Not trying to wade into the controversy here, but I will add my own explicitly anecdotal experience based on working in an industry with many South Asian ex-pats whom I routinely press to recommend restaurants in Greater Boston that they like. More than eighty percent of the time, the response is along the lines of, “I eat in local South Asian restaurants out of convenience, not because they are particularly good, but here are one or two that I find not bad.” (Godavari, Ritu ki Rasoi, and Royal India Bistro are among the frequent mentions. I’m a fan of all of them.)
If the respondent is a dude, it’s usually qualified by, “Because my [wife or mom] cooks much better food at home for me.”
Again, purely anecdotal. My sample size is probably under 200, and dates back 20 years or so, which includes a period when the number and regional diversity of options here was much smaller. For instance, I can recall some general excitement about the arrival of Indian-Chinese options on local menus maybe 15 years ago, and they’re hardly a novelty now.
When I first settled in Boston as a dewy youth, it was nearly impossible to find many regional Indian cuisines beyond a dish or two here and there, never mind Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan options. Our current assortment may be underwhelming for people with a highly educated perspective on South Asian cuisine – I’m not one of those, though I’ve long lamented the lack of fine-dining options comparable to multiple places I’ve visited in London and one in Manhattan – but I still think we’ve come a long way from the bad old days of identical Punjabi / Mughlai menus with one Goan option. (We have had brushes with fine-dining refinement: Mantra and Tamarind Bay in their early days.) I remain grateful for the overall steady improvement in quality and diversity here.
I’m thrilled to read a rave for Tashan, did not expect much of it based on the owners’ first splash here – being the best thing in the Burlington Mall food court is a pretty low bar – only wish it served lunch. I hope to make a dinner trip soon.
(One more anecdote related to service, which indeed was dismal in South Asian restaurants here for many years, perhaps because workers were paid so stingily. I talked up a Back Bay place I liked, the long-gone Kebab n’ Kurry, but warned my date that the service was comically surly, like, “Meet every request with a disgusted eyeroll, drop every dish from a height of six inches” hostile. We went and got the sweetest, most solicitous server I’d ever had in a local Indian restaurant to that point, to my date’s great amusement. A good way to be wrongedty-wrong-wrong!)
