The Indian Restaurant Menu Explained

There is a lot of mumbo jumbo spoken about the Indian restaurant menu. We are led to believe that each dish is lovingly prepared to some secret recipe, known only to that particular chef. Read the menu and it will describe the virtues of any particular dish in a most evocative style. But there is one thing you can be sure of, most dishes in the typical Indian restaurant don’t vary much at all, other than in heat and the most prominent ingredients, such as the type of meat, fish or vegetable and possibly whether the sauce is lentil or cream based. This is not to say that the dishes are not enjoyable, but to cater in almost the ‘fast food’ market, that is the way they have to be.

So, every Indian restaurant will have its basic ‘curry gravy’ and every dish served will be a derivative of that sauce. The Indian restaurant chef is the master of exploiting that base to give us what we know as our favourite dish.

We have tried to demystify the Indian restaurant menu by explaining what individual items are and how they vary from each other. It is worth bearing in mind that spellings are not definitive as all the translations into the English language and alphabet have been done phonetically. So we might see Dhansak or Dansak, for instance.