Katsu curry has been a smash hit with tennis fans at this year’s Wimbledon tournament, its head of food and drink has revealed.
Anthony Davies, who leads the culinary operations at the All England Club, said the Japanese dish was among the most popular on its expanding international menu.
‘Katsu curry has been a flyaway success,’ he said.
Other world dishes available to visitors to the grounds include Jamaican ital stew, Thai noodle stir-fry and Mexican burritos.
Mr Davies said: ‘We have a lot of international guests, as well as celebrating great British produce we also like to make sure we have authentic-tasting international dishes.’
This year’s tournament sees the debut of Wimbledon’s first ever vegan version of its famous strawberries and cream as the All England Club moves to keep pace with changing consumer tastes.
It is accompanied by a growing range of vegan dishes, such as a jackfruit curry pie or beetroot and red pepper burger.
‘Clearly across the UK in the last 12 months, the UK public and their approach to eating has changed quite significantly, there’s been a huge increase in the amount of flexitarianism,’ Mr Davies said.
‘Therefore we needed to make sure that this year we improved our offer.’
Mr Davies said the vegan options have ‘matched our expectations’ but was unable to provide figures for sales.
He added: ‘The important thing for us is choice ultimately, it was never necessarily going to be our runaway biggest seller but it is about making sure that all of our guests have a really good choice of great quality products.’
His team also provide meals to players taking part in the championships, who largely tuck into ‘pasta and sushi’.
Asked if competitors ever make unusual requests, Mr Davies said: ‘We very rarely get very unusual options, I’ve not heard of anything strange this year. For sure we’ve had things in the past.’
‘I remember somebody having peanut butter and Marmite. I couldn’t tell you who that was. In previous years there have been some strange requests.’
The majority of the ingredients used at Wimbledon are sourced from the UK, with international ingredients brought in to make dishes ‘authentic’.
Mr Davies said the All England Club was not concerned about any potential impact of Brexit on its food operations.
Last year, a record 38 tonnes of strawberries were consumed at the Wimbledon Championships, with any leftovers made into jam.
Its catering operations made 259,225 cups of tea and coffee, cooked 25,165 pizzas, sold 18,843 bottles of champagne and had 2,556kg of bananas available for players.
A total of 273,603 glasses of Pimm’s were poured and 9,998 litres of cream used.