Over spring break I went to an Indian Restaurant on South St. with a few people that live in my building. Check out the website for Lovash here.
It’s definitely one of my favorite Indian restaurants and I love taking people there. The people that I went with were actually International students. This created the perfect opportunity to talk about different cultural norms! Since we were out to dinner, we obviously talked about food.
So a unique thing that this restaurant does is they allow the customers to choose how spicy they want their meal prepared on a scale of 1 to 10. Since I was familiar with the restaurant I proudly ordered a number 10, while everyone else ordered things between 1 and 3. Why was it that I was so adament about ordering the spiciest food available at the restaurant and everyone else shied away from it?
At home, my mom makes really spicy food and it’s just become a natural thing for me to always chose the spiciest options. When I asked the others what their thoughts were, they said that they weren’t used to eating such hot food and some even mentioned that the taste is so distracting that it becomes no longer enjoyable. Of course I disagreed with them!
Now when I had ordered the 10, the waiter himself was warning me and telling me that he himself could not handle anything past a 6 or a 7. The waiter was a fellow Indian, and this surprised me. We ended up getting into a long discussion about how his family did not prepare very spicy dishes during his childhood and it’s hard for him to handle certain Indian foods.
This got me thinking – everyone assumes that Indian food is incredibly spicy, but this depends on the dish and which region of India it is produced. My family is from South India and we like our dishes HOT HOT HOT. This is something so normal to me, but everyone else thinks that I’m crazy!