Mexican and Indian Fast Food

Ravikiran Rao, (who writes an interesting blog – at least until Aug 11), has written many interesting comments on my blog recently. Here is one that deserves more comment:

[It] occurred to me that it might be interesting to study the evolution of Indian food in the US with Mexican food in the US..

Specifically, if we can answer
1) When was Mexican food introduced?
2) Were the restaurants started by immigrants?
3) Were they first patronised by immigrants?
4) When did restaurant chains like Taco Bell start? Who started them? First-gen immigrants? Second-gen immigrants? Non-Mexicans who wanted to cash in on the popularity of Mexican food?
5) Who are the ones innovating there? Small restaurants? Big chains? Or the former introduce and the latter popularise?
6) What sort of innovations? Did they just get recipes over from Mexico or did they come up with innovations uniquely suited to Americans' palate?

A comparison of the trajectories the two cuisines are taking would tell us a lot about the cultural differences between the two ethnicities. We Indians may also learn something about ourselves...

Those are good questions and while I am not completely qualified to answer them, I know roughly what the answers are:

The Hispanic population in the U.S. has always been here, especially in Southwest. By “here” I mean in the area that is currently the U.S. Keep in mind that the U.S. took a major chunk of Mexico after the Mexican American war in 1848. Yes, many Hispanics have since immigrated to the U.S., but I believe that there is probably not a great difference in the traditional cuisine of Mexico and of the Hispanics in the Southwestern U.S. This cuisine was based on corn tortillas (tortillas are like chapatti) and mashed beans and meats (beef and pork). The taco (a fried corn tortilla shaped like a “U” and filled with meat) is probably a genuine Mexican food from centuries ago.

I am sure that there were mom and pop Mexican restaurants in the U.S. Southwest for at least a century and the clientele was mostly the Hispanic population. By the 1950’s many of the Anglo population in Southern California had occasionally tried Mexican food.

Mexican fast food was not created by Hispanics. It was created by Anglos. Taco Bell was probably the first really successful Mexican fast-food chain and it was started by Glen Bell (hence the name) in 1964. There is actually an excellent history of Taco Bell at their website. Apparently Glen Bell was quite the entrepreneur. He started with essentially nothing, and he created not just Taco Bell but also Der Wienersnitzel, which was once a major hot dog chain.

Taco Bell was never particularly authentic Mexican food. I doubt if Glen Bell really cared if Hispanics thought it was authentic or not. He was producing fast food and this really restricted what he could do. Taco Bell has never served vegetables, for example, which makes it rather uninteresting food for me. Critics joke that Taco Bell is always taking their five basic ingredients and combining in different ways to seem like different food. But there is something there. They really have innovated – given the fact that they are stuck with the five basic ingredients. And Taco Bell cuisine is getting less and less related to ordinary Mexican cuisine. But when I live in the Southwest, I will say that Hispanics really did seem to like Taco Bell food.

The Taco Bell formula I think is roughly this:

1. Keep the menu simple


2. Mass produce most of the food in central factories


3. Keep people from getting bored with the food by introducing minor innovations


4. It pays to advertise

Could this formula work for Indian food. I don’t see why not. But then why hasn’t someone done exactly this? Maybe more surprising, why hasn’t a successful Chinese fast food chain emerged? There could be several explanations:

1. The major fast food chains, for some reason, don’t know how to translate their fast food formula for other types of cuisine


2. Indian and Chinese restaurants are already numerous and very competitive so margins are very low. There really isn’t a lot of profit to be made by introducing Indian and Chinese fast food


3. Indian and Chinese food is served very promptly, so again there is not much scope for fast food to provide a new niche in the market


4. Indian and Chinese fast food is like a billion dollar bill left in the street that everyone passes and says, “It cannot be genuine, for if it were, someone would have picked it up by now.”

I think there might be truth in all of these possibilities. It could be that Chinese food is hard to produce in a fast food manner because it must be reasonable fresh. I find that if I reheat Chinese food, it doesn’t taste any good. That’s not true of Indian food and Indian food works really well in the buffet style and the food can sit around for a while and still be very good. Dal can stay good for hours if kept heated. It might be that Indian food is a good candidate for fast food, but maybe it just hasn’t been done yet in the U.S.

I don’t know about India but I am guessing that India hasn’t formed major fast food chains like McDonalds and Taco Bell yet. This might simply be because it isn’t as easy as it might look to unlock the power of economies of scale. You have to know how to advertise effectively. You have to know how to really get the cost down to rock bottom and maintain consistent quality. You have to know how to recruit and train a small army of low wage workers who can produce a consistant quality product. Fast food is really not restaurant food, it is manufactured food delivered to restaurant-like places. It requires a different body of knowledge than the average restaurateur knows.

So does anyone else have a good idea why there isn’t Indian fast food?