Interesting article.
Sweetness in savoury cooking can be so regional. Amongst Bengalis, the community originating in West Bengal (called Ghoti, colloquially) are known for the sweet profile of their savoury cooking. In contrast, the community originating in East Bengal (in what is now Bangladesh, and known as Bangal colloquially) absolutely do not add sugar to their savoury dishes. It might originate in the relative deprivation of the East Bengal folk - they probably didn’t have the economic means to access a lot of sugar and their cooking is very much the ‘cucina povera’ of Bengal.
I’m a Bangal who married into a Ghoti family. I find my mother-in-law’s cooking too sweet. My father-in-law was a Ghoti who was brought up in (then as was called) Burma and cooks with a completely different ‘hand’ - much less sweet.
What I found interesting about the article was the commentary on westernization skewing traditional dishes way sweeter than they used to be, and the complicated history of sugar.
Trader Joe’s here, a grocery store with a lot of frozen asian entrees, is notorious for syrupy sweet sauces on many of their popular Chinese American dishes.
But somehow it is not as bad of a problem in their more recent Korean and Thai frozen foods (nor Indian).
So interesting about the terminology you mentioned re Bengal: I have never heard it even though I am surrounded by Bengalis 
There is a similar sweet / not sweet spectrum in Gujarat, where those not familiar think all Gujarati food is uniformly sweet. But in most regions of Gujarat there’s never more than a slight pinch of sugar for balance — anyone who wants sweeter dal or or kadhi has to add sugar later, because the baseline is deeply savory.
However there is also the cultural expectation of something sweet on the thali, just like there is something spicy, pickled, crunchy, and cooling — all for balance. (My mom likes a tiny piece of jaggery on her plate — if she didn’t eat it during the meal, she’ll eat it at the end as dessert.)
As a white dude whose cooking skills stem almost entirely from. tv (Yan Can Cook!) and YouTube, I know that my various attempts at Asian-inspired cooking took a pretty good step forward when I began to understand that adding sugar does not necessarily meant explicit sweetness.
Much like salt makes things taste more like themselves, some sugar seems to ‘round out’ many dishes, providing a counterpoint to sourness and caramelization adding all those umami/maillard reaction, “brown” flavors.
From the article:
In the realm of savory cooking, sugar and other sweeteners are treated like a spice—one of many ingredients used to make food taste delicious. In Cantonese cuisine, for example, “sugar is used as a tool to achieve balance, mostly to deepen savoriness,”
Across Asia, a touch of sweetness is essential for the ability to shift and shape other flavors, but sugar is, in theory, not an ingredient that should stand out on its own. It is merely there to reign in a pungent fish sauce in Thai and Vietnamese sauces or to tamp down the spice of a Sichuan stir-fry.
This philosophy of balance and equilibrium exists in kitchens across the region, from the five key flavors of Thai cuisine to the Japanese concept of gomi.
In Asia, indigenous ingredients like honey, glutinous rice, grain syrups, and fruit historically added nuance and character to a dish. In Korea, for example, pears and onions were the sole source of sweetness in a bulgogi marinade.
…catering to a global audience is like an act of translation where the source text risks losing its integrity or, worse, is rendered totally inaccurate.
The great sweetification, as I’m now calling it, also panders to a Westernized ideal, which Ponseca identifies in the Philippines’ reverence for colonial influences, like Spanish baked breads or American processed foods like spam and ketchup.
“That’s how many of us view the consumption of meat; it means we have money. I think the same thing could be said about sweetness,” she says. In this case, indulging in a sweet treat is not just about taste but is rooted in class and status, which is true across so much of Asia. “In Korea, we revere Western culture,” says Kim. From Manila to Hong Kong to Seoul, sweetness is driven as much by affordability as it is by the aspiration to be seen as modern and sophisticated.
But if the universal flavor du jour is sweet, we lose the meditative delightfulness of balance. We’re entering an era where the highest compliment once reserved for dessert in many Asian households—that it’s not too sweet—might now apply to dinner.
I don’t like Thai cuisine, at least the version we get around here, because it’s too sugary. I mentioned this to a friend, who said he didn’t find it sweet. We went to lunch at a Thai place, and from the start (satay skewers) everything was cloying to me.
You need to find better Thai restaurants! Good Thai food balances sweet, sour, spicy and salty in a way that is so perfect it’s one of my favorite cuisines of all times.
That said, the most popular Thai place in our lil town goes overboard on the sweetness, too, which is why we don’t eat there 
There’s only one other Thai restaurant in town that at least occasionally gets the heat level right (where appropriate), but neither come close to our favorite place in Berlin.
Over the past 15 plus years or so I have been traveling extensively to Thailand and Hong Kong. I don’t recognise the article’s conclusion, in that over those years generally food hasn’t become sweeter to my taste. I typically visit local places, not hotel restaurants and such.
