I went to just one curry restaurant in London, a very small Indian-run one. Had some fantastic lamb vindaloo.
We also ate mulligatawny - is that soup actually British-Indian food? I’ve never seen it anywhere else. It was really good, though.
Had great Indian food in Singapore and Japan, too. Unfortunately have never been to India. Bless the Indian diaspora, bringing their wonderful cuisine all over the world…
Yes, mulligatawny is a British-Indian creation - but there’s never been anything isolationist about Indian cuisine. After all, they had no chillis or tomatos until after Columbus made a certain journey
I love curry. Had it in England too, at one of the joints in Notting Hill.
And my kitchiri is damn good. Some of my friends say it’s better than what they get at home 
Don’t forget those wonderful Kiffir lime leaves. Dear God, but those things make my toes curl in ecstasy.
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that, although it’s a natural assumption, there’s no need to assume that a thread entitled “Curry” is about Indian food, or even about Indian curry… (I certainly didn’t think it was, until I remembered that oh, yeah, there’s Indian curry too. :))
I had the best curry of my life in London a number of years ago. And it was remarkable hot! Wow! Of course I had been eating smashed up peas and meat filled pasties for a week, so I was ready for something on the spicy side. Fortunately, I grew up on Mexican food, so my tolerance to hot food was in line with the curry.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember much else about the meal.
I had the opposite thing happen. The first thing I thought about was Indian food, then after reading your post I thought, “Hey, that’s right - I’ve got Thai curry paste in the fridge!” Which lead me to make a huge pot of green curry, for which I will be forever grateful to you - it was damn good curry. 
I don’t know if a lot of people have had this experience, but many people I know, when I say, “Hey, let’s get Indian food” immediately say “No, I don’t like curry,” meaning the spice not the dish. Which always confuses me because most Indian dishes don’t even have curry powder in them, and many Indian vegetable and meat dishes are labeled under the umbrella “curry,” which has nothing to do with curry powder. Has anyone else had that experience? I’m thinking it might be because I live in the Midwest, and St. Louis, while it does have an Indian community, does not have a really large one.
It’s the other way around - curry powder gets its name from curry. The closest translation of ‘curry’ is probably ‘gravy’ - essentially it means cooking food in its own juices. So the broad sweep is correct.
I learned to cook curry as a kid. My parents, although English, spent lots of their early adult life in east Africa. My mother’s family had Indian servants and she learned to cook from them. My mother used to cook really elaborate curry dishes, crushing her own herbs and spices, when the Australian idea of a curry was cooked sausages or prawns in a sauce made with curry powder.
After I left home I was famous for my curries. In Sydney there were only a handful of Indian restaurants and I could cook more authentic food than most. Nowadays Pataks and Sharwoods have made it possible for anyone to cook top quality curries.
A couple of years ago I moved to where I am now. There is a Pakistani restaurant across the road. Many of the dishes are much the same as Indian recipes but there are a few that are terrifically different - really spicy, aromatic vegetable dishes, chicken dishes with stewed unboned chicken and dozens of creamy or fiery dahls.
If I was told to eat one variety of food for the rest of my life I would choose Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi food…although Sri Lanka has some interesting twists too.
I ate in a couple of Indian places when I was in Edinburgh a few years ago. They were both very nice–I had a vegetarian thali in one and shared various meat curries with friends in the other. The first was around the corner from the Grosvenor Hilton, where I was staying and the other was somewhere up near the castle.
I didn’t consider either to be wildly superior to Indian food that I’ve had in America. Sure, I’ve been to a few mediocre buffets, but I’ve also been to some wonderful places (mostly in Berkeley and San Francisco.) I also do a lot of Indian cooking myself.
Having grown up with Indian food at home, I always find Indian restaurants, especially the expensive ones, a big disappointment. It’s safest to stick to what even Indians consider to be exclusively restaurant food – murgh makhani (butter chicken), gol gappa/pani puri/phuchka, nan, chicken tandoor, etc.
Yeah, and I’ve never quite liked that combination of flavours. When it comes to Thai, I stick to pad thai and stay away from their “curries.”
Even though many “Indian” restaurants are run by Bengalis (both East and West), unfortunately, they rarely ever serve actual Bengali food, which is (in my humble opinion) just the best … all those fantastic fish and seafood dishes are just unavailable in restaurant Indian food, which usually sticks to a standard menu, mostly from the Mughlai cuisine of north central India. I so often wish I could find a genuine Bengali restaurant. So far, the only one I have found was … in Calcutta. D’oh! (It’s called Aaheli, and it is the best!)
The landing of Vasco da Gama was the beginning of modern Indian cuisine … chilis, tomatoes, potatoes, corn … they’re all from the New World.
Speaking of corn – the best way to have corn is charcoal roasted on the cob until about a third of the kernels are blackened … then with a little mustard seed oil, salt, and lime juice. Heaven! Get that boiling water away from here!
Curry paste? Curry paste??? Blasphemy.
Curry powder? Curry powder??? No Indian with any sense of pride ever goes near curry powder. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with Indian cooking.
A curry is a dish that produces a lot of gravy from its own juices and spices added. Period. A curry can be made with any set of ingredients and every cook uses his or her own combination of spices, usually a different combination for each kind of meat or vegetable. (By the way, in Indian cooking, fish, seafood, and poultry are considered “meat.”)
I remember a Korean-American friend of mine once invited me over for “a curry.” he then proceeded to make a chicken and vegetable stir-fry with curry paste. I had to tell him, “Dude, this is good and everything, but it’s not a curry. It’s got no gravy!”
I’m really quite lucky, due to the large Indian population in Seattle ( a good deal of it due to the tech sector here) it’s easy tpo get good indian food. You simply seek out the places where you see the most actual Indian folks eating.
Speaking of Indian food… One thing about Indian restaurants that I have a problem with is that very, very few of them in my neck of the woods serve south Indian food. The ones that do don’t do a really good job - they usually wind up with tons of oil in their dishes, even the ones that aren’t deep fried, and their masalas are often kind of bland, as in they don’t have a whole lot of different spices in them. I think the only good south Indian restaurant I’ve ever been to was on Devon in Chicago. Their dosai were fucking huge, but really really tasty.
And with Thai curries - they taste fabulous, but the smell of fish sauce is godawful. Not that that’s a problem, of course - as long as the entire dish doesn’t smell only of fish sauce, I’ll eat it. Then again, I’ll eat anything if it’s not moving.