Becoming Southern
Meherwan Irani still remembers the first time he tried Indian food in America. A broke graduate student, he ventured to a local Indian buffet in Columbia, South Carolina, for what he soon found to be a grand disappointment.
Was this what Americans thought of Indian food—strip mall lunch buffets?
The food tasted bad, and most of the dishes weren’t even meals they actually ate where he grew up. Nearly every town had that same kind of spot: the strip mall locale, the waiters donned in cliché maroon jackets, and white tablecloth-topped tables with green polyester napkins. And the food—extensive buffets filled with 30 indistinguishable dishes that were both gloppy and oily, and always infused with curry. “It was North Indian banquet food that you don’t really eat at home, and not even done well,” he remembers. “It was stale with shortcuts, and you could taste poor-quality ingredients. It was just missing everything.”
But that’s what Indian
