The Tastemakers (29 page)

So far the bulk of the customers at the Café Spice kiosk, which was next to stations that served sandwiches, burgers, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, pizzas, and salads, had been the South Asian doctors, but Dunn had noticed a growing interest in the Indian food from other hospital staff, and the food was only available at two other places in Flint. At lunch Dunn introduced me to Tracy Daviek, a nurse who had never tasted Indian food until Café Spice opened in the hospital. “I tried it on the first day when they were giving out samples,” she said, dipping a piece of naan bread into a steaming mound of bhindi okra masala, a tomato-based okra stew. “I love to eat it. My favorite is the chicken …” she turned to Dunn, “you know, the one in the red sauce …”

“Chicken tikka masala,” Dunn said, noting the company's most popular dish of roast chicken pieces in a creamy curry.

“Yeah, that stuff and the dish with the garbanzo beans and the mango smoothies …”

“Lassi,” said Dunn.

Just then, another nurse came up to Dunn and looked at his plate of chicken vindaloo and biriyani. “Hey Steve,” she said, “I want a taste of that tomorrow. I don't know what it is, but I want to see if I like it.”

W
hen you've just read the fifth article in one week about the benefit of chia seeds and the lines down the block for the new burger truck make it impossible to get to your car, it's hard to see just why we should give a damn about food trends at all. Caught up in the seasonal fashion cycle of flavor fads, we tend to miss the subtle shift under the surface that food trends are exerting. But if you think back to what you ate ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago, their effect is apparent and is glorious. It is hard to believe that there was a time, well into my teenage years, when I had never tasted pad Thai, sushi, or ceviche. These days appetizer platters are filled with garlicky hummus and fluffy pita, golden tortilla chips and spicy salsa verde. But as recently as fifteen years ago they were nothing but cut veggies and ranch dressing or round crackers with a chewy, low-flavor cheese. Remember salad without the rich coating of extra-virgin olive oil? It seems remote today, but even a generation back we lived in a land of meat-and-potato eaters who feared garlic as we now fear trans fats. We liked our bread white, our vegetables overcooked, and our food bland. We ate at steakhouses, taverns, and pubs, and we only strayed out of that model in baby steps, with Americanized Chinese food that involved plates of grenadine-smothered chicken balls and checkered tablecloth Italian restaurants that boiled down that glorious nation's cuisine to leaden lasagna and pepperoni pizzas.

Contrast that with today, when chipotle hot sauce and miso paste are as common in restaurant kitchens as ketchup and mustard, and even the smallest towns have somewhere serving pad
Thai. One of the big reasons why food trends matter is that they have the power to pick up one culture's cuisine and push it above the fray of cheap, marginalized ethnic foods to the point at which it becomes part of our everyday diet. Once, these global foods were exclusively confined to their urban immigrant neighborhoods, but as food trends have grown more pervasive in recent decades, bold global tastes are penetrating parts of the continent that were once the uncontested territory of meat and potatoes. Not only did these ethnic food trends shape what was on our plates; they have also slowly changed what was in our minds about the cultures behind these foods. They broke down barriers of language and race and made the exotic every day, the foreign familiar. Ethnic food trends can open up minds. Taste something you like, and suddenly you find yourself wanting to discover more about that culture's cuisine. The more sriracha hot sauce you eat, the more curious you become about Southeast Asian cooking. With each visit to a Vietnamese, Thai, or Cambodian restaurant, you try new dishes, new flavors, and new foods. You begin to wonder what those countries are actually like. Are they nice? Are they safe? Is the food even better than here? Next thing you know you're squatting on the sidewalk in Ho Chi Minh City, enjoying an incredible sandwich procured with no knowledge of Vietnamese but the words “banh mi.”

