.
The tension in the story is simple. The old stockport pyramid site had been left unused for years, yet Royal Nawaab has turned it into one of the few businesses not merely surviving through a cost-of-living crisis but expanding through it. Channel 4’s special, The World’s Biggest Curry Restaurant, arrives as evidence of that reinvention, and the central fact is already clear: what was once an abandoned landmark has become a high-volume operation with a reach that stretches well beyond Stockport.
