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The globalization of food Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking: Indian Food in ManhattanThe globalization of food

Author: Inglis, David; Gimlin, Debra L Ray, Krishnendu

Article Title (if applicable): Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking: Indian Food in Manhattan

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Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking: Indian Food in Manhattan

Krishnendu Ray New York University

On 2 November 2005, Julia Moskin, a food critic for The New York Times (NYT) wrote, 'New Yorkers have learned to tread fearlessly in the world of real Indian food. They know pakoras from samosas and dabble in idlis and utthappams' (2005: Fl). Frank Bruni, arguably the most influential restaurant critic in the United States, reviewed the restaurant Mint and found it wanting (2005: E2, 43). But he found the chole bhature at Tandoori Hut exquisite. In 1998, Danny Meyer, one of New York's elite restaurateurs, accelerated this trend by recruiting the Goan chef Floyd Cardoz to open the most expensive Indo-French restaurant, calling it Tabla. That was right in the middle of the rising tide of talk on Indian food in Manhattan. The fact that the NYT has carried about a dozen different stories on fine-dining Indian restaurants over the last few years tells us something about how trendy Indian food has become among Manhattan taste-makers.

The Indian Restaurant in Manhattan

Indian food is fashionable but it does not reach the heights of other cuisines. The 2006 Zagat, which is a survey of fine-dining restaurants, listed 43 Indian restaurants, after Italian at 389, American 270, French 202, Japanese 101 and Chinese at 63. MenuPages, a more exhaustive listing, identified 163 Indian restaurants out of a total of 8,561 eateries. To get a perspective on these numbers, it is important to remember that there are more than 23,000 eating and drinking establishments in New York City.

In terms of check averages in Zagat 2006---which is good shorthand for the hi- erarchy of taste-Indian restaurants came in at $33.85, after French at $47.81, Japa- nese at $46.72, American at $42.83, Italian at $42.27, Greek at $38.71 and Spanish (as separate from Latino) at $37.73. In general there is an inverse relationship be- tween the demographic weight of a group and the check average. For example, out of about eight million people in the five boroughs of New York City, only 52,907 claim

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214 • The Globalization of Food

French ancestry, yet French restaurants are among the most popular destinations for the fine-dining clientele, with 202 French eateries evaluated by Zagat 2006. In ad- dition, the most high-priced restaurants classify themselves as Continental, French, Japanese or American. The two most expensive restaurants in Manhattan in 2007 were Masa and Per Se. In contrast, almost two million New Yorkers claim an African American heritage, and another two million claim Latino ancestry, but fine-dining restaurants even remotely associated with their identities are among the fewest (11 and 10 respectively out of a total of over 2,000 restaurants evaluated by Zagat in 2006) and by far the cheapest ($24.50 for Soul and $22.00 for TexMex).

Just as there is a social clustering oflndian restaurants in the middle--along with Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Korean eateries-there is some degree of spatial clustering in three geographic areas: the stretch of East 6th Street between First and Second Avenues that houses almost fifteen Indian restaurants run mostly by Bangla- deshi migrants; the area between 26th and 29th Streets on Lexington Avenue, which houses about twenty restaurants; and Jackson Heights in Queens, which is popular among expatriate Indian men and hipster American students with adventurous pal- ates.1 By the end of the 1990s, the city and its suburbs were also peppered by Indian and Pakistani grocery stores and bodegas that sell cooked food-such as samosas. dais and vegetable curries----0n the side. But such eateries have rarely entered the rarefied realm of restaurant criticism.

Indian Food Enters the Discourse on Fine-Dining Restaurants

Understandably, Indian food was covered sparingly in the NYT during the first hun- dred years of its publication (from 1853 to 1953). The first proper discussion of it appeared in 1876 under the title 'An Essay on Curry', which was really a diatribe against serving Chablis with curry. It ended with the judgement that 'For, though curry is a good thing in its place and time ... it hardly deserves to win its way, into the higher domain of the gastronomic art. It still rather deserves the epithet of "barbaric" than that of "marvellous"' (Anonymous, 1876: 2).

