The chicken recipe that flew from Yemen to Bengaluru

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pani puri. The novelty faded somewhat when she made tandoori prawns, and by the time she was on to butter chicken, I thought they were struggling to be polite.

When the famous chef Jamie Olivier allowed the contestants only ingredients from a “magic box", she was floundering because it had zero spices.Two things irked me. First, that Indian food abroad is usually identified with Punjabi food.

Second, our culinary horizons are limited to our food.You could argue that India has welcomed some foreign cuisines, except that gobi Manchurian does not count as Chinese, and even pizzas have been desi-fied with spicy kheema and butter-chicken versions. Yes, we have taken to some cuisines, such as Thai and Korean, without major modifications.

These are well-known examples, mostly because they have spice levels on par with ours.This is why it is surprising that in the south, in lands known for the fieriness of their spices, from Telangana to Kerala, many restaurants now offer a cuisine mild on spices, teetering on the edge of blandness. I am referring to food—mostly meat—from the Arabian peninsula.Alongside the mutton brain dry fry and shaadi ki biryani—and local atrocities like popcorn chicken kebab—the menus of the modest restaurants in my neighbourhood inevitably have an Al Faham or mandi mutton or chicken, usually the latter.Al Faham in Arabic only means charcoal, but here it refers to a grilled or barbecued chicken with mild spices, such as coriander and cumin.