A restaurateur, a Sikh businessman, a Sri Lankan chef and an English eccentric are the subjects of a Channel Four television series that starts airing in the United Kingdom on Thursday.

The series, titled A Place in France: An Indian Summer, follows the fortunes of the four men as they go about starting an Indian restaurant in the Ardeches region of France, one-and-a-half hour's drive from Lyons.

Connoisseurs of French food questioned the temerity of such upstarts posing a challenge to the Western world's finest cuisine in its own backyard but the four gourmet adventurers were neither stirred nor shaken.

Nigel Farrell, an Englishman from London, came up with the idea of opening an Indian restaurant in the middle of France. He broached the subject to his friend Nippi Singh, who runs a village shop and post office in Hampshire.

Mid-way Nippi Singh developed cold feet but Farrell salvaged the situation by bringing aboard Reza Mohammad, the Indian proprietor of one of London's best-known restaurants Star of India on Brompton Road, and voila! it was time to heap the coals in the tandoor.

This is not the first time Channel Four has been involved in a project of this sort. A few years ago, it followed Nippi Singh and Nigel Farrell as they bought a rundown property in France and turned it into a holiday home.

But an Indian restaurant is an entirely different bowl of curry. For a start, it needs a chef to keep an eye on day-to-day cooking.

Fortunately, for all concerned, including the documentary filmmakers, Reza came across Sri Lankan-born Edward in Paris and persuaded him to lend a hand at L'Ete Indien au Relais Fleuri (Indian Summer at the Restaurant of Flowers).

Whether it was due to the food or the friendly elephant that helped formally launch the restaurant in July 2003, it has been a huge success and even Nippi Singh's cold feet have given way to warm enthusiasm for the French window into the cuisine of his ancestors' homeland.