If Indian food was mentioned in passing and mostly in disdain, it is no surprise that Indian restaurants in the United States were equally rare, first showing up in the 1920s but disappearing quickly thereafter until the 1960s. On 3 April 1921 Helen Lowry identified the first Indian restaurant in the NYT in an article titled 'The Old World in New York' (1921: 37). She did not give its name but wrote, 'Six short weeks ago an Indian restaurant was discovered on Eighth Avenue near 42nd Street. Grave Indian gentlemen, with American clothes but with great turbans on their heads, used to come in for their curry and rice' (1921: 37). There was one other reference to an Indian restaurant in New York before that, on 7 August 1912, but it is unclear from the report whether the restaurant was real or just rumoured:

Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking • 215

Ranji Smile, who said he was a Prince, the fifth son of the late Amcer of Baluchistan ... was married yesterday at the City Hall to Miss Violet Ethel Rochlitz, daughter of Julian W. Rochlitz of this city ... In May, 1910, he [had] obtained a license to wed Miss Anna Maria W. Davieson, but no return was ever made to the License Bureau to indicate that a wedding had been performed. At that time the Prince said he had formerly run an Indian restaurant on Fifth Avenue, between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets. About thir- teen years ago Mr. Smile was a cuny cook at Sherry's. (Anonymous, 1912: 11)

The first named restaurant advertising itself as a 'Magnificent New Indian Restau- rant' was Longchamps on Madison Avenue at 59th Street, which was a chain of nine restaurants that also served Hungarian beef goulash (4 October 1935).

Indian food in America has been covered over a longer duration and in much greater detail, starting with a reference to make-believe Delhi at Luna Park, in Coney Island in 1904, where there was a passing discussion of Bombay duck and other peculiarities of the Indian diet (Anonymous, 1904 ). The next ripple came just ahead of the 1933 World Fair at Chicago, which included an India pavilion financed by the Indian cricketing prince Ranji, who promised, to the great delight of Americans, it would appear from the article, that 'Indian food, such as rice and curry, will be featured in the restaurant and served in typical Indian fashion by Indian waiters and waitresses in native costumes' (Anonymous, 1932: 17).

One of the earliest discussions of cuny in the context of gourmandise appeared on 12 March 1939. Charlotte Hughes (1939: 53) asserted that 'Curry has come to be a lot more popular in New York in the last few years, with curry restaurants springing up here and there and with hotels putting cuny dishes on their menus'. Unfortu- nately, she did not list either those restaurants or the menu items. She conceded that 'Men, it seems, are more likely to be curry fans than women'. She went on to assert that 'Curry powder is a blend of fifteen or twenty spices' that needs proper blend- ing, as explained by 'Darmadasa, of the East India Curry Shop, for Ceylon curry of oysters'.

Jane Holt, working in conjunction with the Civilian Defense Volunteer Office (with an interest in civilian nutrition, especially vitamin deficiency) and trade or- ganizations such as the Spice Trader's Association, wrote a number of articles on curry in the 1940s. Where Holt left off, Jane Nickerson continued in her 'News of Food' column, announcing the 'first direct shipment of curry powder since the war' to arrive from Madras on 7 September 1976. She informed us that 'Chutney, by definition, is a relish that is equally sour and sweet, according to the proprietor of the East India Curry Shop, a restaurant that probably serves the most "authentic" curries in town' (Nickerson, 1946: 12). By 1948 India Prince was opened on 47th Street by C. B. Deva. The new restaurant, 'neat but unpretentious in appearance, provides an opportunity for savouring some excellent Indian food, at prices ranging from $1.50 to $5 for a complete luncheon or dinner' (Anonymous, 1948: 10).

