Pat, in my opinion, should be regarded as a curry cooking legend. How I came to know about him, I am not sure, but his books Indian Restaurant Cookery, Favourite Restaurant Curries and Pat Chapman's Curry Bible are in my opinion seminal texts that all self-respecting curry-holics should have read. With the 1984 Indian Restaurant Curries, Pat, for the first time to my knowledge, articulated recipes that were aimed squarely at those with a passion for the kinds of meals served in your local curry house. There were lots of Indian cookery books around even then but this book seemed to be the first that attempted to capture "that restaurant flavour". It didn't do that though.
In addition, it was almost subliminal advertising for his curry club, because if you couldn't source the spices for a particular recipe in your local shops then you could buy a spice pack directly from the club. Along with membership of the club, this book was my first foray into curry cookery as I imagined it should be.
Reading the introduction now, over 25 years later, his description on what goes on behind the scenes in an Indian takeaway kitchen seems somewhat dated. As I understand it Pat has travelled widely whilst researching his books but this book seems to lack experience of Indian restaurant kitchens in the UK that cook the dishes we love. It makes reference to a "curry gravy" (base) but suggests they are made with powdered garlic and ginger rather than the real thing. It provides recipes for a Pakistani Curry Gravy and a Savoury Curry Gravy but doesn't guide the reader if they are to be used in isolation or if they are part of an overall method. One is left feeling that the book is part experience and part guesswork. So although not quite fulfilling it's promise of leaving most Indian restaurants at the starting gate, this book is still, in my opinion, a landmark text because it is the first of its kind and it does contain some recipes which produce great meals, only they are not what goes on in an Indian restaurant.
Pat's next book, Favourite Restaurant Curries can be seen as a sequel to Indian Restaurant Curries in that it covered lots of similar dishes. It also attempted to articulate how a restaurant could offer dozens of recipes by starting off with a base gravy and merely adding different spices to individualise a dish. The previous book had by and large, shown the reader how to cook one-off curries. However Favourite Restaurant Curries was far from being a fully developed guide to cooking resaurant style curries. It only hinted at how this would work in practice and Pat's recipes were probably too complicated to give the reader real insight into how to truly clone the dishes of the average local takeaway.
Latterly Pat produced The Curry Bible, a book which targets the sixteen curries most common to the Indian restaurant menu along with sixteen "house favourites". This time he included one-off recipes alongside the restaurant style equivalent which brought the book another step closer to restaurant methods of cooking albeit still short of offering the reader a coherent system. However I still use Pat's recipe for Tandoori Masala in my Lamb or Chicken Tikka and his Curry Bible remains for me a splendid reference text.