by I said yes, and made him a version with exactly the same spice level as everyone else’s. He never noticed the difference, and I still have complicated feelings about that.
A customer at today’s pop-up, genuinely friendly and well-meaning as far as I could tell, asked whether I could “tone down the spice for American palates” before ordering, a specific, familiar request I have fielded many times over the years running this pop-up, and I said yes, smiled, and then quietly made him the exact same dish, at the exact same spice level, as everyone else in line that afternoon, a small act of culinary civil disobedience I have been turning over honestly in my head ever since, uncertain how I actually feel about my own specific response.
I want to be fair to him, because I do not think his request came from anything particularly malicious, simply a common, genuinely widespread assumption that South Asian food is, by some kind of inherent cultural default, considerably spicier than most American palates can comfortably handle, an assumption that, in my own professional experience running this pop-up for several years now, actually holds up considerably less consistently than the stereotype suggests, since plenty of my regular customers, across every background, order the spiciest options on my menu without any hesitation whatsoever, and plenty of South Asian customers specifically ask me to tone things down for their own particular preferences.
The small deception itself, giving him the standard version rather than an actually modified one, was not, I want to be honest, purely a matter of principle. It was also, quite practically, considerably easier than actually preparing a separate, modified batch mid-service for one single customer’s specific request, a shortcut I have taken plenty of times before without much ethical hand-wringing attached to it. What made today’s instance feel different, worth actually sitting with properly tonight, was the specific framing of his request, “American palates,” a phrase that implicitly positioned my own food, and by extension my own cultural background, as something requiring translation or adjustment before it could be considered properly accessible to a mainstream American audience.
He ate the dish, genuinely enjoyed it by every visible sign, thanked me warmly on his way out, and never once seemed to notice that the spice level was identical to what every other customer that afternoon had received without any special request attached. I think that outcome, more than anything else, is what I keep returning to tonight, a genuine confirmation that the specific assumption behind his original request, that the food needed adjusting to actually be enjoyable to him, simply was not accurate in the first place, a small but real piece of evidence against the broader stereotype his request had unconsciously carried.
I do not think I handled this perfectly, and I have gone back and forth today about whether a more direct, honest response, actually explaining that the standard spice level is generally well received across every background of customer I serve, would have been the more genuinely useful choice, both for him personally and for the broader assumption his request represented. I think there is real value in that kind of direct, educational pushback, and I have used it before with other customers in similar situations.
Today, for whatever specific reason, I simply did not have the energy for that particular conversation, mid-service, with a line of other customers waiting, and I chose the quieter, smaller act of simply proving the assumption wrong through the food itself rather than through any direct conversation about it. I am not fully certain that was the better choice, but I think it was, at minimum, an honest one, and I suspect I will keep making some version of this same judgment call, situation by situation, for as long as I keep running this pop-up and keep fielding some version of this same well-meaning but quietly loaded request.
I mentioned the whole episode tonight to a fellow food business owner, a friend who cooks a cuisine from an entirely different region and background than my own, and she laughed with genuine, immediate recognition, describing an almost identical version of this same request she fields regularly from her own customers, along with her own similarly mixed, situation-dependent approach to handling it. That conversation helped me feel considerably less alone in this specific, ongoing negotiation, a reminder that this particular dynamic is not unique to my own specific cuisine or my own specific customer base, but something a great many of us running food businesses rooted in a specific cultural tradition apparently navigate in our own ways, week after week.
I do not think I will arrive at a single, permanently settled approach to this exact situation, and I suspect the right response genuinely does depend on the specific moment, the specific customer, the specific amount of energy I actually have available on any given service day. What I want to hold onto, going forward, is simply staying honestly aware of the choice itself each time it arises, rather than letting it become such a routine, automatic response that I stop actually noticing the small, real weight it carries every single time.
I think that ongoing awareness, more than any single fixed policy, is probably the most honest goal I can actually set for myself here, staying alert to each individual moment rather than defaulting into either automatic deflection or automatic confrontation regardless of what a given day and a given conversation actually calls for.
More from this author at Stephanie Curry, prat.uk.
