Today for lunch I am going with some friends to an Indian Buffet for lunch. An amazing experience where you are transformed to a land of plenty where you are able to eat way more than you should and spend the rest of the day regretting that last plate of food. I don't envision Indians going to a restaurant in Delhi and sitting around a table eating 4 giant plates of food and spending 100 rubes. Yet somehow this concept and tradition is firmly in place in 95% of Indian restaurants in the United States.
So this made me think, why is Indian food the only buffet cuisine? Why don't they have Thai buffets, or Italian buffets, or Japanese buffets? It's as if every Indian restaurant that opens comes with a manual that says if you're going to open a restaurant you must do a lunch buffet or else you may not open this restaurant at all.
Theories are welcomed to this phenomenon.....
The purpose of eating at a buffet is to get the most value for money by selectively feeding the face with the most expensive dishes. As a general rule, avoid the rice, samosas (and other fried food), raita, and dal. Gulab jamuns are usually microwaved straight out of cans, so don’t go near them. Paneer dishes never have any paneer, so you can avoid those too. At a quality buffet, there will at the least be a lamb, goat, or shrimp entrée. You should be good at fishing out only the high-value bits from the curry with an elegant, clean Azharuddin-worthy flick of the wrist. If a cooked-to-order masala dosa is offered, you are permitted to eat the dosa, but not the potato-based masala. The rationale behind this is that even though the dosa is made from cheap ingredients, it is a value-added product because of the specialized expertise and time required to make it properly. If you eat the tandoori chicken remember not to pick off all the meat from the bone as you would at home. As a rule of thumb, round up 0.5 or greater of consumed food-unit to higher whole number. If others stare at you, it is their problem, not yours.
ReplyDeleteThey DO have Thai buffet! Italian buffet is called Sunday Dinner.
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