Iqbal Chowdhury - Bengal Brasserie (From York Press)

Iqbal Chowdhury - Bengal Brasserie

11:29am Saturday 20th August 2011 in Profiles

IQBAL Chowdhury is a top businessman in charge of a small local empire of top Asian restaurants and a top human being, whose generosity of spirit is widely recognised.

That is why Iqbal is being nominated by colleagues for both the Business Personality Of The Year and Tourism And Hospitality Business Of The Year titles in The Press Business Awards 2011.

He has a proven track record in the restaurant business over more than 35 successful years, lately over 15 years trading in York and North Yorkshire under the Bengal Brasserie Group.

His restaurant in Goodramgate, York, was the start of a chain of four which includes the more than 100-seat Bengal Brasserie in Poppleton and he employs 40 people.

All this in spite of new and intense competition plus increasingly difficult trading conditions, including the unsolved arson of his Poppleton restaurant in May 2008. Undaunted, he rebuilt it, making it even more stylish, at a cost of £125,000.

Iqbal has guided his group to many awards, in recent years, including the prestigious “Fusion Foods” award that resulted in his invitation to an international event hosted in the Sheraton Hotel in Dakha, Bangladesh.

Alongside this has been his tireless fundraising for national and local charities, with charity nights generating about £18,000 in total for worthy causes. They include the British Heart Foundation, York Age Concern, York Hospital’s children’s high dependency ward, the St Leonard’s Hospice in York, the Thailand Tsunami victims, Save The Children and various charities looking after the victims of flood and other disasters in his homeland of Bangladesh.