216 • The Globalization of Food

The Hungarian-born chef Ernest Koves at Hotel Sulgrave in New York had to explain through June Owen of the NYT that 'Indian or Bengali curry is a very re- fined dish. You get just a faint taste of the spices', and curry anyway is a mixture of 'sixteen or seventeen different spices, with red pepper, saffron, ginger, cayenne and black pepper predominating. In India, one "rolls one's own curry," that is, you place the whole spices on a stone slab and work over with a rolling pin until they are com- pletely powderized'. He concluded, 'To taste a truly fine curry, one must go to India' (in Owen, 1955: 24). Similarly, Nickerson noted that there was hardly 'a hint of curry' in the cuisine ofDharamjit Singh, a 'crimson-turbaned Sikh' who cooked an Indian meal for some food-minded New Yorkers in 1955 (Nickerson, 1955: 20). He said, 'the authentic cooking of his country had a diversity that included many mild dishes. Mr. Singh observed that curries he had eaten in east Indian restaurants in New York were hotter than anything he ever had tasted in Delhi' (Nickerson, 1955: 20).

Until about 1961 an authoritative native interlocutor was always invoked in talking about Indian food. The informant was often a spice trader, a restaurateur, a housewife but rarely a cook. Craig Claiborne, who changed the shape of restaurant reviews and culinary reporting by acquiring an increasingly authoritative posture towards the food and the audience, initially also depended on the exotic housewife to vindicate him. On 25 February 1960, perhaps in his first piece on Indian food in the NYT, Claiborne depended on Manorama Phillips (Claiborne, 1960: 22): 'Miss Phil- lips is a diminutive, dark-haired young woman with a mercurial smile who has lived in the United States for nearly four years'. Phillips worked for the Government of India Trade Center and roomed with an American woman. Her three-room apartment was 'handsomely furnished with Indian accessories'. The article was accompanied by a six-by-six inch photograph of Phillips in her apartment, clad in a sari and framed by exquisite Indian hand-crafted textiles.

In 1960 Nan Ickeringill advertised another kind of authority: the Conservative English knight Sir William Steward-owner of the famous Veeraswammy's in London-who was credited with launching a 'one-man crusade to discover these- cret of good curries' (lckeringill, 1960: 41). 'It was really hard work', recalled the tenacious Englishman. Knowledge of curry had to be wrested from the hands of the inscrutable native. The tenacious knight forced his way into kitchens; none 'would tell him how cuny was made, but the kitchen staff let him watch. They did not think he would be able to solve the puzzle that way. However they sadly underestimated both Sir William's diligence and intelligence'. As late as 11 May 1961, Claiborne depended on the figure of the sahib gone native to flavour his curry. He called on William Clifford, 'the young editor with Simon & Schuster' who 'is an excellent and enthusiastic cook who lived in India several years ago' (Claiborne, 1961 b: 44).

Only by 9 July 1961 did Claiborne let go of such aides as the adventurous knight, the housewife or the spice trader to give five recipes for chutney (Claiborne, 1961 a: SM35). By mid-1962 Claiborne's self-confidence about ethnic food peaked, and he ranged widely through hot tamale, chilli con came, Senegalese soup, lamb curry

Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking • 217

and chicken curry (Claiborne, 1962a: 148). 'An enthusiasm for curried dishes', he said, 'seems to be national and curries are as welcome in Wichita as in Westchester' (Claiborne, 1962b: 32). Then there was the long explanation of what the curry is not, which we have seen before: 'It is almost easier to define a curry by what it is not than by what it is. It is not made from the single spice of a tree, vine or bush. In the western hemisphere, at least, curry powder is a combination of a dozen or more spices, the prominent one being turmeric' (Claiborne, 1962b: 32). This appears to be an enduring trope of culinary journalism on curry and other ethnic and foreign things-it is not what you think-asserting an early kind of expertise that came to bloom slowly among this cohort of cultural experts. This was the beginning of the process of sacralization of the restaurant critic in American society that had emerged in full force by the end of the twentieth century.

