#tayyabs

Pictured above: Salman Farsi, social media guru of the East London Mosque and Aleem Tayyab, co-owner of Tayyabs restaurant.

Forget about the "authentic" South Asian restaurants on Brick Lane, Tayyab says. After our interview at the East London mosque we ducked out the backdoor into the rain and down the block to visit Tayyabs. It used to be a tiny shop selling burgers alongside fluffy piles of naan and mixed grill meat.

Today it's a hot to trot restaurant with two floors and a waiting list every night. "We still sell the hamburgers though!" Tayyab tells us.

Marketing stunt to send a tandoori lambchop into space became a 5-month hunt to track down the footage.

When four friends decided to send a tandoori lambchop into space, they had no idea it would lead them on a 5-month-long wild goose chase around the West Country, or how beautiful the footage they eventually recovered would be.

Before dawn on 14th June 2014, artist Nick Hearne, novelist Nikesh Shukla and two friends inflated a 2-metre diameter helium weather balloon under a full “Honey” moon. The payload was a tandoori lambchop and a GoPro camera, set to head 31km up into the stratosphere (the equivalent height of 101,705 lambs stood on each other’s shoulders). This very literal marketing stunt of sending meat to space was to promote the new novel “Meatspace” by Nikesh Shukla.

At 6am the balloon was released and the tandoori lambchop set off on an adventure that no other lambchop had ever made. 18 hours previously it had been sizzling on the grill at famous East London restaurant Tayyabs, before making the 88.6 mile journey to the launch site. Now it would rise at 325m/min for 95 minutes before the balloon was predicted to burst 50 miles away over Hungerford, West Berkshire. The payload would then parachute back to earth with a predicted landing near Andover, Hampshire, 68 miles from the launch site.

GPS contact was lost with the tandoori lambchop shortly after launch. It was assumed that GPS contact would be established when it re-entered a zone of mobile phone coverage after the flight. However the freezing temperatures of near space (at 12km high, the tropopause can be as cold as minus 55 degrees Celcius) meant that the GPS device didn’t survive the flight. There was no way to contact the pod or recover the payload. The launch team were devastated and held little hope for its recovery.

One month later on 18th July 2014, flight organiser Nick Hearne received a call from a farm worker “Adam”. He’d discovered the payload in his threshing machine during harvest on a farm in Manston, Dorset, 82 miles from the launch site. The launch team immediately made plans to recover the camera from “Adam”. Upon which time an almost 5 month wild goose chase around the West Country began.

“Adam” made arrangements to meet at locations in Dorchester, a service station in Bridgend, and Weston-super-mare, but failed to show every time. He dodged between different phone numbers and locations, every time giving excuses why he couldn’t return the camera. By this time the launch team began to believe that this was life imitating art. The main theme of the novel “Meatspace” is the lies that we tell ourselves and others in the modern social media-obsessed universe. Was this a case of elaborate catfishing? Or purely somebody attention seeking?

Following some prompting from the Avon & Somerset Constabulary, “Adam” got back in touch on 6th November and pointed the launch team to another farm worker “Will”. “Will” quickly recovered the camera and made a rendezvous in a KFC on 11th November. The pod ,which had made such an incredible journey, was handed back to the launch team and they couldn’t believe how beautiful the footage they found was. Over 100 minutes of clear footage showing the ascent of the tandoori lambchop through the clouds, and high up into the stratosphere with stunning views of the earth below.