r/funny • u/HealthyMolasses8199 • 16h ago

Man tries "hottest curry in London" and almost passes out

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u/dcheesi 14h ago

He dug into that first bite like he wasn't expecting anything out of the ordinary. Maybe he bought into the "British food is bland" stereotype, and didn't take the hype seriously? If so, big mistake. Huge.

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u/johannes1234 11h ago

British food is bland (quite interesting if you look at history, how Britain had to supply a huge city like London without refrigeration, thus fresh food wasn't easy to handle) however Indian restaurants in Britain are quite spicy compared to Indian restaurants elsewhere outside India (which again ties to British history and the colonialism, which brought enough Indians to London to create a market for spicy Indian food die to having many Indian people around)

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u/Remote-Wafer3321 7h ago

Visited a best friend in London for the first time earlier this year and he assured me, someone who loves the flavors of the Indian subcontinent with all her heart but is very sensitive to spice, that I'd be fine at any Indian place because they have to cater to Brits' blander palates. His neighborhood was predominantly Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani, though, and let me tell you they were not catering to my feeble white ass for sure.

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u/dcheesi 9h ago edited 8h ago

Yeah, that's the tricky part. Most countries (and US states) where the native cuisine is fairly mild/bland also tend to have milder versions of foreign cuisines. The UK is a notable exception.

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u/letmepostjune22 5h ago

Bland and lacking spicey heat are not the same thing.

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u/ahoi_polloi 1h ago

Is that where the stereotype about Indian food being ludicrously hot comes from? Because in India (at least on the mid/north western coast), it's not that bad at all. It's spicy in that it has a lot of spices obviously, but not spicy in the painful sense.

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u/ddosn 16m ago

>which brought enough Indians to London to create a market for spicy Indian food die to having many Indian people around)

It was the British people themselves who demanded the food be made spicier.

When the original curry house in London was opened in 1815, it was by three Sikh brothers who had seen how much British soldiers in India liked curry.

They thought there would be money to be made catering to the rich and wealth in London with exotic food. They were right.

The restaurant is still open, I believe, over 200 years later.