Tonight, I met with Chris’s cousin’s friend from Melbourne who is doing grad studies at NYU, her friend from Melbourne who is interning temporarily at the Council for Foreign Relations, and my good friend for dinner at a restaurant that specializes in South Indian cuisine in the Curry Hill area of Manhattan. I’ve made a number of South Indian dishes, including masala dosa and appam, and these were things that were on the menu tonight. I ordered the kal dosa, which according to Chris’s mother is the most basic everyday dosa eaten by Indian families in South India. Chris’s cousin’s friend ordered the appam, not because she actually remembered it but because she vaguely thought she had the dish before and wanted to make sure she remembered it, as the last time she’d had it was in South India visiting relatives. I was curious to see how it tasted since I’d never had it or even seen it on any restaurant menu ever. I took a piece of her appam and was a little confused and almost even disgusted when I tasted it; it was sour, which made sense because the batter is fermented, but it was too sour. I’d had it the very first time when Chris’s mother and aunt made it for a Christmas Eve dinner, and after that, I replicated it myself here twice. It’s supposed to taste coconuty because the batter has coconut and rice, but this appam had zero coconut flavor. It was salty and very sour. I was so disappointed. And it looked so pretty, too, so it was obviously made in the right style pan.

And then it hit me: I think I’m a better Indian chef than the people who work in the Anjappar kitchen in Curry Hill, and I’m not even Indian. I was able to replicate the flavor of a real appam better than the Anjappar cooks could. I had a brief moment of smugness that I had to hide and keep to myself.