Indian culture or beef ball curry at desi restaurants

Here’s a travel tip. Never eat at Indian restaurants abroad. Unless it is at the Brar’s in Toronto, which is special. But in general, Indian restaurants outside India are a conspiracy to counter the argument that India is awash with diversity. Especially in the United States, every Indian restaurant is exactly the same. They are as homogenous as cloned sheep.

Let’s begin with the decor. A faded photo of the Taj Mahal. Random Mughal miniatures and occasionally posters of Madhubala or Amitabh Bachchan. The music is the same bland, soul deadening, bad instrumental versions of bad songs to begin with. Have you ever heard an instrumental version of Annu Malik songs from the ’90s? If you haven’t eaten at an Indian restaurant in the US, you probably haven’t. The music is like a side dish of engine oil. And that brings us to the food itself.

Every desi restaurant in the US has an ‘All you can eat’ buffet, and more depressingly, every item in every restaurant is exactly the same, right down to the order of dishes. There’s usually a perfunctory salad bar that’s explicitly designed for white customers. Indians don’t eat salads. We only eat oily, fried foods, especially when eating out. What sort of crazy person would pay good money to eat raw vegetables, eh? There’s usually a kachumber salad featuring cucumbers, chillies, onions, tomatoes that are neutralised by a generous sprinkling of chaat masala, some lettuce, and sliced onions. Onions are pretty much the only raw vegetable that you will find Indians serving themselves. Right next to the salad bar is also the dessert section. In almost stereotypical desi cost-cutting style, these restaurants save on an extra cold buffet table by combining salads and desserts.

There are usually two desserts. One is rice kheer and the other, gulab jamuns as big as golf balls. But the true queen of the dessert section is never placed on the buffet table. One pays $2.95 for it. It’s the mango lassi, that uniquely American Indian (dot, not feather) concoction found in every desi restaurant there. It is yoghurt blended with mango concentrate (Hahaha, of course not real mangoes; the only real mangoes that grow in Mexico taste like cucumbers).

For the starters, there’s either pakoras OR samosas with the blandest of fillings. They are called white-friendly samosas. After that, a thick yellow liquid that will be labeled ‘lentil soup’ (in reality, just plain dal) and then about three vegetarian dishes — a questionable looking palak paneer, one of those (Kolhapuri, Jaipuri, Hyderabadi) vegetable gravies, one kind of dry aloo and then the following meat dishes: chicken tikka gravy, lamb gosht, and interestingly, ‘beef ball curry’.

Every Indian restaurant serves beef, thus proving comprehensively that you can take an Indian out of India but can’t get him to always drink at the fountain of ‘Indian culture’. Business sense always trumps religion.

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