The great American curry swindle

If you don't know Indian chef Hari Nayak, you will soon. Nayak is among the bumper crop of Indian chefs trained at prestigious US culinary schools and bent on taking Indian cuisine to new heights in the US. He's already making ripples across the culinary landscape there, with his "modern" regional Indian cuisine.  
Nayak's modern style looks set to make Indian cuisine in the US just as popular as it is in the UK. It's trailing behind the UK in terms of popularity, quality and quantity at the moment, and Indian food is still being upstaged by Chinese and Japanese. But with more talented Indian chefs studying and resettling stateside, Indian cuisine is poised to upgrade - from street-corner takeaways and buffet stations to fine dining with sophisticated flavours.
"In the States, Indian food is getting more popular. But people associated it with buffet or takeaways. If you do a restaurant without buffet, they don't think it's a proper Indian restaurant," says Nayak.
Trained at New York's Culinary Institute of America (CI) and based in the US for the past 15 years, Nayak has mixed feelings about how Americans view his native cuisine.
Popularity is a good thing, but there's more to Indian cuisine to takeaways and buffets. Coming from a South Indian town in Kerala famous for its vegetarian dishes, Nayak reckons there's a mosaic of flavours in Indian food yet to be discovered by America.
That probably explains why Nayak preferred New York to London when he decided to go overseas for training. Three years at the CI changed his life forever, he says, teaching him everything about the world of cooking except Indian cuisine, which wasn't taught.
"I learnt everything about modern and Western cooking there," he admits.
Based in New Jersey, Nayak now runs his own consultancy business, Gourmet Gurus. His first cookbook, "Modern Indian Cooking", was named Best of the Season in 2007 by the LA Times. His latest, "My Indian Kitchen", has won similar acclaim offering easy recipes for beginners.  
The interest in his books and cooking in the States is simply because Americans now are discovering true Indian food, he says.  
"US readers and Western readers want to find something different, and Indian food is becoming more popular. Now they are discovering southern Indian dishes too."
But besides chicken tikka masala and buffet, Nayak reckons Americans know little about Indian food, and what they know is a misconception. "Chicken tikka masala is not even Indian," he points out - it was invented in a curry house in Britain.
Nayak's mission is to introduce not just southern Indian food, but the broad spectrum of flavours that span the entire Subcontinent.
In contrast to northern Indian food, southern food is less oily and has no cream at all, but is famous for its use of coconut milk and spices as well as seafood, beef and pork.  "Southern food has a lot of tropical flavours.
"I want to highlight that there's more to Indian food than chicken and vegetarian food. I grew up in the South on the beach, cooking mussel, clam and oyster."
It's this type of regional cooking - not really popular outside India - that Nayak wants to give Americans a taste of. He calls it modern Indian food - authentic recipes that adopt new ingredients and foreign influences.  
 "New York is a melting pot of cultures, and that diversity is reflected in my cuisine. Everything is deconstructed, paired with wine. Yet you still stay true to the roots," he says.
But he has some catching up to do. Britain has three Michelin-star Indian restaurants - Beneras, Rasoi and Cinnamon Club - while the US has none.  
"I want to see one here in the US."