The United States and Canada (and, more recently, Western Europe) are nations of immigrants, and each successive wave of new arrivals brought the seeds of food trends, whether it was Germans in the nineteenth century and the rise of hot dogs and hamburgers or the more recent influx of South Koreans and the current fever around kimchi. Cultural forces have played a role in feeding these trends, whether through travel, music and movies, or even a country's exposure through the news. The sushi boom rode the wave of Japanese interest that peaked in the 1980s, spurred by novels like
Shogun
, Nintendo video games in every household, and the country's seemingly unstoppable corporate culture. These food trends were also driven by key tastemakers from these cultures, often immigrants, who not only brought their food to our shores but also figured out how to translate it for a mainstream North American
audience. Before we were ready to embrace raw fish in the 1980s there was entrepreneur Rocky Aoki in the 1960s, who opened his chain of Benihana teppanyaki steakhouses in the United States, with their cooktop theater tables and chefs with samurai knife comedy skills, paving the way for Japanese culinary inclusion with rivers of teriyaki sauce.

The road from an unknown ethnic cuisine to a widespread food trend isn't assured. Some cultures fare better than others, and others struggle, despite the right mix of immigration statistics and cultural cues. The Polish and Irish communities in Chicago are much larger than the city's Thai population, yet you'll find many more restaurants serving pad Thai than you will featuring pierogies and soda bread. Similarly, Somali-style samosas, though a central part of the large community in Minneapolis, haven't become a Minnesota staple in the same way that Swedish meatballs have in that Midwestern state. So what are the elements that make an international cuisine go mainstream in North America? One of the most instructive and surprising examples is Indian food. With its large immigrant community in America and its rich, bold traditional flavors, Indian cuisine should have been every bit the staple that Chinese has become. Yet for decades its fortune has confounded chefs, trend forecasters, and industry predictors, who have said, with great confidence, that
this
year will definitely be the year Indian food breaks out of the curry house and into your kitchen.

In her fascinating history of Indian food's journey to the West,
Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors
, Lizzie Collingham reveals that what we know today as Indian food, from chai to curry, is in fact an international hodgepodge of influences and cuisines, pulled together on the Indian subcontinent through a collision of colonial rulers, politically aligned kingdoms, and fate. Anglo-Indian hybrid dishes, like mulligatawny soup, were the first pan-Indian foods, bridging the distinct regions and cultures of the vast empire, presenting a spearhead into the West. In Britain the Indian food trend arrived with returning colonial officials who had served in India, and it quickly grew in the decades following World War II, as immigration from Britain's former colonies brought Indians and other
South Asians to the United Kingdom in great numbers. By the 1960s “going for a curry” was as familiar to Brits as Chinese food was for North Americans. Canada, with its links to the commonwealth, experienced similar Indian immigration on a much smaller scale from the early twentieth century, especially in Vancouver.

In the United States Indian food's first beachhead was New York City. A handful of restaurants appeared there in the 1920s, catering to spice traders, seamen, and students from India, often run by men who had little experience in the kitchen. These weren't places Americans frequented, and the few articles that mentioned these restaurants did so briefly, warning readers off the powerful smells found in their walls. Some writers called curry “barbaric” or portrayed it as exotic, and not in an appealing way. Owing to restrictive immigration policies on Indians and other Asians, the Indian community in New York remained tiny for most of the first half of the twentieth century, and though several curry houses held on in Midtown Manhattan, popular references to Indian food were few and fleeting. That began to change slightly in the mid-1950s, in the decade after India's independence.

Dharum Jit Singh, a Sikh living in New York, published the first cookbook aimed at an American audience about his homeland's food. “Pinned down on what specific dishes might open up new culinary avenues to American home cooks, Mr. Singh suggested that they look into the various ways Indians prepare rice,” the
New York Times
wrote in an article on Singh in 1955, a year before his
Classic Cooking from India
was published. Despite a favorable write-up when the book came out, including recipes for pakoras and rose petal shrimp pellao, Singh's ultimate impact was minimal. But in the 1960s things began to pick up. More open immigration policies brought a new wave of Indians to America. These were educated, middle-class individuals, including doctors, engineers, and graduate students who established roots around universities in New York, Boston, Berkeley, California, and other cities, and they began building proper expatriate communities. India began exerting its own cultural currency, which shaped the country's international image. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gained fashion in progressive
political circles for his modern socialist vision of a New India as well as the distinctive high-collared jacket he wore, while Ravi Shankar and the Beatles popularized the hippie discovery of India's spirituality, from meditation to yoga.

