Street

Taj Stores is London’s longest-running Asian greengrocer. It’s a Bangladeshi-owned, family-run business.

The store first opened in 1936 and was originally located on Hunton Street (now Buxton Street), just off Brick Lane. The business relocated to its current location, 112 Brick Lane, in the 1980s.

Today, Taj Stores brands itself as a world food supermarket and sells produce from Bangladesh, India, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Greece, Lebanon and Jamaica, among other places. It also sells kitchen-ware and cooking utensils. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has said that Taj Stores is one of his favourite shops, and it features in a TV ad he made in 2018 for Range Rover.

Taj Stores supplies many of Brick Lane’s Bangladeshi-owned cafés and restaurants with food products. The store stocks a wide selection of frozen fish from Bangladesh that is used by the head chefs of the lane’s restaurants to make the ‘staff curry’. One Bangladeshi restaurateur told us:

‘typically we are fish-eaters.’

Another said:

‘Bengali food is basically fish-based.’