Claiborne eventually launched an explanation of the authentic thing: 'In India and Pakistan, a curry is not a sipgle dish made from a classic formula but is more or less any spiced sauce made with various meats, fish or fow I. Within the course of a single meal at an Indian table there may be several cun-ies, none of which will taste the same because the spices are varied with considerable care and discrimination'. How does he know all this? We are not told any more. No native is paraded out nor any claims made about travels in India. Perhaps by now Claiborne is expected to be an expert by his increasingly cosmopolitan audience and he is therefore supposed to know such things. As a result he launches into three remarkable recipes that are curries precisely and only because curry powder is added, presumably the very thing curries in India do not have, but the recipes are of the universe of sweet and spicy meat sauces with added fruits, perhaps a curry only in name (Claiborne, 1962b: 32).

Subsequently, he appeared as jaded as the title of the next restaurant review, 'A Rare Thing: Indian Restaurant with Food to Get Excited About'. In it he was full of praise for the Gaylord restaurant housed in the Blackstone Hotel, at 50 East 58th Street, for being the 'only Indian restaurant in the city with genuine tandoors or tandoori, the authentic Indian hot-fired clay ovens. We find these ovens an enormous plus, for without them an authentic "tandoori chicken"-and that of the Gaylord is equal to the best we've eaten in New Delhi or London--cannot really be made' (Claiborne, 1974: 34).

He had recently strengthened his credentials by travelling in northern India (in 1970), in particular Delhi and Agra, and by dining at Moti Mahal, the Moghul Room (at the Oberoi Intercontinental Hotel), the Tan door (at the President Hotel) and at the Flora across from Jama Masjid, all in Delhi. He also visited the Clarks Shiraz in Agra. On his travels, connoting an expanding budget for the coverage of food, Claiborne momentarily lost his capacity to be critical, and was giddy about hotel cuisine, where it seemed it was impossible to 'find a bad native dish' (Claiborne, 1970: 56). In this case, the friendly exoticism returned, such that it became impossible to distinguish the good from the bad. But just because he could not discriminate between various hotel cuisines, Claiborne did not give up on creating a hierarchy. He maintained his

218 • The Globalization of Food

distance from common Americans, by scolding them: 'how odd it is that so many Americans go to foreign countries and ignore the native food of whatever place they happen to be' (Claiborne, 1970: 56). How does he know that? We are not told.

The 1974 article is also the first where Claiborne named the chefs-Ram Dass and Daulat Ram Sharma-neither of whom became celebrities. Claiborne was the first major restaurant critic in the United States to save the cook from anonymity, which turned out to be an important step in the making of a self-conscious cuisine. That trend took another two decades to bloom, and it happened rarely for an ethnic cook. The next time an Indian chef was named was by Florence Fabricant on 7 May 1978. 2 In 1979, when Mimi Sheratonreviewed Tandoor and Tre Sealini on the same page, the Indian chef was ignored, but we learn that the Italian chef was Vittorio Guarini (1979: Cl6). In 1985, even when Patricia Brooks credited improvements in an Indian restaurant to a new chef she did not find out who it was (1985: CNl 7). In 1986, when Bryan Miller reviewed Akbar and Meridies on the same page, only chef Susan Sugarman of the latter was named (1986: C24).

In 1984 when Marian Burros wrote that 'America is flexing its gastronomic mus- cles, and no where is this more obvious as in California. Here, where chefs are as glamorous as movie stars ... ' (1984, Cl) she was referring to named chefs. It is instructive to see who got named in a December 1985 roundup of notable subur- ban restaurants in Westchester County by M. H. Reed, who evaluated thirty eateries by name (1985: WC13). Almost every owner and chef of French and Continental restaurants--eleven total---was named. Exelusively Italian chefs were not named, although if they cooked French and northern Italian food they came out of the shad- ows. Spanish entrepreneurs were named but not the chef (contra Chithelen, 1986: Ll5). Indian chefs were unknown. Japanese chefs were anonymous, and still are. This was a stark confirmation of the hierarchy of taste in terms of its relationship to the ethnicity of the cook in 1985.

