Loading...
A UK curry-house ordering guide using Action on Salt, NHS and BHF numbers: which mains, sauces and sides keep a takeaway under 800 kcal and 3g of salt.
A Friday-night curry from a British Indian restaurant — what the trade calls a BIR — is one of the most-ordered takeaways in the UK. It is also one of the saltiest things most people eat in a week. The campaign group Action on Salt sampled 50 chicken tikka masalas with pilau and found the worst contained 6.81g of salt in a single portion; once you add a poppadom, chutney, a side and a naan, a typical takeaway can clear 20g of salt — more than three times the 6g daily ceiling that the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition and the NHS recommend for adults [1][2][3].
The good news is that the same menu also contains the lightest mains you will find in any cuisine. Tandoori dishes are dry-roasted in a clay oven so most of the fat drips away, and tomato-based curries — jalfrezi, madras, rogan josh, bhuna — run roughly 200-300 kcal per portion against 600-800 for the cream- and coconut-based korma, pasanda and butter chicken [4][5]. This guide is the ordering pattern, not a list of forbidden foods: which main, which sauce family, which side, what to say at the counter, and where the hidden salt actually lives.
Most British Indian takeaway menus are 70 percent creamy curries, fried starters and oil-cooked rice, and the conventional Friday-night order — tikka masala, pilau, naan, poppadom, chutney — can deliver more than three days of an adult's salt limit in one meal. The same menu also contains the lightest mains on offer in any cuisine. The fix is not to stop ordering Indian; it is to learn which side of the menu you are ordering from.
The British-Indian-Restaurant menu evolved in the 1960s and 70s to suit a British palate trained on cream, butter and big portions. Many kitchens build the entire savoury line off two or three large-batch base gravies — a 'curry base' and a 'masala base' — that are pre-seasoned for salt and pre-thickened with cream, ghee or coconut. A korma, a pasanda and a butter chicken share more of their fat and salt content with each other than the menu suggests; the protein and the spicing change, the base does not.
What that means for an ordering guide is that the lever you actually have is the sauce family, not the dish name. Once you pick a tandoori, a tomato-onion gravy or a pulse-based dish, you have already done most of the work — the rest is a question of how many carbs and how many salty extras you stack on top.
A bought curry with all the extras — rice, naan, saag aloo, poppadom and chutney — could provide over 20.5 g of salt, the equivalent of over three times your maximum recommended intake of 6 g a day.
— Action on Salt, Curries Survey
Tell us your weekly salt and calorie targets and the curry styles you actually order. Our planner builds a seven-day menu of BIR-style dishes (tandoori, jalfrezi, dal, saag) that land inside the 6 g UK daily salt limit, with one shopping list and the swaps already baked in.
Plan my curry-house weekThe pattern reduces to four moves. Pick one main from the tandoori or tomato-sauce side of the menu, not the cream side. Pick one carb (a chapati, a small rice, or half a naan) and skip the other two. Treat poppadoms, pickles and chutneys as a salt budget, not a free starter. And split the portion in half on the plate — most BIR mains are 1.5 to 2 servings by Public Health calorie guidance, and the second half is your lunch the next day [4][6].
If you take these moves to the same Friday-night menu, the same shop, the same delivery app, you will land at roughly 600-800 kcal and 2-3g of salt for the meal, instead of 1,400-1,800 kcal and 6-8g of salt. The food is no less Indian. It is just the ordering pattern that the BHF and Action on Salt have been recommending for years, applied at the counter rather than in the kitchen [3][6].
Sourabh writes about Indian cuisine, budget cooking, and the everyday nutrition questions that come up in Indian kitchens — chapati portions, dal protein, how to keep dishes balanced without losing the flavours families actually want. His pieces lean on credible sources (ICMR-NIN, peer-reviewed studies) and home-cook reality in equal measure.
Meet the editorial team →Built using verified nutrition databases, culinary research, and traditional cooking knowledge — every claim is cross-referenced against the sources listed in the article. Last reviewed May 2026.
Articles are curated using trusted food databases (USDA FoodData Central, IFCT), culinary literature, and dietary guidelines, then structured by our editorial team for clarity, accuracy, and usefulness.
