For me this is part of it. I don’t hate Indian food – I’m not that much of a food person, and I don’t often have strong feelings about one cuisine over another anyway. But when I do really enjoy food, it’s when I can really taste the steak or the vegetable or whatever it is, with minimal seasoning. Indian food tastes at times like everything has been drenched with a bizzaro world ketchup – not that the ketchup tastes all that bad, but who wants to drench everything in ketchup in the first place?
Of course, this is true of pretty much all inexpensive “formula” restaurants–Chinese, Mexican, whatever.
Agreed, I am against the “but you have to like . . .” sort of food fascism.
Exception: if in some weird hypothetical my doctor or someone told me (a big carnivore) that I must become a strict vegetarian (not vegan, that’s just crazy) – I could just about do it with Indian food.
Yes, all of these. I generally prefer less spice in my food. At an Indian restaurant, everything is very heavily spiced. In addition, I do not like the taste of curry, or of coriander.
I grew up on cheesy hamburger casserole in the Midwest, so I did have some experimenting to do. But I now like Thai food and Ethiopian food and just about everything else I’ve tried.
So far, Indian food is the only kind that I just … don’t like. I will go to an Indian restaurant if pressed, and have butter chicken and a mango lassi. But honestly, the smell kind of ruins that for me anyway.
It’s not usually an issue unless I’m with my oldest brother, who does see dislike of any kind of ethnic food as a moral failing. Oh well.
This. I personally don’t have a problem with it, but the complaint you hear from a lot of people is that it looks like glop.
I would say disliking every kind of ethnic food on some principle might be a moral failing. As in, “I only eat good old American food!” Which gives me pause, anyway. Did you mean Southwestern? BBQ? Lobster from Maine? Chitlins and Southern food? Creole? New England Clam Chowder? I mean, we’re not all hamburgers and fries, no matter what the haters say.
But I don’t like Thai food. That doesn’t make me morally repugnant!
Paprika? Paprika isn’t hot. In fact, so far as I can tell, paprika has no flavour whatsoever.
Most doctors are hesitant about demanding that big carnivores give up meat. :eek:
The Indian food I’ve tried hasn’t been very interesting and curry, while tolerable, is not a favorite spice.
I might try Indian food again but there are lots of other things to eat.
Wait, yes it does. Everybody likes Thai food.
FYI, curry is not truly an Indian spice. Curry is something the Brits came up with.
Curry isn’t “a spice.” It’s a saucy dish, a stew. There are various kinds of spice mixes for curry, but they aren’t all the same – every place makes curry powder with varying combinations of different spices, and any good restaurant will use a different spice mix for each dish. There is something called a “curry leaf” (sweet neem leaf), which is very popular in Kerala, but it is rarely used in Indian restaurant food.
It’s the combination of sweet and spicy that I don’t like. Also there’s too much goopiness.
But it’s that green sauce that tastes like it’s made from lawnmower clippings that I really can’t stand.
It seems overly spiced. It has the strongest smell I can possibly imagine from a foodstuff and it seems like they emptied the last half a jar of every possible spice from their spice rack into a pot and then called it dinner. It is all just too much! I might like it if there were a very lightly flavored version.
My ex and I went to an Indian restaurant once, and for him, this was quite a stretch (as he was somewhat picky) , but I’d been trying to prod him to broaden his horizons a little. The food was good, and he really liked the appetizer (kinda of a pastie with veggies and spices in it.) He was munching away happily until he stopped and said with a suspicious glance. “Wait…are those peas?!” “Nope, I said… some kind of Indian vegetable, I forget what It’s called.”" OK." and he polished it off…
Yeah, they were peas 
I’ve never bothered to try Indian food because I don’t trust that it won’t be too spicy for me.
People I know that do like Indian food like it because it’s spicy. I’ll never trust anyone who likes spicy food to tell me that something “isn’t that spicy” because they can’t comprehend the level of spice I can tolerate (nor can I comprehend their tolerance).
I have a stupidly low heat tolerance where anything crazier than ketchup can really leave my mouth and face burning (yes, really) so it’d just be embarrassing and wasteful for me to try to enjoy Indian food.
IF there exists a dish in Indian cuisine that is, say, like a burrito with no salsa and no sauce then I’m up for it. But then, would I really be eating Indian cuisine?
I was too lazy to explain the whole thing. 
Plus, I didn’t remember all the details.
BTW, I agree that some Indian foods are spiced too highly. My solution? Make it at home. Spice to desired degree.
But on the other hand, it took me forever and a day to get used to blander foods, or, as my SO says, who is a GREAT cook, more “subtly flavored foods”. I was so used to everything tasting so strong I didn’t like things that didn’t have strong flavors.
Now as an adult my tastes have broadened greatly but sometimes I still get a hankering for that old heavily seasoned taste.
Legit I think – the modern Western palate doesn’t deal well with this combination (only time I’ve ever puked from alcohol was mulled wine, and I didn’t drink that much). That’s why Cincinnati style chili is so divisive.
I think what you’re thinking of is a condiment, not a sauce. The little cups they bring out with the pappadum? Just don’t eat it, then. I don’t eat the brown sauce, which tastes like HP or something to me, though I don’t mind the green chlorophyll sauce.
The green sauce is pudina ki chutney, or mint chutney. This varies from divine, orgasm-inducing chutney, to nasty crap. Most restaurants have the nasty crap. Sometimes it can be so hot your tongue is like to burn off. I don’t see the point of this. IMO mint chutney is meant to cool the palate not sear it.
The brown chutney is imli, or tamarind. It is supposed to be semi-sweet. What is HP?
As for the combination of sweet/spicy, that’s mainly Gujrati food. Their main courses often call for sugar. Punjabi food very rarely mixes sweet with spice. Good Punjabi food can rock your world, though.
The appetizer with the peas is a samosa and even people who claim to HATE Indian food will eat one with first suspicion and then yumminess. A samosa is delicious.
Funny story on samosas: I remember being at a party years and years ago, in the temple, for Holi. I was dancing in the crowd with everyone else, when suddenly the girl next to me got smacked in the head with a samosa. And then I stepped on one.
Turns out one of the uncles (everyone is an uncle or an aunty) was THROWING samosas into the crowd. This is the temple, no alcohol, so he wasn’t drunk. Someone had to take the tray away from him! I never did figure out why he thought chucking samosas into the crowd was the right thing to do.
Ha – includes tamarinds:
Aha! I see. I don’t think ours has malt vinegar in it, but to be honest when I make it at home I just buy tamarind paste and add water.