Over the next decade some things changed as Italian and Japanese chefs got their say, but rarely did a Mexican, Korean or an Indian chef. Ethnic cooks generally re- mained invisible. 'It's a rare Indian restaurant', Eric Asimov noted as late as 2002, 'that acknowledges the existence of its chef, unless it's a star consultant like Madhur Jaffrey or Raji Jallepalli-Reiss' (2002: FIO). Note the sleight of hand by which he assigned blame, apparently on Indian restaurateurs, but not restaurant critics for their complicity in the problem. By the 1990s coverage of Indian restaurants reached new heights, with 300 articles in the NYT in that decade, at a respectable distance behind Italian restaurants (1,264), Chinese (840), French (594), Japanese (368), American (34 7) and Mexican (316). The coverage of Indian restaurants was up from 182 in the 1980s, 100 in the 1970s, 13 in the 1960s and 2 in the 1950s. As coverage intensified, the associated commentary appropriated a more objective language of critique rather than just factual information, exotic fascination, or even sneering Orientalism.

For instance, on 13 September 1963 in reviewing the Kashmir Restaurant, an unnamed correspondent noted the mere facts of its location, price and decor, end-

Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking • 219

ing with a quick judgment--'it is one of the best Pakistani and Indian restaurants in town' (Anonymous, 1963: 51 ). By the 1964 World Fair the critical load was in- creased when Claiborne (the critic was named by then) noted that 'The food is ad- mirably spiced but without the overpowering hotness that is frequently and often mistakenly ascribed to Indian cuisine ... [although] the salad was ordinaty and un- inspired' (1964: 16). A touch of the exotic was maintained by reference to 'the most incredibly beautiful women, hostesses with delicate faces wearing saris and sandals'. In a 1969 review of Shalimar, Claiborne explained a new cuisine when he wrote, 'There's a very good appetizer called samosas, a pastry filled with well-spiced meat or vegetable', and sharpened his critical focus with 'There are two faults that seem basic to the Shalimar: The various curries are bland and have a sameness of flavor; and some of the dishes seem woefully over-cooked, particularly the shrimp' (Clai- borne, 1969a: 42). Claiborne had come a long way from 1960 when he had to depend on Manorama Phillips to help hi~ understand Indian food. He returned to the native informant once more in 1985 but this time to fathom a regional Indian cuisine- Gujarati (Claiborne, 1985: Cl). By 1969 he was able to assert with confidence, all on his own, that 'There is not a restaurant in New York that prepares food equal to that in a well-staffed Indian or Pakistani home' (1969b: 12).

I do not want to insinuate that Claiborne was being pretentious. He was merely developing a script that distinguished a restaurant critic from others-as every new profession must-and that developed credibility with the public who had to be will- ing to pay for it. Practitioners in 'communities of practice are engaged in the gen- erative process of producing their own future' (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 57-58). Claiborne in fact hit the perfect note. He came across as someone who knew his stuff but who could also display humility with a sense of humour. He was even willing to be corrected about Indian food.

It also appears that for the last 100 years everyone began their coverage of Indian food with a comment about heat. For instance, an anonymous 1897 piece titled 'In- dian Curries' noted that the curry offered in the West 'consists principally of turmeric and cayenne pepper that sacrifices the roof of your mouth and tongue and gives no pleasure in eating' (Anonymous, 1897: BR7). Almost 100 years later, on 26 Novem- ber 1982, Mimi Sheraton writing about an Indian restaurant noted,

Dynamite is merely hot, but double [dynamite] is promised as the real thing, so insist on it if your tolerance is high. Having had a problem with customers who ask for food very spicy, then return it because it is too spicy, the owner has become reluctant to add the full share of chili and pepper, until he is sure of his customer. ( 1982, C 18)

One thing had changed in 100 years: the complaint had been turned on its head. Sheraton, David Canady and Raymond Sokolov repeatedly insisted on the real thing, real heat, like connoisseurs. In the process they also incessantly berated the Ameri- can public for forcing these ethnic folks to tone down the real thing. Why bother to

220 • The Globalization of Food

have Indian food if it did not cauterize your throat, they wondered? Burros composed a whole piece titled 'A Quest forthe Hottest of the Hot' (Burros, 1986: 52). Her com- plaint was typical: 'if you can convince the staff at the Indian restaurant Darbar that you mean business when you say hot, they may make the ghost vindaloo hot enough to call for a fire extinguisher. Now ifthere were some way to convince the local Thai restaurants to believe customers when they say they want the food authentically hot' (Burros, 1986: 52). Heat became shorthand for difference, and tolerating it, nay ap- preciating it, appeared to be an important way for critics to distinguish themselves from the run of the mill American.

