Cowley Flavors is a photojournalistic column documenting food and life stories from ethnic restaurants and grocery shops located on Cowley Road, updated weekly.
Like all the best stories, the tale of Majliss commenced with family, history, and love.
The seed was planted with the first cry of a girl born into a Bangladeshi family who ran a similar restaurant in Cowley. It matured decades later, when the girl married a man who migrated from Bangladesh to the UK, and it bloomed as her family grew larger: now a proud mother of five, Nurjahan manages Oxfordshire’s Best Indian Restaurant together with her husband. Majliss’s pristine interior ambiance–crisp white walls, gilded gold lights and spotless floor-to-ceiling windows–mirrors her years of dedication and commitment to being a good wife, a caring mother, and a responsible co-owner of the culinary gem in central Cowley.
[Majliss on Cowley Road, Image by Shixin Zhao]
[Majliss provides both dine-in and delivery service, Image by Shixin Zhao]
Nurjahan welcomed me into her restaurant with open arms. Despite being the woman behind these incredible achievements in the gastronomic scene of Oxford, Nurjahan only smiled humbly when I asked her how the restaurant grew so big. “It started with my parents’ business,” she answered, “they had a restaurant also here on Cowley Road. When we opened Majliss in 2009, many ideas were passed down from their restaurant to create our menu”. Her fingers ran softly through the sunlit yellow pages of the menu and glided across the bright pink headlines.
[Menu, Image by Shixin Zhao]
I was amazed by the length of this booklet. Majliss offers a massive range of options, and you can freely choose between many different styles of masalas, kebab, tandooris, biryanis, dosa pancakes, naan bread, and spiced rice. My eyes skimmed quickly through more than 50 names of dishes and I concluded wistfully that I actually wanted to try them all.
Celebrating the traditional flavor from Bangladesh and beyond, Majliss takes pride in its rich representation of diverse regional specialties of the South Asian continent. The five people at their kitchen, including two main chefs, one Tandoori chef, one kitchen porter and sometimes a side assistant, enchant their customers by opening the door of a multi-sensory global tour. From the chili-fired Northeast to coconut-laced South to clay-oven-baked West, every dish you taste is like a passport stamp. You can enjoy the beloved Bengali classic Sylheti Shatkora of beef stew with ripe lemon, or chew on some papadum after dipping it into mango chutney and mint sauce, or rip off a piece of garlic naan bread to serve the juicy lamb kebab.
[The Bengali owner Nurjahan introducing each sauce for poppadom dip, Image by Shixin Zhao]
[A family dinner at Majliss, Image by Shixin Zhao]
If you have a sensitive palette, don’t worry: the considerate chefs have adjusted the spiciness to accommodate the average English tastebuds. Every customer can personalise how much flare they want to enjoy, so neither chiliheads nor tender palates will be disappointed.
The Majliss staff are almost all of Bangladeshi origin and converse with each other in fluent Bengali. Recruitment happens through word-of-mouth hiring that deeply relies on trust and community ties. The main chef, for instance, was introduced to Majliss for his impeccable reputation in the circle. Remaining loyal to the intention of the previous generation, Nurjahan and others make an effort to bring authenticity to every single dish that represents the true diversity of Indian cuisine, so that any customer that walks into Majliss will gain a new appreciation for South Asian gastronomy. It is way beyond one plate of chicken tikka masala.
[Chicken laknari & honey king prawn, Image by Shixin Zhao]
[Glamorous color of the thick, sweet and sour sauce, Image by Shixin Zhao
Among their many specialties, one dish stood out for its originality: Majliss Special Chicken. This is a dish created in the familiar clay womb of Tandoor oven. Wrapped carefully in foil, large chunks of chicken breasts are creatively stuffed with spiced minced lamb and then placed in the surging flames of the oven. For the proteins to be fully cooked, the chicken has to remain 30 to 45 minutes in the blistering walls of the Tandoor as the juice hisses into the burning coal below, and for this reason must be ordered early. Majliss customers don’t mind the wait: all good things take time. In an era that prioritizes fast-paced everything, Majliss stands the ground for slow cooking, for ethics, and for love.
When one sits down on the soft leather chair, impressed by the elegant embrace of the modern decor and the honeyed hue created by the cross-shaped wall lights, it is hard to believe the eyes when Majliss’s menu offers many one-digit prices. Many meat-based options are attainable at £15 and most vegetarian dishes cost less than £10. “Yes, very student friendly,” Nurjahan smiled as she explained to me how they settled on the pricing.
[Lighting inside Majliss makes a perfect dinner, Image by Shixin Zhao]
[Banana tree decor, Image by Shixin Zhao]
Unsurprisingly, students make up a large population of their long-standing customers. Many come over to the property in central Cowley from the University during weekdays and weekends to take a break from their study. Majliss’s easily accessible price and large portion of food make it impossible to pass by their milk-white exterior without making a quick stop, either to dine in or take away. “What is the food they order the most?” I asked with curiosity.
“Chicken tikka massala, the UK national dish!” Nurjahan smiled whole-heartedly again.
[Majliss making headlines on Oxford Times, Image by Shixin Zhao]
[Best Indian restaurant in Oxfordshire, Image by Shixin Zhao]
I then asked Nurjahan if she had visited the University. As a native born and raised in Oxford, Nurjahan knows the city by heart and has many memories of the centuries-old institution, although she’s never been inside. She can name many colleges and their location, but has never had the chance to know the life locked behind the impenetrable brick walls and metal fences. Her narrative resonates with the answers from many other business owners on Cowley, that the local community of Oxfordshire is severely excluded from the 34,000 hectares of inaccessible college land. It is the students and their day-to-day life outside the school that help bridge the gap between the University and the city, and bring the two communities closer. Dining at a restaurant, therefore, is not only a monetary exchange of bills for nutrients, but more profoundly an exchange of care, friendship, and livelihood between two worlds.
And the Majliss family, since the seventies when Nurjahan’s parents arrived in the UK, have been an important node of connection that provides generations of Oxford students with joy, warmth, and the best curry in town.