Into this came Sushil Malhotra, the godfather of Indian food in America, who was born in Bombay and moved to New York in 1966 to study engineering at City College. He worked at Shell Oil and American Electric Power after graduating, but in 1970 he and his father, a naval engineer, opened a spice trading shop in the city called Foods of India, supplying New York's curry houses with spices, chutneys, and papadums while at night he pursued his MBA at New York University. “There was and is no professionalism to these places,” Sushil said, referring to the majority of Indian restaurants in North America, from his lavishly decorated living room an hour north of Manhattan along the Hudson River. The midcentury colonial house, with its formally dressed butler, hand-carved jade elephants, and long settee piled with silken pillows, was the perfect metaphor for his mission to bridge Indian and American tastes over the past four decades. Describing the majority of neighborhood Indian restaurants in America, restaurants that tend to serve identical menus of British-influenced North Indian dishes, often from a buffet and surrounded by the same faux Taj Mahal and sitar-heavy décor, the passionate Sushil nearly knocked over his chai tea several times.

Many of these restaurants had been opened by Bangladeshis who were fleeing conflict and poverty back home. They were often called “ship jumpers” because many arrived as seafaring crew and then claimed refugee status once they landed. In New York strips of garishly colored curry houses emerged on sixth street in the East Village, further uptown in the neighborhood labeled Curry Hill, and out in Jackson Heights, Queens. On the West Coast Indian food coalesced around Berkeley, California, and the adjacent city of Oakland. In Toronto Gerrard Street became a teeming, colorful bazaar with many Punjabis. Though the owners of these restaurants frequently lacked prior kitchen experience, they succeeded in establishing a foothold for Indian restaurants in American cities, but not without a downside. “The mom-and-pop curry shop has been a
barrier to the acceptance of Indian cuisine in America,” said Josaim Barath, a professor of hospitality management at North Texas University who has written on the subject of Indian restaurants. “You run into a slew of problems with management, including cleanliness of the restrooms, and they find it difficult to understand the concept of standardization and consistency. They are outside the field, and I admire them for their entrepreneurship spirit, but while they open the doors to Indian cuisine, often it's a bad experience.”

Sushil Malhotra was even less sympathetic. “They bastardized the food,” he said dismissively. “Students loved it, but there was a fairly good chance you'd get a runny stomach.”

One day I made a pilgrimage to Curry Hill (a three-block strip whose name is a play on the neighborhood that surrounds it, Murray Hill) to have lunch with Krishendu Ray, a professor of food studies at New York University and the country's preeminent expert on ethnic food's place in North American society, especially the food from his native India. We met at Curry in a Hurry, one of the pioneers of fast food–style Indian restaurants in the country, which Sushil Malhotra had been involved in opening. With its tattered takeout section up front and the shabby 1970s dining room above, it was filled mainly with South Asians eating classics like daal lentils and saag paneer spinach with plastic cutlery. Nearby was a table of grizzled backpackers who looked like they just stepped off the Appalachian Trail. “Chicken tikka?” one of them asked out loud. “Is that hot?” Ray explained that North Americans had two distinct ways of looking at food trends brought from other cultures: foreign and ethnic. Foreign was refined, upmarket, and expensive. Ethnic was exotic, downmarket, and cheap. French and Japanese were foreign. Chinese, Mexican, and Indian were ethnic. With ethnic, “people start to complain if a meal costs more than $10,” Ray said, using buttery bits of naan bread to scoop up the fragrant daal in his bowl. “If you enter from up high, you can move low,” he said, pointing out how sushi had gone from an expensive rarity to something you could now buy in your supermarket for a few bucks. “If you move from low to high, however, it's much more difficult.” Indian food had been stuck in the ethnic category for decades, consigning it to the fringes, as far as food trends go.