That act of distinction from the common American was particularly difficult to pull off until the 1980s because the critics in their reviews did not typically include any material on the entrepreneurial or production conditions of the cuisine they were covering. That was a surprise to me, that critics did not take advantage of their access to the backstage, which is where they could have a clear and easy advantage over the consumer. Perhaps this was because their public was not interested in the pro- duction of cuisine, only in its consumption. Attention to craftsmanship and artistry came later, mostly in the 1990s, by way of display kitchens and celebrity entrepre- neurs. Instead, in the 1980s, heat became the carrier of a double difference, of ethnic food from nonethnic, and the taste of the critic from that of the standard American consumer, so much so that claims of inauthentic mildness of ethnic food were often repeated, in the exact same words, in reviews of distinctly different cuisines-for example, Indian, Thai, Mexican, Vietnamese and so on. Thankfully, Claiborne was never enamoured by heat per se.

What Claiborne set out to do in the 1960s and 1970s became a norm by the new millennium. Mark Bittman's 2003 piece on upscale Asian restaurants in London can be used to mark the apogee of promotion oflndian food and also underline the inter- national circuit of global cities on which such things get played out. He wrote:

The excitement generated by Tamarind's opening eight years ago [1995] cannot be over- stated. Here was an Indian restaurant on a chic Mayfair street charging upscale prices and

serving Indian food in glamorous style. It quickly became not only the talk of the town but, with Zaika ... among the first Indian restaurants in Europe to receive a Michelin star. Now, the phenomenon is almost commonplace: most major cities in Britain, the United States, India and elsewhere have similar restaurants (Bittman, 2003: 57).

Many of the ancient formulas have by now been abandoned: (1) the incessant focus on heat is gone, (2) the endless explaining of what is curry and what it is not is done with, (3) outsider descriptions of samosas, pakoras, idlis and utthappam are passe and (4) the backstage is no longer effaced, making the entrepreneur and the chef visible. The first three transformations are possible because by now the critic and the public have tightly constituted each other, with less and less that needs to be explained, hence there is room to delve into design, decor and the making of the

Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking • 221

backstage. As less and less needs to be said, an entire ensemble of assumptions is re- inscribed in the body of the field ofrestaurant criticism. Furthermore, it is precisely the invisible networks of affiliation between entrepreneur, chef and menu-invisible to the mere customer-which become the locus of the critic's new expertise. It is the access to the back that now distinguishes the critic. In addition, new expertise is indicated in having familiarity both with upscale temples of cuisine such as Devi and cheap, quirky joints at the bottom of the market that might include the Dosa Cart at Washington Square, which is what others have characterized as cultural omnivorous- ness (Johnston and Baumann, 2007).

Today food has entered the fashion cycle, at least in Manhattan, and Indian food is playing its part in it. The process began in the 1960s and 1970s when we witnessed the birth of a new discourse through the pen of a new kind of expert, the restaurant critic, that hastened the circulation of cultural capital through the sinews of an urban, public space, already invigorated by discussion of fashion, movies and music, in the burgeoning magazine and newspaper trade. But all this is from the perspective of the connoisseur and critic. What of the Indian immigrant? Unfortunately we know next to nothing about the Indian immigrant restaurateur or cook or server.3 I am just beginning the process of interviewing about eighty restaurateurs and conducting a census of their labour force. Although we will have to wait for the results of that study, what we do know is that just as Indian-born New Yorkers are overrepresented as physicians, professors and yellow cab drivers, they are underrepresented as chefs, bartenders, dishwashers and hostesses. We know very little about them. But we do know what middle-class Indian professionals eat, especially at home.

