Why is Indian food always expensive?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because it requires a ton of ingredients and prep. It requires sooooooo much more work than say Italian food. I bet you have no problems paying $25 for a pasta dish, yet you sneer at $22 for an Indian dish that requires 2x the work.

Are you an Indian restaurant owner LOL? Most places keep all the master mixes frozen in bulk and throw dishes together quickly.

No, I just recognize the ethnocentric bias in cuisine costs. People expect stuff like Indian, Thai, Chinese, etc. to be cheap and delicious while they have no problems paying 2x more for something like Italian food or French food that is half the labor and 1/4 the number of ingredients. Ha, as if Italian places don’t have premade sauces often times they simply heat up and throw in the boxed pasta they boiled.

The expectations for ethnic cuisines are twice as high compared to such mediocre Italian food, yet consumers demand cheap costs. It’s ridiculous.

YES! Thank you. So sick of people who equate "ethinc foods" = cheap

The Post wrote about this - https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/restaurants/my-columns-name-does-a-disservice-to-the-immigrants-whose-food-i-celebrate-so-im-dropping-it/2018/12/31/101a28de-07c8-11e9-85b6-41c0fe0c5b8f_story.html

This is one hundred percent spot on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Indian good is expensive because it requires certain expertise, equipment and spices, none of which are cheap. It also is expensive because people are willing to pay what the restaurants charge.

Not true except for a few specific dishes. Your run of the mill palak paneer, butter chicken and naan are very easy to make.

That does not even begin to explore the very wide world of Indian cuisine. It’s patently untrue that “except for a few specific dishes”, the rest do not require expertise, equipment or spices.

Do try to make a Dal baati churma or Soan papdi, and report back on how easy they’re to make (and before you go there, these are but two examples of hundreds of dishes that are difficult to make).

Silly argument. No one in India makes soan papdi at home. You buy it from the halwai. When I was a kid growing up in India there would be vendors cycling around the neighborhood carrying the feathery sweet in big glass jars. We’re talking about typical Indian restaurant fare in the US.

I have eaten a soan/halwa combo dessert at a restaurant; was quite good although I don’t really like either separately. I found it rather dismissive to say that with a few exceptions, Indian food is easy to make, when it is likely the other way around, or 50-50.

My point is that just because you can make some sort of bastardized version of some Indian dishes at home does not mean that the actual ones, served at many restaurants, are not time/labor/ingredient intensive.

Take butter chicken, for instance. The dish is believed to be created to use up leftover tandoori chicken. As such, you’ll have to first make tandoori chicken, and then use it to make butter chicken, which let’s just say that “crockpot butter chicken” is most decidedly not doing. Of course, since most of us don’t have a tandoor, if we bake the chicken, you’d then have to take the extra step of infusing the curry with a little smoke to emulate the authentic flavor. If a restaurant charges 20 bucks for a butter chicken and they’re serving the real deal, I’d call that a bargain.

It's only a bargain if you want to eat it. It's not a bargain if you would rather get something else for the same price.

People pay more for the food they crave. It sounds like the people who really want Indian food at a higher price point are either going to the more expensive places, or they are learning to make something similar enough at home.

You can be as mad about it as you want, but when hungry, nobody is calculating the effort-to-effect ratio and deciding they just aren't willing to pay a brown person that amount. They are asking what they are hungry for and what they are willing to spend for it.

If restaurants are charging that much and able to stay in business, then there must be a large enough group of people that do believe that it is worth the money.

PP here. We are not in disagreement. If people are willing to pay the price, then the market bears it.

OP thinks it is too high, and there is at least one PP who has posted that the price is set too low (because of racism). The truth is that people will pay for what they want.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If anyone wants a nice cheap recipe for summer, I recently started making makai paka, which is a corn curry (I think it might be east african, which has indian roots, but maybe not technically indian).

Delicious with the fresh corn we will be getting soon, pretty easy, not too crazy of spices needed.

Recipe please.

