A friend of mine sent me his thoughts on why he, although not vegetarian, chooses to eat vegetarian food at Indian restaurants. He claims that the vegetable dishes are usually tastier and more intricate in flavor than meat dishes. This surprised me a bit, considering that most Indian restaurants in America are owned and operated by Punjabis, a non-vegetarian ethnic group in India. Punjabis, who live in Northwest India in the state of Punjab, cook a rich cuisine full of but certainly not limited to dishes based on tomatoes, potatoes, more wheat instead of rice (as opposed to South and Central India), and dairy (cream/cream-inspired sauces and daals and the like - the temperature is cooler up north, good for dairy farms). This is, I think, what most Americans think Indian food is like; a cuisine that is made up of foods that aren't so foreign from the ones that we're familiar with in the New World, since many of these ingredients are, in fact, New World ingredients that were probably introduced to that part of India via trade (I could be wrong, I am not an expert). This cuisine comprises probably 1/100th of what a person could eat in India. Seriously.
Anyhow, Punjabis (Sikhs in particular) are meat eaters, and therefore, I'd think that meat dishes would be really well-made in such restaurants. So it surprises me that even at those sorts of places, the Veggie Thali has won out nevertheless. I think that most Americans/Europeans don't know how to order in Indian restaurants simply because their food sensibilities haven't been shaped by Indian practices, but by their respective European/Western ones. Since I've been living in Germany, I've come to realize that I've only experienced a teeny tiny bit of European cuisine due to my food restrictions, and that I am in fact probably missing out. Meat in Europe IS traditionally the big wowzer during a meal. People carry this mentality over to Indian food, too, because that's how they're used to thinking. Due to the ingredients that I described above, people also continue to think that these are the standard ingredients in the definitive Indian kitchen, when in fact, there's a whole lot more to even Punjabi cooking than just these few dishes.
Solution: we need are a bunch of non-Punjabis (nothing against Punjabis, I love your food, too) to open restaurants around the world with a full guide included in menus on how to properly order. We Indians need to broadly and properly educate our 'audience'. Otherwise, this whole thing will end up the way Mexican food in the U.S. has: a Mexican-American mishmash that doesn't retain a lot of its authentic Mexican flavor. Perhaps that's not a bad thing, though. I mean, I really like a good taco.
But hey, it's not like Indians themselves are expert restaurant foodies. I mean, nearly every time my father orders something in a non-Indian/Asian/South Asian restaurant (hell, it could be Crepe Suzette), he calls after the waiter once the order's been placed and he/she is going to the kitchen: "Make it a little spicy, please." Zubin Mehta is supposedly known to carry his own silver case of home-grown red chilies with him everywhere, and sprinkles a bit on top of every dish he eats, regardless of the origins of the cuisine.
We are what we (usually) eat, I guess.
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