Reply to Why is Indian food always expensive?

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

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).[/quote]
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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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.  [/quote]

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