My DH's family is from east africa, so I kind of mixed a few recipes together to try and make it how he remembered his grandpa making it.

I used this recipe for the spices/most of the cooking process
https://mayuris-jikoni.com/2013/03/06/makai-paka-corn-coconut-curry/
(I couldn't find cashew powder so I did the toasted chickpea flour and it was great)

But DH always had it with hunks of corn and with some tomato paste, so I also added in a bit of this recipe
https://lovelaughmirch.com/makai-paka-east-african-coconut-corn/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Indian good is expensive because it requires certain expertise, equipment and spices, none of which are cheap. It also is expensive because people are willing to pay what the restaurants charge.

Not true except for a few specific dishes. Your run of the mill palak paneer, butter chicken and naan are very easy to make.

That does not even begin to explore the very wide world of Indian cuisine. It’s patently untrue that “except for a few specific dishes”, the rest do not require expertise, equipment or spices.

Do try to make a Dal baati churma or Soan papdi, and report back on how easy they’re to make (and before you go there, these are but two examples of hundreds of dishes that are difficult to make).

Silly argument. No one in India makes soan papdi at home. You buy it from the halwai. When I was a kid growing up in India there would be vendors cycling around the neighborhood carrying the feathery sweet in big glass jars. We’re talking about typical Indian restaurant fare in the US.

I have eaten a soan/halwa combo dessert at a restaurant; was quite good although I don’t really like either separately. I found it rather dismissive to say that with a few exceptions, Indian food is easy to make, when it is likely the other way around, or 50-50.

My point is that just because you can make some sort of bastardized version of some Indian dishes at home does not mean that the actual ones, served at many restaurants, are not time/labor/ingredient intensive.

Take butter chicken, for instance. The dish is believed to be created to use up leftover tandoori chicken. As such, you’ll have to first make tandoori chicken, and then use it to make butter chicken, which let’s just say that “crockpot butter chicken” is most decidedly not doing. Of course, since most of us don’t have a tandoor, if we bake the chicken, you’d then have to take the extra step of infusing the curry with a little smoke to emulate the authentic flavor. If a restaurant charges 20 bucks for a butter chicken and they’re serving the real deal, I’d call that a bargain.

It's only a bargain if you want to eat it. It's not a bargain if you would rather get something else for the same price.

People pay more for the food they crave. It sounds like the people who really want Indian food at a higher price point are either going to the more expensive places, or they are learning to make something similar enough at home.

You can be as mad about it as you want, but when hungry, nobody is calculating the effort-to-effect ratio and deciding they just aren't willing to pay a brown person that amount. They are asking what they are hungry for and what they are willing to spend for it.

If restaurants are charging that much and able to stay in business, then there must be a large enough group of people that do believe that it is worth the money.

PP here. We are not in disagreement. If people are willing to pay the price, then the market bears it.

OP thinks it is too high, and there is at least one PP who has posted that the price is set too low (because of racism). The truth is that people will pay for what they want.

But the issue is with people's expectations. If there are people willing to pay the higher price why should people expect that is should be lower because of the ingredients? And those expectations occur more frequently with ethnic food. And the argument that you can make it at home for much less doesn't make sense. You could say that for most restaurant food but people still choose to eat at restaurants.

[Anonymous]

Personally I would pay higher prices for really good Indian food over any other type of cuisine. It’s more flavorful and labor intensive than any other cuisine and it happens to be my favorite ‘ethnic’ cuisine - ethnic in quotes because of course ALL cuisine is ethnic.

The only other type of food I would pay premium for is really good Persian food, also labor intensive and delicious.

[Anonymous]

Nope, the issue is that there have been tons of lower priced options around and the food tastes better at the hole in the wall or small place in a strip mall mom and pop joint than the sit down locations. Maybe those are gone from the DMV and you only have mediocre Indian food at high prices at places like Rasika.

