( In various threads dopers stated their dislike for indian food).
What part of the food do you dislike? Is it that there is spice in almost everything? Or is it the amount of spice per dish? Or is it any particular spice? Or anything else?
Details welcome .
Well, as someone who LOVES Indian food, but has friends/family who hate it, their major complaint is “it’s too hot!”
Due to this, it is difficult to get them to try other Indian dishes.
I have found that if I can convince someone to try a few milder dishes, with some great garlic naan bread to sop it up, they tend to agree that the FLAVORS are great - but still complain it is too hot/spicy for them.
Wimps.
BTW, these are usually the same people who think all Mexican food starts with jalapenos and adds chili peppers before coating it with paprika. I guess some people have delicate palates. I know some people who will take gulps of water if you have two shakes of pepper in the spaghetti sauce instead of one. I guess I have a palate made of steel - I can eat salsa with a spoon direct from the jar.
mmmmmmm curry!
I tend to love Indian food, including the meat/cream heavy stuff they serve in the typical Indian restaurants here. But I know some people who complain about it, and I recall them giving a couple of reasons, too spicy, lots of odd (for them) flavors, too oily/fatty, but one specific one that I recall is that:
Some people really don’t like cumin, which means they also often don’t like a lot of Mexican food too. Also, I have noticed that Indian food has a penchant for using whole cumin rather than powdered, which is normally fine but if a kernal of cumin escapes into the final dish it has a nasty flavor when bitten.
For me, for many years, it was the predominance of cilantro, the one taste I just could not abide.
I have learned to eat through that soapy flavor and now enjoy 90% of the Indian food I eat just short of the taste bud-burning Vindaloos and whatnot. I like flavor but I like to be able to taste what I am eating without killing the taste bust with a sweat-inducing burn.
I don’t like most Indian food because the sheer amount and number of spices used are overwhelming and unpleasant to my palate, which is probably oversensitive. It’s the equivalent of someone drenching themselves in ten kinds of strong cologne. I also don’t like hot spices or curry flavor. It’s not that I like bland or safe food, either.
It’s funny, I like spicy food and love Indian food. I grew up in a multicultural family and was exposed to a variety of foods as a child.
My stepfather, OTOH, is very sensitive to spices–when I think something merely has flavour, he’ll exclaim “Very hot!” or some variation. He was raised on meat & three veg.
So if it’s an unlearned ability to adapt, why can’t these sensitive eaters learn this skill?
OTOH, if it’s biological, why aren’t there Indians and Mexicans complaining that their native food is too spicy?
Much of it is too spicy for me. Mainly too much chilli. Of course, this is the stuff from take-aways and Indian restaurants in the U.K., which likely bears little relation to the original Indian dishes.
I can’t taste the flavour of really hot Indian (or any other cuisine) dishes. That’s why I don’t like it, because food is primarily about flavour to me.
For some of it (heat tolerance), I think you have to want to change. It takes time and effort to expose yourself to those foods even though they’re a bit tough to enjoy. If you’d rather just stick with the foods you like, then there’s no incentive to change. I had a “tender tongue” when I was growing up, and managed to get to the point where I like “medium” levels of heat, both in Mexican and Indian foods.
Is there some pressing reason I should like it?
I’ve had Indian food several times in restaurants that my dining companions assured me were very good. The combinations of flavors did not appeal to me and the cheesey “sweets” were gross.
Heat and spice don’t bother me. I happily eat peppery Chinese and Caribbean dishes.
The fact that even the “not spicy” stuff is said to be spicy by people with similar palates to mine makes me not want to try it. I don’t want to waste my money on food I can’t eat. And, if I’m going to go to an Indian restaurant, it’s going to be an all night affair (since they’re out of town) and I’d have nothing else to eat.
It’s easier just to say I don’t like it and be done with it.
Among my friends I’ve seen a couple reasons. For one guy, it’s too hot. For another, “it’s not beef and potatoes so there’s no reason anyone should even want to eat it.” Yet another friend just doesn’t like trying anything new. And the worst reason: “It’s third-world food.”
I could really go for some curry mashed potatoes right now.
These comments pretty well summarize my feelings about Indian food. I don’t mind some heat, and enjoy Mexican and Chinese dishes that are medium hot. It’s just that the flavors I’ve found in most Indian dishes range from “I don’t hate it, but I don’t enjoy it” to “I’d rather go hungry than suffer through this.” I have no incentive to continue to try various Indian foods when experience tells me that I’m not likely to find something I actually want to eat, while there are so many other foods available that I know I do like.
My husband will eat mildly-spiced dishes under duress, but that’s it.
His reasoning?
It’s not meat and potatoes. It’s too exotic. Too many spices.
Wimp 
Some people don’t like the way it smells, I think; also, it tends to use a lot of vegetables that aren’t very popular among many people here in the US, so people who wouldn’t eat lentils and okra at home aren’t likely to eat them at a restaurant. We just ordered in a fabulous feast last night - there’s a place here with online delivery that has a dinner “for two” which really feeds more like six where they send you tea, soup, three or four veggie dishes (you don’t get to pick, they just send you whatever), bread, rice, and theoretically some kind of dessert but we think they always forget it and hope it’s not just that the dessert is so foreign we can’t recognize it. Absolutely delicious and really cheap!
My experience with Indian food has been confined to those foil packets of curry stuff heated up and poured over rice and I found it tasty enough to want to go to the local Indian buffet with a friend. She hardly ate anything because she said everything looked “gross” and “unsanitary”. What she did eat (pieces of chicken and naan bread and rice) she said was good and not as ‘hot’ as she expected. But she is a beef n’ taters type gal and her eating any Indian food at all was a stretch.
I think she would get on well with Hypno Toad’s friends!
For some people, it is the spices – not even the heat (though that) but the aforementioned cumin, turmeric, allspice-type-things – they just aren’t that heavily used in the West, and it puts some people off.
Point two: I’ve had several people say to me, apropos of curries, that they associate thick or heavy sauces with disguises for bad meat/base food, and the trend even in Western/European cuisine has been away from heavy sauces to sort of minimalist presentations of the base ingredient (obviously you can get this with Indian food if you just go with tandoori meat w/o sauce or whatever, but the steam table stuff is usually curry-centric).
Point three: the steam tables. A lot of the first generation Indian offerings in the U.S. and U.K. have been . . . not that well presented, dumbed down, and of variable quality. Indians brag about how they don’t have recipes per se, they rely on the “hand” of the cook – which is great if you have an Indian mom doing home cooking, not so great when it’s hapless FOTB guys who never cooked until they emigrated, or Oaxacan paisans, in the kitchen trying to replicate what that mom would do.
What’s the incentive to like it? I mean, I think you should try it, but if you’ve tried it, and still don’t like it, why make yourself?
That being said, most people think it’s too heavily flavored. Then again, I have known people who go into a twenty minute fit over radishes. Indian food is not necessarily hot. It is spicy, though, i.e., “full of spices”.
And yes, a lot of Indian places use bad meat. I mean, low grade meat, not meat that’s gone rotten or anything.
I don’t like the flavors of cumin or curry. That makes it difficult to enjoy Indian food.
I also don’t like the flavor of chili powder, so Mexican is also a problem.
It’s not the heat/spiciness, although I don’t like spicy food. Even the mildest dishes in those two types of cuisine usually turn me off because of the spices used.
I try to like them, because so many people do and I hate to be missing out on such a huge number of restaurants… but so far, not happening.