SOUTHAMPTON’S rising curry kings have added another restaurant to their rapidly expanding chain.

The Chowdhury family have snapped up the King & I Thai restaurant in High Street to end a busy year of acquisitions.

It will be a second foray into Thai cuisine for the four Chowdhury brothers, Zak, Jay, Nelly and Naz, who run the restaurant group. Existing staff will be retained and the restaurant rebranded as the Chowdhury’s Thai Lounge by the end of January.

The Chowdhury’s ran a restaurant in Swaythling, Chowdhury’s Curry House, which opened three years ago, and two in London.

They followed it with the opening of the Chowdhury’s Curry Lounge in Shirley earlier this year. Further deals saw them take over the Café Mumbai restaurant in Bedford Place and rebrand it as Chowdhury’s Lal Quila and open Chowdhury’s Thai Cuisine in Shirley.

Jay said: “Every business we’ve opened this year has been doing |really good. Business is improving day by day and we’ve got plans to open a further few next year.”

Jay’s father and uncle came to Southampton in the late 1950s, and they opened the first Indian restaurant in Southampton in the early ’60s called the Taj Mahal in Commercial Road. By the 1980s they had built a seven-strong empire along the south coast before the restaurants were sold off.

The brothers, who took over the family business in 1995, returned to catering in recent years after investing in the property market.