Mexican out here in CA is a good example. The best by far Mexican is from several of the tiny Taquerias in strip malls on the east side. The expensive Mexican near the foothills is meh and really overpriced for a taco. The best barbecue we ever had was at a place next to a gas station with nothing else nearby in Texas. Best Chinese was in a tiny run down restaurant in outer sunset.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Indian good is expensive because it requires certain expertise, equipment and spices, none of which are cheap. It also is expensive because people are willing to pay what the restaurants charge.

Not true except for a few specific dishes. Your run of the mill palak paneer, butter chicken and naan are very easy to make.

That does not even begin to explore the very wide world of Indian cuisine. It’s patently untrue that “except for a few specific dishes”, the rest do not require expertise, equipment or spices.

Do try to make a Dal baati churma or Soan papdi, and report back on how easy they’re to make (and before you go there, these are but two examples of hundreds of dishes that are difficult to make).

Silly argument. No one in India makes soan papdi at home. You buy it from the halwai. When I was a kid growing up in India there would be vendors cycling around the neighborhood carrying the feathery sweet in big glass jars. We’re talking about typical Indian restaurant fare in the US.

I have eaten a soan/halwa combo dessert at a restaurant; was quite good although I don’t really like either separately. I found it rather dismissive to say that with a few exceptions, Indian food is easy to make, when it is likely the other way around, or 50-50.

My point is that just because you can make some sort of bastardized version of some Indian dishes at home does not mean that the actual ones, served at many restaurants, are not time/labor/ingredient intensive.

Take butter chicken, for instance. The dish is believed to be created to use up leftover tandoori chicken. As such, you’ll have to first make tandoori chicken, and then use it to make butter chicken, which let’s just say that “crockpot butter chicken” is most decidedly not doing. Of course, since most of us don’t have a tandoor, if we bake the chicken, you’d then have to take the extra step of infusing the curry with a little smoke to emulate the authentic flavor. If a restaurant charges 20 bucks for a butter chicken and they’re serving the real deal, I’d call that a bargain.

It's only a bargain if you want to eat it. It's not a bargain if you would rather get something else for the same price.

People pay more for the food they crave. It sounds like the people who really want Indian food at a higher price point are either going to the more expensive places, or they are learning to make something similar enough at home.

You can be as mad about it as you want, but when hungry, nobody is calculating the effort-to-effect ratio and deciding they just aren't willing to pay a brown person that amount. They are asking what they are hungry for and what they are willing to spend for it.

If restaurants are charging that much and able to stay in business, then there must be a large enough group of people that do believe that it is worth the money.

PP here. We are not in disagreement. If people are willing to pay the price, then the market bears it.

OP thinks it is too high, and there is at least one PP who has posted that the price is set too low (because of racism). The truth is that people will pay for what they want.

But the issue is with people's expectations. If there are people willing to pay the higher price why should people expect that is should be lower because of the ingredients? And those expectations occur more frequently with ethnic food. And the argument that you can make it at home for much less doesn't make sense. You could say that for most restaurant food but people still choose to eat at restaurants.

Doesn't matter. If they really want it, they will pay for it, regardless of any rationales offered. People talk about reasons only to make sense of the decisions already made.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Nope, the issue is that there have been tons of lower priced options around and the food tastes better at the hole in the wall or small place in a strip mall mom and pop joint than the sit down locations. Maybe those are gone from the DMV and you only have mediocre Indian food at high prices at places like Rasika.

Mexican out here in CA is a good example. The best by far Mexican is from several of the tiny Taquerias in strip malls on the east side. The expensive Mexican near the foothills is meh and really overpriced for a taco. The best barbecue we ever had was at a place next to a gas station with nothing else nearby in Texas. Best Chinese was in a tiny run down restaurant in outer sunset.

Part of this is overhead. The tiny rundown places can spend on ingredients and employee time instead of rent.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Indian good is expensive because it requires certain expertise, equipment and spices, none of which are cheap. It also is expensive because people are willing to pay what the restaurants charge.

Not true except for a few specific dishes. Your run of the mill palak paneer, butter chicken and naan are very easy to make.

