The painting is symbolic of both Quilon and its Exceutive Chef, Sriram Aylur, a slender, 39-year-old Indian born in Bombay. The Chinese nets, which improved local fishing in India, illustrate the kind of cultural exchange of ideas that can bring value to a society and underpin evolution. Similarly, Quilon exports to London a culture of regional Indian cooking that is helping to change the image of ethnic Asian food in Britain. What began many centuries ago in India as simple home cooking could soon be taken to fashionable New York. Amazing to think that even in India, little was known about it until a couple of decades ago.

I meet Sriram on a Saturday morning at the restaurant. We walk through the kitchen, furiously being cleaned by staff. "The kitchen must look like new everyday," Sriram says. Quilon is open for lunch and dinner every weekday, but only opens Saturday evening during the weekend.

He guides me through the restaurant, a calm mixture of greenery, white washed table clothes and wicker chairs. Generous space between tables projects a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere. Sriram tells me they have only one sitting per night.

"Guests should feel relaxed and enjoy their eating," he says.

We sit to one side, Sriram with his back to the front window. Several times people tap on the window asking what time he opens. He waves his hands, indicating six.

"I have worked all my life as a chef in India," begins Sriram, who studied law in India but chose instead to follow his father in to the hotel business.

He joined the Indian Hotels Company Ltd, now Taj International, as a chef, cooking five-star cuisine for five-star guests. By giving the client what they wanted, Sriram found he was however sacrificing the real taste of India.

"Ethnic food, the food we ate at home, was dying. The hotels, which catered to popular taste, were losing the whole concept of our culture," says Sriram.

The company recognizing a need to change this and so selected a handful of chefs, including Sriram, then 23, to go and study cooking in Kerala, a lush and lazy Indian region on the west-coast. "We went to houses and learnt from house wives," he explains excitedly.

With Sriram's vision, the hotel group opened a new restaurant, Karavalli, meaning simply "coast," in Bangalore. The food was cooked exactly the way Sriram had learnt in the Kerala houses. "It came," he says "from the heart and soul of India, representing our culture."

Keralan cooking uses fresh seasonal ingredients. It is high on spice but low on oils and uses no added colouring, frozen or canned foods and rejects cream.

Karavalli was a big success, which instigated the company to replicate the idea in London, where Indian food, popularly termed a "curry" was a popular cuisine. "Outside India, if you want to cook good Indian food, there is only London." In 1999, Sriram, backed by Taj International, opened Quilon.

But how would a country used to chicken-masala, hot-madras and sickly coloured sauces cope with partidge cooked in red chili and semolina crumbed fried fish?

Sriram laughs, then says, "They were genuinely surprised. Our cooking went totally against the grain of what people know about Indian food." Already fairly familiar with spices, Sriram found Londoners hungry for his style of healthy cooking.

Sriram believes New York City, where he travels frequently to shop, is the right place for his next venture. "New York is long overdue to see Indian food -- in its right perspective."

He is currently scouting for new premises and several times we are interrupted by phone calls from New York. Although the new premises will define the look and name of the new restaurant, Sriram expects it be smarter and more modern than Quilon, but cook the same style food. "Ethnic food in a modern perspective," he says.

I wonder whether the events of September 11, have changed anything. "I think people are a little more cautious. America had a casual, friendly, trusting culture. It still has it but there is a little more suspicion. A few months after September 11, empty restaurants were offering three-course meals for $20. It was very sad. But Six months later, those same restaurants were busy and running normally. America is one of the most resilient countries I have seen."

The US is however proving more challenging, particularly its tough regulations on importing spices, the key ingredient to Keralan cooking.

A Keralan dish will typically use as many as fourteen spices. Quilon imports almost all of its spices from India, not for any moral purpose but because they are a better quality and the only way to ensure the right taste.

"All the key spices come from India, the chilis, the tamarind, the peppers," says Sriram.

Keeping with local taste and tradition is essential in Sriramís cooking. Coconut is ground on old grinding stone, not in a blender because that would risk burning the spice with the heat of the spinning blades.

"Everything has a reason for being done the way it's done--there is method in the madness," he says.

Sriram describes cooking as a science, not art. Spices, he explains, add value to a dish in different ways. Some can lose their flavour in oil; others can be ruined through boiling. The art of cooking, he insists, is in presentation.

Sriram believes he will make a success of America. "I think the US just has to get used to Asian cooking."

Indians are meanwhile no strangers to western values, thanks to post cold war globalization. Throughout the 1990s, this once staunchly socialist country has taken a more liberal attitude towards western brand names such as Coca Cola and Pepsi, seen more Indians travel abroad and encouraged a software revolution that has turned Delhi and other cities into the back office to the World.

"The World suddenly shrank and we understood the ethics and ethos of other countries," says Sriram.

Capitalism is spreading in India. Sounding like a student of Jack Welch, Sriram believes the only thing that matters in life is to win. But, he warns, "the ethics and the ethos of your business, of your profession, must be absolutely clear and strong."

Sriram rejects any notion that globalisation risks taking away the identity of culturally driven countries like India.

In fact, Sriram believes the industrialized countries have been handed an unfair advantage in money and technology and could do more to spread that wealth. He would like rich countries to share more of its technology, for instance. Indians, he says, are capable of taking products further by giving them mass appeal. He cites post-war Japan as an example, where they would take expensive western luxuries, such as cars, and turn them in to something more widely affordable.

But where Japan made its mistake was in its rigid culture. "One thing is certain and that is change. You have to keep an open mind to it. It can be good, bad and ugly."

But change, feels Sriram, should be an evolution rather than a revolution. That would explain his menu, which gives an extended description of each dish and a setting that is uncomplicated comfort.

Change should also bring value. If people see true value in something, they will accept it, says Sriram, much the same as the people of Kerala, when confronted by Chinese nets.

But he does worry when change risks taking value away. He cites our eating habits. "People would always eat seasonally, our habits changed by nature. The west has gone against that. If you want to eat something, you can get it any time of the year thanks to freezers. Nobody in India thinks about getting food from a supermarket freezer, they don't even relate with it." Because of that, people are becoming less healthy.

Sriram describes his cooking as you might a car: "Indian product, European design and US market." It strikes me that Sriram represents almost an anti-thesis to western-led globalization. America gave the world Starbucks and Coke; Sriram is giving back authentic south Indian cooking.

"There has got to be a synthesis in the process of globalization," he says.

Sriram is an extremely affable and likeable man. Well read and a self-confessed workaholic, at least until the arrival nearly four years ago of a son, Sriram has worked hard to make his restaurants a success. But I think he has done much more than that. By bringing the cooking of an Indian housewife to London and maybe lower Manhattan, he proves how globalization can enlighten us to cultures far beyond our dinner plates -- and still makes it taste great.

Quilon
41 Buckingham Gate London SW1 6AF
Reservations: 44 (0) 20 7821 1899