> ...hearing British people declaring they loved curry could come across as a crass postcolonial misrepresentation
When you travel to Japan and go to an Indian restaurant, the food tastes and is presented differently than it is in India. Then if you travel to Greece and find a small Indian restaurant, the Indian food is different there from the other versions. Same in Africa, South America, Europe. All of the Indian food sold in these places are nearly unrecognizable from each other.
This variation isn't limited to Indian food. It's the same with Thai food, Chinese food, Indonesian food, Italian food, Mexican food, Greek food, Japanese food. The ways of preparing and presenting these cuisines in foreign lands are as varied as the countries themselves.
It's probably a human universal: restaurant owners of ethnic restaurants change recipes to suit local taste and popularity.
It's hard to find "authentic Indian" food anywhere, not even in India. There is a lot of intra-regional and inter-regional variations and interpretations of dishes, even the popular ones. Indian cuisine and recipes were never standardized - they were prepared according the availability of ingredients and the recipes were passed down by word of mouth or never escaped household, unlike European or even East Asian cuisines. Even the relatively recent phenomena of restaurants, street joints and highway dhabas experiment a lot with ingredients and preparations.
I think this is also perhaps partly why Indian food has not established itself in the fine-dining scene in North America and Europe, yet people get shocked when they see a dish priced at $16+ in a local Indian restaurant (the preparations are elaborate and laborious).
What I love to see, in an Indian restaurant, is a chef who is inventive. Sure, put Bombay Aloo and Rogan Josh on the menu, but let yourself go! Some of the nicest curries I've ever had were at a "fine dining" Indian restaurant where they served rabbit, venison and "street food" like pani puri (with a twist). And they did amazing cocktails. It was expensive, but who cares?
If you went to a Michelin Star restaurant, would you expect a bog-standard Caesar salad, Chicken Chasseur and Black Forest Gateau (all made "the traditional way")? Nope. You'd want the chef to surprise you. Why should any cuisine limit itself to "Mama's cookbook"?
Yes, food transplanted is always food adapted to local tastes and ingredients.
What I find interesting is the way that strict recipe following culture interacts with interpretive make-it-up-as-you-go culture.
Take Italy for example - recipe culture is very strict - you make the dish _exactly_ the way Grandma taught you or it is wrong (and by implication bad). Italy has an incredible food culture, and this strictness has resulted in amazing food being largely unchanged for hundreds of years. Every village member has experienced the exact same lasagne for ever - even if it's just the tiniest bit different to the next village.
By contrast countries with little or no food culture simply adopt and fuse everything they come across. The UK is a good example, long lambasted for bland food, there was nothing to lose and everything was assimilated. It promotes experimentation - mixing things never thought of - every day a new adventure.
Each influence is named, "Indian", "Chinese", "Thai", all of which would be unrecognisable in those areas. In one sense it is none of those, it is "British" food.
Thus an Indian restaurant in London does not pretend to be "authentic" (unless of course it explicitly does) - it wants to offer an amazing meal you will enjoy.
An Indian meal in London is different to one in Mumbai is different to one in Beijing is different to one in Washington - and I think the world is richer for that.
At the perl conference in Monterey, (looking it up...) July of 2000 (Yep, Lingua::Romana::Perligata was introduced), my Indian co-worker and I were considering the conference lunch. Plastic boxes with a white bread BLT, ham, turkey, or just a plain LT for the vegetarians; an apple; and a bag of potato chips... it was pretty bland.
So we decided to set out something better.
The first restaurant we came to was an Irish pub. Looking at a map, it was probably The Crown & Anchor. We looked at the menu and I was starting to think that this wasn't going to be acceptable - it was all meat... and while that was fine for me, my coworker had other constraints... but his eyes weren't drawn to the fish and chips or steak sandwich that my eyes were - he immediately saw "curry" and "vegetable".
It was a good lunch.
One of the comments that he made was that with Indian restaurants, they are all very much a family's recipes and no two are the same. One shouldn't expect consistency of flavors between them. And then yes, it becomes a mix with the local styles too. But British pubs are all fairly consistent. The quality may be variable - but a British pub curry is likely going to be pretty much the same from one to another - east coast to west coast.
I'm not sure why everyone jokes about British food being bland. That's actually Japanese food.
British food is all the same color (brown), often some kind of sludge with mystery bits in it, and they want you to try several different gross things all called "pickle", but they have spices. Mustard is a spice.
I never knew it was actually possible to boil broccoli and carrots for so long they start to lose their colour. Then I moved to the UK and had dinner with my girlfriends' parents and discovered you can!
Traditional Japanese food (washoku, 和食) could be described as "subtle", "delicate", or maybe "mild" -- in other words, bland. The strongest flavor you're likely to encounter is pickled vegetables.
Luckily, Japan has a long history of importing recipes from other cultures, for example ramen. I live in Tokyo and haven't had much success locating spicy Indian-style curry, but Sichuan-style dishes are widely available and will blow your tongue off if you're not expecting it (I didn't know what 四川 translated to at first, but I made sure to look it up later...).
Having enjoyed Japanese food all around the world, including when I lived in Japan, speaking personally, "bland" would not be my first adjective, but
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Take Italy for example - recipe culture is very strict - you make the dish _exactly_ the way Grandma taught you or it is wrong (and by implication bad).
And yet, Italian food in other countries is recognizable as Italian only in that it's pasta and tomato sauce.
This to me is a little bit silly. The partition of India was in 1947 (a British idea) and Bangladesh didn’t gain independence from Pakistan until the 70s. Before that, the entire thing was “India” and we still use the term “Indian subcontinent” today to refer to the entire region.
The partition didn’t happen along culinary lines, so I don’t see a reason why it would be inappropriate for a restaurant for a restaurant run by Bangladeshis to claim it serves “Indian” cuisine within the general meaning of the word.
If you go to a Bangladeshi restaurant in the UK and ask for authentic Bangladeshi food, most often they will be happy to serve it for you.
The problem is when the Bangladeshi Bengali cooks serve food that is mostly alien to them. Mostly what they serve as Indian food is based on north and western Indian cuisine. Stuff that is very different from what Bengalis in Indian Bengal or Bangladesh would cook.
For those looking into this more the term used is BIR. British Indian Restaurants. There’s plenty of folks online doing their best to share the secrets of the British curry house. One such is Dan Toombs (The Curry Guy).
Essentially the majority of British Indian curries are made using a base gravy and different items are added to differentiate them. Giving each curry house its own distinct flavour that’s present between most dishes on the menu.
I have a vague recollection of going to a curry restaurant in Tokyo tower and being disappointed that instead of getting actual Japanese style curry I ordered some neither here nor there attempt at an "Indian" curry. It was decent still but there was only so many meals in a day and I wanted to max out my Japanese style food intake. I can eat all the not-japanese style curry I want back home...
I thought this was going to be about recreating Curry House, the Japanese restaurant chain that randomly shut down one day in 2020 (pre-covid). Their salad dressing was really good.
When you travel to Japan and go to an Indian restaurant, the food tastes and is presented differently than it is in India. Then if you travel to Greece and find a small Indian restaurant, the Indian food is different there from the other versions. Same in Africa, South America, Europe. All of the Indian food sold in these places are nearly unrecognizable from each other.
This variation isn't limited to Indian food. It's the same with Thai food, Chinese food, Indonesian food, Italian food, Mexican food, Greek food, Japanese food. The ways of preparing and presenting these cuisines in foreign lands are as varied as the countries themselves.
It's probably a human universal: restaurant owners of ethnic restaurants change recipes to suit local taste and popularity.