That does not even begin to explore the very wide world of Indian cuisine. It’s patently untrue that “except for a few specific dishes”, the rest do not require expertise, equipment or spices.

Do try to make a Dal baati churma or Soan papdi, and report back on how easy they’re to make (and before you go there, these are but two examples of hundreds of dishes that are difficult to make).

Silly argument. No one in India makes soan papdi at home. You buy it from the halwai. When I was a kid growing up in India there would be vendors cycling around the neighborhood carrying the feathery sweet in big glass jars. We’re talking about typical Indian restaurant fare in the US.

I have eaten a soan/halwa combo dessert at a restaurant; was quite good although I don’t really like either separately. I found it rather dismissive to say that with a few exceptions, Indian food is easy to make, when it is likely the other way around, or 50-50.

My point is that just because you can make some sort of bastardized version of some Indian dishes at home does not mean that the actual ones, served at many restaurants, are not time/labor/ingredient intensive.

Take butter chicken, for instance. The dish is believed to be created to use up leftover tandoori chicken. As such, you’ll have to first make tandoori chicken, and then use it to make butter chicken, which let’s just say that “crockpot butter chicken” is most decidedly not doing. Of course, since most of us don’t have a tandoor, if we bake the chicken, you’d then have to take the extra step of infusing the curry with a little smoke to emulate the authentic flavor. If a restaurant charges 20 bucks for a butter chicken and they’re serving the real deal, I’d call that a bargain.

90% of the restaurants are baking the chicken in the oven and using a frozen sauce base among other shortcuts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nope, the issue is that there have been tons of lower priced options around and the food tastes better at the hole in the wall or small place in a strip mall mom and pop joint than the sit down locations. Maybe those are gone from the DMV and you only have mediocre Indian food at high prices at places like Rasika.

Mexican out here in CA is a good example. The best by far Mexican is from several of the tiny Taquerias in strip malls on the east side. The expensive Mexican near the foothills is meh and really overpriced for a taco. The best barbecue we ever had was at a place next to a gas station with nothing else nearby in Texas. Best Chinese was in a tiny run down restaurant in outer sunset.

Part of this is overhead. The tiny rundown places can spend on ingredients and employee time instead of rent.

I don’t think the mom and pop rundown restaurant is buying high end ingredients. What even would be high end lentil? The Indian food at sit down restaurants is very basic and less flavorful, my guess, is because they are trying harder to cater to what they perceive as American tastes. The foods used in the most popular Indian dishes are not expensive either.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If anyone wants a nice cheap recipe for summer, I recently started making makai paka, which is a corn curry (I think it might be east african, which has indian roots, but maybe not technically indian).

Delicious with the fresh corn we will be getting soon, pretty easy, not too crazy of spices needed.

Recipe please.

My DH's family is from east africa, so I kind of mixed a few recipes together to try and make it how he remembered his grandpa making it.

I used this recipe for the spices/most of the cooking process
https://mayuris-jikoni.com/2013/03/06/makai-paka-corn-coconut-curry/
(I couldn't find cashew powder so I did the toasted chickpea flour and it was great)

But DH always had it with hunks of corn and with some tomato paste, so I also added in a bit of this recipe
https://lovelaughmirch.com/makai-paka-east-african-coconut-corn/

Thank you!!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nope, the issue is that there have been tons of lower priced options around and the food tastes better at the hole in the wall or small place in a strip mall mom and pop joint than the sit down locations. Maybe those are gone from the DMV and you only have mediocre Indian food at high prices at places like Rasika.

Mexican out here in CA is a good example. The best by far Mexican is from several of the tiny Taquerias in strip malls on the east side. The expensive Mexican near the foothills is meh and really overpriced for a taco. The best barbecue we ever had was at a place next to a gas station with nothing else nearby in Texas. Best Chinese was in a tiny run down restaurant in outer sunset.

Part of this is overhead. The tiny rundown places can spend on ingredients and employee time instead of rent.

