This is our version of a Chili Chicken, a beloved Indo-Chinese classic, combined with flavors of Sweet and Sour Pork. We made our sweet and sour sauce by using lychees and tamarind, combined with common household Bengali spices (cumin, coriander, cinnamon, green cardamom, bay leaf) and a mixture of Bengali and Sichuan chili powders. In Fujianese restaurants you might find a dish called Lychee Pork, which is the FJ version of sweet and sour pork. It’s called this not because of the use of lychees in the sauce, but rather the shape the pork is cut into such that it curls into a jagged sphere when fried. In our version, we decided to use lychees for the sweet fruitiness it offers, combined with tamarind in addition to black vinegar for the sour component.

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Bengali and Fujianese families tend to be the ones behind your affordable everyday Indian and Chinese restaurants. Most Fujianese go through the Chinese takeout pipeline, though more recently you’ll see them expanding to Japanese/sushi and Boba shops. There are networks in place that help Fujianese immigrants find work in restaurants, learn the business, and eventually open their own.

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You have been to an Indian restaurant. Most Americans at this point have been to an Indian restaurant. You might know the classic Indian restaurants of Murray Hill, or in Midtown. All those Indian restaurants are modeled after the British Curry House, which in turn was essentially created by Bangladeshi immigrants. Just like how most take out Chinese restaurants in North America serve a cuisine that is not truly authentic to the cultures of the people running the restaurants, the Indian restaurant and its parent, the British curry house were created in the UK from Sylhet-Bangladeshi immigrants. Now Indian takeaways are much more popular in the UK than in the US, to the point where people call Chicken Tikka Masala the national dish of Britain. There are conflicting reports of how chicken tikka masala came to be, as it is not something that was created in South Asia, but more than a few reports believe it was also created by Sylheti-Bengalis. The Indian food known the world over, the tandoori chickens, the chicken tikka masalas, the vindaloos, and the jhalfrezis, were popularized by Bangladeshis. Bangladeshis who felt that their own cuisine would be too foreign to sell and so opted to create this hybridized cuisine.

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This tale also spins around Indo-Chinese cuisine, a hit across South Asia and now creeping into the West's South Asian spots. Elmhurst has NYC's first Indo-Chinese restaurant, Tangra. For many, life's big moments are marked by these flavors. But its roots? Colonial-era Kolkata, full of recent Chinese settlers—Hakka, Cantonese, Hubei—meshing their culinary arts with Bengali flavors. Thus, the chicken lollipop and chow mein were born. It's a curious middle ground, this cuisine, not quite Indian, not quite Chinese, but a mainstay nonetheless. For many families, running these eateries mirrored their Western counterparts. In Bangladesh today, "eating out" implies these very dishes. Chili chicken became one of these iconic dishes, the equivalent of a General Tso or Orange Chicken. Yet, cuisine and culture are not static ideals.. Post-'60s, amid the Tibetan uprising, refugees pouring into West Bengal places like Kolkata and Darjeeling wove their touch into this culinary tapestry, gifting it Momos and Thukpa. The '80s and '90s saw Bangladeshis in Southeast Asia, ferrying back exotic twists. So, this cuisine, ever dynamic, keeps simmering on.

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These communities and stories are often hidden behind the monolithic representations of immigrant communities in the US. Even many South Asians are unaware of the rich history of Indo-Chinese cuisine. We wanted to use this course to talk about monolithic representations and unseen communities. Oftentimes these unseen communities are actually right in front of us, integrated into our everyday lives. We have a responsibility to learn about and learn from these communities so that they’re not forgotten.