Expatriate Home Cooking

To say something about expatriate domestic cookery I have to abandon the cat- egory 'Indian' and look more closely at any of the linguistic subsets such as Punjabi-American, Gujarati-American, Bengali-American and so on. Since Bengali- Americans have been most closely studied, I will use their case to illustrate my points about Indian-American domestic cookery. There are about 100,000 Benga- lis in the United States. For most of the approximately 30,000 Bengali-American households, breakfast eaten at home consists of milk and cereal or toast. The ex- ception is that tea is served instead of the ubiquitous American coffee. Lunch, con- sumed at or near the workplace, is a salad or a slice of pizza, sometimes a sandwich, or a packed lunch from home of roti and subgi. It is dinner that remains the realm of 'tradition', where there is still a literal truth to the question asked by a Bengali: 'Have you eaten rice?' Rice, dal, and fish cooked in a sauce with panch phoron (a Bengali five-spice mix of fenugreek, onion seed, fennel, cumin and mustard seed), is eaten for dinner, more often in the United States than in Kolkata (for details on methodology, sample size, etc. see Ray, 2004).

222 • The Globalization of Food

It is of course an exaggeration to say that dinner remains wholly 'traditional' in any meaningful sense. For instance, the appetizer for one of the households I ob- served for a Sunday dinner was turkey pakora cooked with chopped garlic, ginger, onion and fresh cilantro. Turkey is hardly a traditional Bengali ingredient. Yet it is cooked in a typically Bengali form, with ground turkey replacing ground goat meat. Any meat in Bengali cuisine is usually cooked with the trinity of wet spices-onion, ginger and garlic. It is so in the case of the pakoras. Then there is the more explicit intermingling of what are self-consciously defined as American and Bengali cui- sines on Monday night when the menu was roast chicken, steamed rice, American style salad, sauteed bittermelon, grapes and apple juice. On Tuesday it was a typi- cally Bengali repertoire, albeit with the exception of strawberry shortcake for dessert and grape juice as an accompaniment. On Wednesday, dinner was at Red Lobster- hardly a classical Bengali option.

Nonetheless, there is a pervasive Bengaliness in all this mixing up. Rice contin- ues to be the core of the evening meal. The animal protein is important but remains a fringe item in terms of the calorie contribution to the meal. It is usually two small pieces of fish or a few bite-sized portions of meat. The complex carbohydrate core and the animal-protein fringe is paired with the third defining element-dal. Dal is sparsely spiced, which is often a few roasted cumin seeds. The animal protein fringe, in contrast, is highly spiced, as is typical in Bengali cuisine. The spices and herbs are drawn mostly from the Bengali repertoire, and the cooking processes are typically limited to sauteing, stewing and braising-basic Bengali notions of cooking.

Further, we see the greatest change in the elements that are peripheral to the Ben- gali conception of the 'meal', that is, turkey replacing goat meat in the appetizer, juices and soda replacing water and strawberry shortcake simulating Bengali des- serts. It is because the most radical changes are confined to the accompaniments- the drinks, the dessert and the appetizer--that the 'meal' as such can still be defined as Bengali. Hence, in spite of rampant creolization of ingredients, dinner is perceived as the realm of traditional Bengali cuisine. What might encourage the perception of the Bengaliness of dinner is that it is truly so, almost in an exaggerated manner. Middle-class Bengalis consider rice and fish to be the most distinctive ethnic ingre- dients of their meal. About 60 per cent of Bengali-American households serve rice for dinner almost every day. An equally dramatic sign of change is the rate of con- sumption offish. Almost one-half of Bengali-American households eat fish at dinner on an average day in a week, while only a third or fewer comparable households in Kolkata serve fish for dinner on a typical day. Thus expatriate families have become even more Bengali in their food habits in exile!

