As the market grows it kind of gets undone - this is most obvious in America with maybe Japanese restaurants? Sushi, ramen, bbq are often entirely different restaurants. Except that, as the fusion represents a new cuisine, it can stick around on its own
The only exception is 'mom and pops veg restaurant' where the dishes are a Hodge podge of everything they can make. But these 'vanilla' dishes are usually there to pander to the customer and subpar. Their best dishes are usually the local speciality.
Another exception is national chains like Haldirams, which make 'mediocre everything' and should not be a yardstick for anything indian. (Nothing against haldirams. Their Santra barfi is the best in the world as long as you buy it in the original nagpur location. They also run a few one-off speciality restaurants in Nagpur, which are quite good. But their national chain is meh)
The sub-cuizinization of Indian food is already happening in the US. Godavari is an exclusively Udipi chain. Annapurna? in SJ and Kathakali in Seattle are top tier maharashtrian and Keralite restaurants. You now have Kathi and chat places with 1 page menus and cuisines from neighboring countries (Bangladeshi, Nepali, Srilankan) are finally being recognized as distinct.
As a person for whom food is primary hobby, the idea that Indian or Chinese food gets put under one umbrella makes me rather annoyed. It does a disservice to the culture of civilizational behemoths.
Other than Punjabi and chaat no other Indian sub cuisine gets too many special restaurants at least here.
I’m not saying that this is the best way. I prefer specialized restaurants as well, but Foreign folk get introduced to ethnic food in steps and step 1 is a compression of an entire nations diversity into a single menu. Ones only hope is they do it a decent service. This will naturally let people pursue specialized cuisines from there as is happening with Chinese cuisine in most big metropoles in the US and I’m sure will happen with Indian over time as well.
The core culinary approach and ethos is identical across the subcontinent. I'd say it extends as far as Eastern Africa, Bhutan, Malaysia and Thailand. (not Vietnam tho)
The idea with Latin cooking, is to get the highest quality ingredients that go together really well. It is about a small set of ingredients that play-off-of each other to highlight the strengths of each. The musical analogy, would be a 3 piece band, where you can hear every instrument.
Indian cooking is about a feeling of oneness, derived from the combination of many. 30 different ingredients come together to become 1 flavor that is its own thing. The individual disappears in favor of the creation of a new whole. The musical analogy here, would be a big orchestral composition. You never pick out the individual instruments. Yet, it evokes a single emotion and a singular atmosphere. Indian & similar cooking starts with incredibly complex base ingredients. My family's chilli powder recipe contains 8 different types of chillies and a total of 37 ingredients. This powder goes on to become 1 of a dozen spices that form the flavor base of the final dish. The whole doesn't taste of the ingredients, by design. Xiaoxing wine or Sambal Olek are similar complex base ingredients in the other cultures I mention.
You have to approach each style from a completely different mental state. Having started cooking only once I moved to the US, I became a pretty good western cook, but I could never figure out how to cook Indian food. It is only after about 4 years, that I realized that you can't approach Indian cooking from a western perspective. I now understand why my mom used vague instructions and cues instead of a rigid recipe. I am still a much better western cook than an Indian one, but that's fine cuz I just get my Indian friends here to cook their mom's recipes for me.
Truth is, that you probably want to get invited to an Indian potluck. Apart from Punjabi and street food, most other Indian cuisines do not have a well developed restaurant culture. So, the most authentic food is often home style cooking. With no offense to 2nd generation Indian-Americans, it is the 1st generation immigrants who will recreate their regional cuisine most faithfully.
I don't know many bay area restaurants, since I don't reside there. I've visited once, that's it.
Some regional cuisines to check out:
* Maharashtrian / Mumbai - The Vadapav & Misal are iconic, but there is a lot more to this. Stir fried legumes (matki) is another personal favorite.
* Konkan - Saltwater seafood heavy. My favorite are the coconut marinated crustacean preparations. Bombil (snakefish) is my comfort food, but near impossible to source in the US.
* Indo-chinese - Inchin's Bamboo Garden is a reliable chain. Really interesting cultural exchange. Chili Paneer, Chicken Machurian and Szechuan (that is the cultural correct & technically incorrect spelling for Sichuan) rice go great together.
