FOOD REVIEW: Bay of Bengal, White Lane, Gleadless, Sheffield S12 3GB. Tel: 0114 254 5848.

The only Bengali with an English monicker who is also a Spanish senor, Howard recently opened the Bay of Bengal at Gleadless, a suburb where a new Indian restaurant seems to spring up every month.

He’s been in my contacts book for years because he knows everyone and pops up quite a lot.

My review of his place, the India, at Banner Cross, was somewhat overshadowed by other events. It appeared on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral.

Howard disappeared from my radar for a time because he went to Spain to open a restaurant in Murcia but even then he couldn’t escape Sheffield.

One day a chap walked in he recognised – it was a surprised Kelly Temple, the former Hallam DJ.

Then my phone rang and I was on the case of Howard and the Giant Fish. He’d opened an Asian supermarket, the Bangla Bazaar, in Darnall (before they became quite common) and had acquired a simply enormous fish.

It was so big it flopped out of the deep-freeze, far too big for any one family to eat so he was selling it off by the yard. I left strict instructions that no-one was to take a chunk out of it until The Star took a picture of it posing with Howard.

He was just 10 when he arrived in England and started almost at once in the restaurant business. But customers at the old Ashoka on Ecclesall Road, where he was a favourite, couldn’t get their tongues around his first name Asmath so a customer called him Howard. It stuck.

“I’m known as Howard in the Indian community,” he says. So that is why he signs his menus Senor Howard Ali.

The Bay of Bengal is his sixth restaurant, the former Old Harrow on White Lane, a barn of a place with seating for at last 80 and by 8pm on a Friday night it’s full.