Salon spoke to Ray over the phone about Indian food’s long march to popularity, the most America-ready Indian dishes — and why some ethnic foods just can’t get any respect.

First of all: Is Indian food really going to the “next big thing” in American food?

Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it’s going to become both more popular and more prestigious. No, in the sense that Indian food is not going to be as popular and prestigious as Italian food until 2065.

Why 2065?

I say 2065 somewhat arbitrarily, but that’s about 100 years after the first wave of Indian immigrants came to the U.S., after the civil rights movement — which forced the U.S. to change the immigration laws from racial quotas to national quotas. Since then we have had substantial Asian immigration, and a substantial stream of Indian immigration.

But why will it take so long for Indian food to reach that level of popularity?

If you look at Italian immigration to the U.S., it mostly began in the 1880s and Italian American food started climbing up in prestige in the 1980s, about 100 years later. But Indian immigration also has to continue up to certain a point. There are about 2.7 million Indians in the U.S. — about half a million in New York City — and the culture won’t be able to insinuate itself into everyday culture until it’s in the range of 20 million people. Indians have to be partly as ubiquitous as Italians.

When immigrants come into the country in large numbers, their food first becomes visible in the ghettos, then outside of the ghetto, but they don’t become popular to the larger non-insider audience until almost two generations later when the ghetto has disappeared. Also, the more Indians come into the country, the more Indians will get into the restaurant business (currently many Indian restaurants are run by non-Indians, like Bangladeshis).

If population is what matters, shouldn’t Mexican food be the new Italian food?

If just numbers mattered Mexican food should be both ubiquitous and prestigious in America — but it’s very difficult for it to establish prestige in the U.S. because a substantial number of Mexican immigrants are poor. For Indian food to reach that kind of ubiquity, those 20 million Indians can’t just be poor, because then you might have popularity but not prestige.

One of the advantages of Indian immigration is that a substantial number of them are professionals. About 30 percent to 50 percent of Indian immigrants have substantial cultural capital, and many are Anglophones. The prestige of Indian immigrants gets linked to prestige of Indian food. Though, of course, there are also Indians in less professional fields.

How can you figure out how “prestigious” a food is?

I can take Zagat’s metric of average price for a meal, and add all that up for each identifiable cohort. You see Mexican restaurants falling in the bottom cluster. What’s quite remarkable is that Japanese is the most expensive type of restaurant in New York City, which is very unusual. One person also quoted in the Associated Press article, Andrew F. Smith, editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink of America, who does terrific work, says that Indian food is soon going to be like Japanese food was in the ’80s. But Japanese popularity comes from a different source. There are few Japanese people in the U.S. – which makes it a foreign food, not an ethnic food.

What’s the difference between foreign and ethnic food?

“Foreign food” tends to be more prestigious. “Ethnic food” tends to be cheap. Most people would consider expensive ethnic food to be a contradiction.

Where do other types of food fall into the prestige rankings?

I want to point out that I’m not judging these foods when I say they’re less prestigious — it’s a measure — but Mexican, Tex-Mex and soul food falls in the bottom of the rankings. Indian food falls in the middle cluster with Greek, Spanish and Vietnamese. Indian food is in the middle partly because of this bifurcated nature of Indian immigration.

But don’t some foods become trendy because they get taken up by hipsters?

Sometimes, precisely because a kind of food isn’t cool in the mainstream it will become cool in hipster subcultural groups. Something that’s perceived as inferior can break through to the top. That’s very interesting to watch — because that’s happening with Vietnamese and Latin-American food.

We try to dismiss fashion, but in a city as omnivorous as New York and in American big-city culture, we acquire cultural capital by going slightly against the norm. In New York, for example, you saw that with bloggers really playing up the Red Hook food vendors.

Do you think blogs and the democratization of food writing are going to change the way certain ethnic foods become popular?

Yes, I think they will. This is the great thing about American culture — especially with the new media. The new media is much more democratic, and it gives these people, called consecrators, an audience. People have always trumpeted rare ethnic foods but now they have a byline. I think this democratization will probably lead to an increased focus on regional food, like Bengali food, as opposed to broader Indian food.

Do you think there’s any specific kind of food that you think is poised to become a signature dish for Indian food in America? Like tacos for Mexican food?

