Alex wrote :

I am wondering about the authenticity of restaurant curries. I have 
eaten many curries in the UK and cooked a few from recipes on your 
site. 

Recently I was on holiday with my wife in Rouen, Normandy, and  we 
found what looked like an authentic Indian restaurant. I ordered a 
vindaloo and was surprised to find that, although the meal was 
beautifully aromatic, there was no heat. A vindaloo with no heat? 

Talking with the waiter, he said that Indian restaurants change their 
recipes according to the country that they are in. I asked about 
curries in India and he said that it was entirely different. He said 
that food was cooked at home from fresh ingredients and couldn't be 
compared to the "batch method" used in Western Europe.  

What was he talking about?

Before you ask "is this meal authentic?" first you have to 
decide authentic to what?. That's the tricky 
bit.

If you asked most English curry fans whether the curry in front of 
them was authentic they would probably make their judgement using 
restaurant curries as their yardstick. 

But if you asked a British Asian the same question their reply is 
likely to be based on their family's home cooking.

Many British Asians would, I think, consider standard curry house 
fare to be at best Anglicised and at worst a travesty of the original 
dishes on which they are based.  The well known Indian chef, Cyrus 
Todiwala, remarks in his excellent book Café Spice Namaste 
that the traditional Parsee dhansak has been "grossly abused by 
restaurants in the UK". 

Many English people would find home-style Asian cooking quite 
unfamiliar. That's because, for most of us, our idea of an authentic 
Indian meal is based upon our experiences in "Indian" 
restaurants (which, just to confound our expectations even further, 
are mainly run by Bangladeshis). Listen to what restaurateur Iqbal 
Wahhab has to say "At the end of a night in an Indian restaurant, 
the boys sit down to their own meal. The staff curry is brought out 
...... [and] it's like nothing on the menu they serve their customers".

Yet there is a new and welcome trend in Asian restaurants. These 
new-wave restaurants aspire to be not the familiar curry houses but  
Bengali restaurants or Punjabi 
restaurants or other restaurants serving regional cuisine from the 
Asian sub-continent. So we are now getting restaurant specialities 
that could certainly be described as authentic. 

Of course, even the more upmarket restaurants serving regional cuisine 
have to adapt their cooking for mass catering. They cannot cook in 
home-style quantities. They have to prepare stock sauces in advance.  
They have to pre-cook meat that needs long, slow cooking. So even 
here a traditional recipe will be changed according to the needs of 
a restaurant to serve its customers quickly and efficiently. That's 
what the waiter meant by "batch" cooking. 

Your experience of the vindaloo with no heat is a clear case of the  
restaurant adapting its cooking to the expectation and tastes of its 
customers. The curry house has been a feature of the British high 
street for 40 odd years. Curries have been cooked in British homes 
(using good old Madras curry powder but unrecognisable to the average 
Indian) since the days of the British Empire in India. Curry houses 
in France or the USA are a fairly new phenomenon. The menu is 
relatively unfamiliar so the curries have been tailored to suit the 
local clientele. 

But, in the end, does it spoil your enjoyment if the dhansak in your 
local curry house is not made in the traditional Parsee style? The 
dhansak I was served last week in my local Tandoori was astonishingly 
good but probably not authentic. A traditional dhansak from the Café 
Spice Namaste would, I am sure, be a delight and a whole new 
experience. So why worry about authenticity? Enjoy both!