I don’t often eat Asian food outside of Asia. But as it happens I was in London a few weeks ago, having dinner at the 1 star michelin Indian restaurant Jamavar. I had a lovely prawn curry, which also wasn’t sweet but very well balanced.
In Asia, I’ve only been to Malaysia once and found the food there noticeably sweeter than in other Asian countries. But that’s just the local taste I guess.
If you make it over the Bay bridge try Prik Hom, Kin Khao or Nari or if you are on the peninsula go for Isarn Garden (San Carlos) for much more well balanced Thai restaurants
There are some dishes that skew too sweet almost universally – like pad thai.
Last weekend we got an order of pad thai and one of pad see ew – the pad thai was cloyingly sweet, but the pad see ew was well-balanced.
I think something similar happens with curries, perhaps based on who is likely to order to what. I find panang and massaman will skew sweet at the same places that serve a well-balanced red and green curry.
Never had a larb that I would call “sweet”, though.
Catering to the expected audience for a dish, I suspect.
I had not come across this, which appears to be a chain out of India from the Leela group. Looks good!
Though the Malvani prawn curry you ate wouldn’t have any hint of sweetness in it as there is none in that regional style – but if you had a prawn malaikari from Bengal, it would definitely have a sweet tinge from both onions and sugar 
(in line with @medgirl’s comments above).
Interesting. I’ve never had Indian food that tasted sweet, except for desserts.
Depends on the region, as I mentioned above
I think this hits the nail on the head. I also find Asian food in the western world too sugary, especially at the more hip and happening places. That is also the reason why I don’t eat Asian food a lot outside of Asia.
Yes indeed I had the Malvani prawn curry, just checked the menu again online. The menu states that it has tamarind which indeed adds to the dish being more tart than sugary.
The dish was beautiful, mostly because the prawns were some of the best I’ve recently had in Europe. Big, juicy and tasty. Like they have in Thailand.
As a starter I had a goat kebab - I was really looking forward to having some meat on a stick but they came out with a sort of deconstructed modern kebab! No stick, just some meat and sauce on a plate. Disappointing…
This was the curry.
You mention prawn malaikari here, which indeed is one of the Bengali classics that skews sweet. The Bengali cookbook I use as a reference (The Bengal Cookbook by Minakshie Dasgupta) has a recipe for this where 1 teaspoon of sugar is included for a curry which includes 500 grams of prawns, 4 onions and 2 cups of coconut milk. I never add the sugar as the natural sweetness of onions, coconut milk and prawns is enough for me. Also, the spice used here is garam masala, which despite being warming also has a sweet profile. Apparently the ‘malai’ in the name doesn’t refer to the creaminess but to the origins of the recipe (adopted in Bengal from Malay traders).
Another Bengali classic with a sweet flavour profile is chholar dal - a thick dal made of split yellow gram, which can include raisins, fresh coconut diced small and upto 4 teaspoons of sugar for 250 grams of lentils.
Bengali cooking doesn’t really have much of a following outside of Bengalis. The flavours are quite different to what is considered ‘Indian’. It’s an outlier!
This sounds about right, using sugar as a spice and to balance and activate other flavors. By habit my mother always put a dash of sugar in her cooking, whether Cantonese or others, so I do too. Any dish with sauce or gravy, pasta or stew, I do this, along with umami and other flavors. Sugar balances many flavor, takes the edge off.
I know next to nothing about Thai cooking but I do know a key is balancing heat/spice with sour and sweet.
Otherwise, I dislike overly sweet dish like sweet and sour dishes. Personal gripe is Cantonese tomato beef dishes. On the West Coast it’s usually overly sweet, ketchup-y. Chicago style is savory, balancing the sweet of good tomatoes with beef and black bean and garlic.
Generally overly sweet Cantonese dishes like sweet and sour are called white people food. Sugar is one of the dominant additives in American prepared foods after salt. Sweeteners are often at or near the top of the ingredients list.
Desserts are also an area of less sweet in Asian cuisines. Prime example is a cake from a Cantonese bakery will be significantly less sweet, usually with fruit and a light dairy topping. If something is sweet it’s usually natural, like red bean dessert soup.
Side note: with the rise in the use of sugar in Asia comes the rise in obesity and diabetes.
My mom used to add a tiny pinch of sugar to her salad dressing and tomato sauces. I still do the same (altho sometimes I forget), but I’d have to think about any other savory dishes I add sugar to. A pinch of brown sugar (or splash of aged balsamic) to tomato sauce, for sure.
Her mom used to make a salad dressing with lemon juice, yogurt and sugar. I hated it & always added salt to mine.
Pad thai from restaurants is definitely almost always too sweet. But, the Hot Thai Kitchen recipe has been a huge help for when I need to satisfy a craving!
I think that’s true of most regional cooking aside from what’s popularly recognized as “North Indian” and “South Indian”.
Still, there are a couple of dishes from various regions that make it into restaurant menus — I’d count Prawn Malaikari and Kosha Mangsho among those from the Bengali canon, as Vindaloo from the Goan.