* Chaat - An explosion of flavors. Every region does it differently, but Mumbai (Bombay) is the only one that does it right. Usually a combination of heterogeneously mixed chutneys and textures. Sweet with Spicy. Yogurty and crispy. The most delightful of Indian cuisines. (sorry Delhi, you're second. Some other places put carrot in their chat, and I hope those heathens marry people who order their steak well done)
* Kerala / Malabar - Parotta, Appam and goat curries are my favorite. Chili Beef is probably India's most iconic beef dish.
* Mughlai - Not Punjabi. Real Mughlai food takes a clay oven and charcoal. It also takes a lot of human effort and time. Most Indian places in the US cut corners. A perfect Biryani is epitomizes this cuisine, but finding the right Biryani place is an active challenge. Kababs and grilled tikka are their most visible, but a rabdi-shahi tukda is the most opulent version of a tres-leches cake that you can imagine. (sort of)
* Nepali - Not Indian, but I LOVE their momos (dumplings). Ironically, Nepali restaurant food is the closest thing to authentic homestyle food I've had in the US. They seem to care less about making the traditional british-american dishes and their cooking seems more rooted in how 'mom used to make it'.
This only starches the surface of the many cuisines that India has to offer. But, it's an HN comment not a blog post. (I just got an idea for a blog post series )
Ramen is newer, but definitely is something that the Japanese care about and identify with.
I may be mistaken, but Ramen (as noodles in broth with toppings) strikes me as a fairly obvious dish once you have a kind of noodle and broth.
Ramen specifically uses wheat noodles. "Modern Japanese Ramen" took Chinese recipes that used wheat noddles and used them to great effect during the American occupation with extremely cheap wheat prices (compared to other choice). You can be damn sure without cheap American wheat, Ramen would have stayed as Chinese Soba
It's one of those things that make people uncomfortable because history is messy.
So your history lesson isn't uncomfortable but wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_the_Occupation_of_Japa...
Maybe for you. I, for one, will never accept rice in a burrito.
Things definitely got better, you can go pretty much anywhere in the US and get real salsa now - thank you taco bell for educating people. Today I can buy hatch green chilis in the ethnic isle of most grocery stores in NYC (and you can always order them from Amazon or Walmart). In the northeast poblano peppers are in all the Mexican-ish dishes - huge upgrade from the pickled jalapeños and very close to the hatch chilies I grew up with. Some of the stuff I get at the taco trucks is even more exotic and really wonderful - I’m a big fan of Oaxacan cheese, wish I had discovered that years ago.
The real issue is that there's been very little widespread systematization of "traditional" indigenous cookery. We've started seeing that over the past few decades through the efforts of people like Lois Frank and many, many others, but it's a process.
Btw, If anyone knows any pre-Columbian restaurants for Italian and Indian cuisines, let me know.
Yes and this nearly amorphous identity is a tragedy that needs unbundling. Scratch the surface and none of it makes sense for any single pre-colonial culture on the whole continent.
There are like 300 recognized distinct pre-colonial cultures here at the US federal level, most of which were grandfathered in before a cutoff for the reservation system and additional ones each requiring an act of Congress for recognition, even more at the state level, and even more vying for recognition as they are just noticing and regrouping after ages of separation, in a combination of forced separation or lineage dilution.
> There's a lot more shared identity today as a result of colonization and the reservation system, which somewhat extends to things like food. Frybreads are a good example since they come directly from the reservation system and the typical ingredients provided by the government for cheap calories: flour, beans, oil, "cheese", and some form of meat, sugar, etc. Despite the common name, it's a shared culinary heritage for many tribes in the US.
At least this shared identity wasn't built over unmarked graves for children like elsewhere. [0] [1] [2]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/world/canada/kamloops-mas...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/world/canada/mass-graves-...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/24/americas/canada-unmarked-grav...
Don't kid yourself; the American boarding schools for the Native Americans weren't much better than the Canadian ones, were they any better to begin with. In general, I'd be hard-pressed to declare Canada any better or worse in its treatment of indigenous peoples than the US was--they were both pretty appalling.
It was....and not just children's graves, either.
I welcome regional native restaurants too, but I also welcome solidarity among BIPOC and think that deserves celebration as well.
If that's true (and I don't know if it is), then celebrating the commonality doesn't seem quite so obvious a thing to do.
The gourmet scene probably didn't exist much before the rise of agriculture.
The Californian Native Americans prided themselves on being fit and not eating fatty foods, subsisting off acorns and wild grasses, where as the Pacific northwestern natives threw fat feasts known as potlatch.
These would be wildly different restaurants.
So, let regional native american restaurants bloom!