I don’t think the mom and pop rundown restaurant is buying high end ingredients. What even would be high end lentil? The Indian food at sit down restaurants is very basic and less flavorful, my guess, is because they are trying harder to cater to what they perceive as American tastes. The foods used in the most popular Indian dishes are not expensive either.

What about the lamb/goat dishes?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because it requires a ton of ingredients and prep. It requires sooooooo much more work than say Italian food. I bet you have no problems paying $25 for a pasta dish, yet you sneer at $22 for an Indian dish that requires 2x the work.

Are you an Indian restaurant owner LOL? Most places keep all the master mixes frozen in bulk and throw dishes together quickly.

No, I just recognize the ethnocentric bias in cuisine costs. People expect stuff like Indian, Thai, Chinese, etc. to be cheap and delicious while they have no problems paying 2x more for something like Italian food or French food that is half the labor and 1/4 the number of ingredients. Ha, as if Italian places don’t have premade sauces often times they simply heat up and throw in the boxed pasta they boiled.

The expectations for ethnic cuisines are twice as high compared to such mediocre Italian food, yet consumers demand cheap costs. It’s ridiculous.

YES! Thank you. So sick of people who equate "ethinc foods" = cheap

The Post wrote about this - https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/restaurants/my-columns-name-does-a-disservice-to-the-immigrants-whose-food-i-celebrate-so-im-dropping-it/2018/12/31/101a28de-07c8-11e9-85b6-41c0fe0c5b8f_story.html

This is one hundred percent spot on.

Umm 3rd world countries make food that is cheap by western standards

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Indian good is expensive because it requires certain expertise, equipment and spices, none of which are cheap. It also is expensive because people are willing to pay what the restaurants charge.

Not true except for a few specific dishes. Your run of the mill palak paneer, butter chicken and naan are very easy to make.

That does not even begin to explore the very wide world of Indian cuisine. It’s patently untrue that “except for a few specific dishes”, the rest do not require expertise, equipment or spices.

Do try to make a Dal baati churma or Soan papdi, and report back on how easy they’re to make (and before you go there, these are but two examples of hundreds of dishes that are difficult to make).

Silly argument. No one in India makes soan papdi at home. You buy it from the halwai. When I was a kid growing up in India there would be vendors cycling around the neighborhood carrying the feathery sweet in big glass jars. We’re talking about typical Indian restaurant fare in the US.

I have eaten a soan/halwa combo dessert at a restaurant; was quite good although I don’t really like either separately. I found it rather dismissive to say that with a few exceptions, Indian food is easy to make, when it is likely the other way around, or 50-50.

My point is that just because you can make some sort of bastardized version of some Indian dishes at home does not mean that the actual ones, served at many restaurants, are not time/labor/ingredient intensive.

Take butter chicken, for instance. The dish is believed to be created to use up leftover tandoori chicken. As such, you’ll have to first make tandoori chicken, and then use it to make butter chicken, which let’s just say that “crockpot butter chicken” is most decidedly not doing. Of course, since most of us don’t have a tandoor, if we bake the chicken, you’d then have to take the extra step of infusing the curry with a little smoke to emulate the authentic flavor. If a restaurant charges 20 bucks for a butter chicken and they’re serving the real deal, I’d call that a bargain.

90% of the restaurants are baking the chicken in the oven and using a frozen sauce base among other shortcuts.

Using a frozen sauce base isn’t really a shortcut, poster. At some point the kitchen staff made that base, and it took a good long while. When they finish using that batch in the freezer, they’ll spend hours making a new one.

Batch cooking certain things like that happens in all cuisine kitchens, you aren’t getting a totally fresh product made for your order when you order Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, I could go on and on with cuisines that have sauce based dishes. I mean obviously, the Sunday gravy takes hours to meld into something divine and worth paying good money for.

[Anonymous]

Get food from Indian restaurant, eat half one day with store bought and pan warmed naan, next day boil basmati rice and eat with leftovers.