A Curry Tour of NYC

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

And for our last 10 minutes, dessert, although baked into a main dish because we're going to wrap up the show with a speed tour of curry in New York City, bringing a recent cool Gothamist and WNYC news feature onto the talk show space here. When you hear the word curry, you probably think of India, many of you anyway, but curry shows up in kitchens all over the world, Jamaica, Thailand, Japan, Germany even, just to name a few. That's the beauty of eating in New York City, right? Chances are if a country has a curry, you can find it somewhere in the five boroughs. Robert Sietsema, veteran restaurant critic and author of the Substack newsletter, Robert Sietsema's New York, set out to do exactly that. And he shared his findings on Gothamist in a piece titled, 10 Dishes That Demonstrate the Delicious Diversity of Curry in New York City. And he's giving us a few minutes here and also to take your calls. Hey, Robert, welcome back to WNYC onto the talk show site.

Robert Sietsema (1:13)

Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer (1:15)

And listeners, what's the curry dish from your home country? Do you have one you want to shout out?

212-433-WNYC. Did you grow up on your grandmother's chicken curry in Guyana? Or your family's curry from Sri Lanka and curries on the table every night? What goes into it and how do you eat it? 212-433-WNYC. What's the best curry you've ever had in a New York City restaurant, even if it's not from your home culture? 212-433-9692. As we go down this list a little bit with Robert Sietsema of some of the curries on his list.

All right, let's start with that German example, because why not? Curry worst?

Robert Sietsema (2:01)

Yeah, that's one of the most extreme, Brian. The reason is that Germany is a country without many spices. The idea that it took almost 200 years for curry to reach Germany, but when it did, it exploded. It was in 1949 that curry worst was first invented when someone thought, hey, let's put some curry powder and ketchup on a bratwurst.

Brian Lehrer (2:30)

Why not? There was an Upper East Side restaurant. You shouted out on that. What was that?

Robert Sietsema (2:35)

There's a few places in town that serve it, but Schaller's Stuba, which is an offshoot of Schaller and Weber, which is a famous German butcher shop from the old days of Yorktown. They have a very impressive curry worst for really not very much money.

Brian Lehrer (2:53)

Let's keep going. Goat curry at Flava's International Grill in the Bronx. You call it one of the world's greatest meals. Why?

Robert Sietsema (3:02)

Well, it's right across from Yankee Stadium. So, instead of eating the usual hot dog or whatever else you get at Yankee Stadium, you can hop over to Flava's and they serve an amazing chicken curry. It's a very simple one and a goat curry too. I prefer the goat curry. But when you get to these Caribbean curries, this one's from Jamaica, it's basically just a curry powder that's cooked down with the meat, and usually some vegetables are thrown in. And in this case, okra, a very African vegetable.

And so you have like the whole world on a plate here.

Brian Lehrer (3:43)

Listener writes, an example, Sri Lankan curry abounds on Staten Island, and New Asha is the best. There's a plug. How about you listeners? 212433 WNYC. Here's a question from a listener I probably should have asked to start.

In a text, listener writes, how does one define a curry?

Robert Sietsema (4:06)

Wow, that's a deep question, Brian.

The fact of the matter is that curry is a state of mind as much as anything else. It was first invented when British colonialists wanted to bring some of the flavors that they'd experienced in the Raj back home to England. And so they said, hey, give us that spice you put in everything. And of course, there was no such thing as a single spice called curry. It was all a giant array of masalas, which are spices ground to order for every particular dish. But some cunning Indian cook put together a spice package that had cumin and fenugreek and all sorts of other things in their coriander and said, hey, this is the spice called curry. And they started manufacturing it in England in 1784 And from there, it kind of went all over the world. So oddly enough, curry as an idea was transmitted via the United Kingdom.

India then even picked it up in India where it was a convenience to call something a curry. An appealing idea if ever there were one.