In addition, rice and fish have migrated from lunch to dinner, and dinner has become more important in defining a Bengali culinary identity in the United States. The heightened valorization of dinner is in itself a product of modem work sched-

Exotic Restaurants and Expatriate Home Cooking • 223

ules, which de-valorize other meals in the enactment of the self, although, in this case, the same modern transformation is being used to strengthen a tradition-a dinner of rice and fish. Further, the portion size of fish has almost doubled from about four ounces on the outside in Kolkata to about six to eight ounces in the United States, which is also a development that can be seen either as Westerniza- tion (because of the valorization of the protein component of the meal) or as a traditional carryover (because of the stress on fish-a self-conscious marker of Bengaliness). Perhaps a Bengali would not be a Bengali without consuming rice and fish in one of the main meals of the day. As dinner has come to be the only cooked meal, Bengali-Americans feel compelled to partake of ingredients that an- chor their Bengaliness-that is, rice and fish. Thus dinner has changed in two direc- tions: new ingredients, such as turkey, are absorbed into old culinary paradigms, and the use of old constituents, such as rice and fish, are insisted upon. One absorbs change and the other acceptuates tradition.

Middle-class Bengali men are particularly insistent on a Bengali dinner and that may be for a number of reasons: (1) their limited social interaction with other Ameri- cans outside the context of work, hence their unfamiliarity with American food other than the hotdog, hamburger and salad; (2) as a respite from the American world that they confront.each day; (3) their culinary incompetence as men-only one man in 126 households cooks regularly-which makes their nostalgia particularly acute and takes the form of a desperate longing for their mother's cooking; and (4) the smell of Bengali food cooking at the hearth confirms their very nature as Bengali men and is proof of both patriarchal control and containment of polluting American cultural influences.

With breakfast and dinner, it is as if middle-class Bengali migrants have divided up the day into what they characterize as moments of 'modernity' and moments of 'tradition', both perceived as good and necessary in their separate places. This complementary duality towards the 'modern' and the 'traditional'-the former imag- ined as embodied in something as mundane as industrialized breakfast cereal and the latter with traditional rice and fish-is central to the identity of the Bengali bhad- rasamaj. The Indian middle-class has long been both threatened and seduced by the promise of modernization, and they have acted on those concerns in organizing their food practices in the United States.

Reprise

There are at least two configurations in which Indian food is served in Manhattan, one in exotic restaurants to the imaginary voyager, and the other in familiar settings to the travel-weary expatriate. They are opposite but ·complementary approaches to home and heritage. The migrant's search for stringency in home cooking and

224 • The Globalization of Food

the tourist's quest for authentic ethnic food-where one can distinguish between a samosa and a pakora or maybe even a singara with the help of the critic-are con- gruent strategies to still the turbulence of time, one projected on another people, and the other projected on another place. The cool metropolitanflaneur and the awkward immigrant are caught in their corresponding quest for authenticity. Both are comple- mentary considerations about home and heritage, which is nothing more than our relationship to a place and a past.

Notes

An earlier version of this chapter was published as 'Feeding Modem Desires' in Seminm; 566 (October): 30--4, Delhi, India.

1. There are more eateries in Queens than in the other boroughs (perhaps with the exception of Manhattan), and that is related to the demand for Indian food, which is partially related to residency of the Indian immigrant population. Ac- cording to the 2005-2007 American Community Survey of the Census Bureau of the United States, a total of about 247,292 Indian Americans (alone or in combination) lived in New York City, of which 65 per cent lived in Queens, 15 per cent in Brooklyn, 10 per cent in Manhattan, 7 per cent in the Bronx, and 4 per cent in Staten Island (Asian American Federation Census Information Center, 2009).

2. The chefs at Sitar were Ranjit Kundu and Mohan Singh, listed by Fabricant (1978: LIS). Julie Sahni is probably New York's first Indian celebrity chef, named and venerated by Burros (1984: C20).

3. For aggregate data and some interview material, see Fiscal Policy Institute (2007) and Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (2005).

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