There are a few contenders. There’s a restaurant called Aamchi Pao in New York’s West Village that interprets a dish called vada pao as sliders on a bun. Then there are wraps, like rotis and naans, and chaats. They’re portable foods and they don’t take a lot of skill to make.

Will Indian restaurants need to Americanize their food in order to make it achieve widespread popularity?

The format of vada pao, for example, is already in some ways very Americanized. It’s already finger food, on-the-run food. These are idioms that Americans understand. But the food can’t be over-Americanized, or it will lose that cutting-edge element. Indian restaurants want to build bridges to Americans but they always want to build barriers.

Do you think the spiciness will have to be decreased?

I think it’s happening. There’s less spice, increased sweetness — but not completely. Those barriers still have to exist.

This week, to great fanfare, organizers turned a former used car lot in Santa Monica, Calif., into a mobile food court where gourmet wagons would be able to serve on a daily basis. The concept has long been floated as a possible solution to gourmet food trucks’ woes — creating a safe space where vendors could park all day, free of bureaucratic harassment — but the lot’s media attention (especially when it got shut down by authorities on its second day of operation) also got us thinking about L.A.’s traditional, immigrant-owned loncheros food and catering trucks. Where do they fit into all of this?

As a fascinating post on N.Y. food blog Midtown Lunch pointed out, Twittering gourmet food trucks are often at odds with more traditional vendors — many of whom have staked out their spots for years according to a long-unspoken code of conduct, and are understandably threatened when a hyper-mobile upstart shows up a few feet away. To find out more, we called Erin Glenn, from the Asociación de Loncheros L.A. Familia Unida de California, a group that represents the city’s catering and food truck operators, and talked about loncheros’ real concerns, why some people don’t seem to want them in their neighborhoods — and why a food lot isn’t going to solve many of their problems.

Why has there been so much bureaucratic resistance to food trucks in some parts of the country?

Traditionally, mobile food trucks have not represented affluence, and affluent areas tend to have problems with mobile food trucks. They represent something that is foreign to a lot of people.

Some people have suggested that designated food-truck lots – like the one that opened, and closed, this week – are a solution to some of these regulation problems.

I think they’re an option. I think it could solve some of the traffic problems. But for the more traditional food trucks, it’s not really about having a safe spot to operate in. Most of our trucks have been operating in the same space for years. They don’t have any trucks to outsource to other areas if they run into problems with ordinances. If they can’t operate, they can’t feed their families.

So what kinds of problems do the loncheros face?

There’s been a stigma attached to “taco trucks” – which is often used as an insulting or inaccurate term. People have this idea that the more traditional trucks are rogue entities that are not paying taxes and not having any kind of overhead. Our members have to have the appropriate permits to operate. They have to pay upward of $200-$300 per week to have their trucks parked and washed. One regulation we face is that when people sell older trucks to another person, the cost of having to upgrade it is ridiculous. It can be detrimental to people trying to operate their own business.

I think the catering and food truck industry has experienced a renaissance, but the infrastructure isn’t taking into account this change and how much this industry contributes to the community that they operate in.

So basically, it’s an industry that’s had a stigma attached for a long time — because it’s largely immigrant-run — and now that it’s gotten a gourmet makeover, the rules haven’t really changed?

Yes. I think that some of the stigma in the past has been motivated by anti-immigrant sentiment. A lot of this anti-immigrant sentiment has been fueled by the stereotypes of the clientele these trucks draw. This industry serves people who don’t have as many resources as people in wealthier communities — but recent protests have shown that that’s just not the case.

It’s made some tremendous gastronomic contributions to the city. This food is really traditional but some of it is much healthier than the typical fast food fare. If you’re going to eat at a taco truck, and you eat a carnitas taco, I’m willing to bet that the salsa is made from fresh vegetables, daily, and it’s more healthy than something that you get at fast food restaurants.

What kind of anti-immigrant sentiment are we talking about?

There’s a lot of scapegoating going on — and a lot of misperception. One of our members, for example, was having an issue in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles, where they’ve been operating for over five years. Some LAPD officers were harassing them on a daily basis, because some of the established businesses thought they were engaged in illegal activity and that the clients caused a ruckus and urinated at night. We were able to do an investigation, and figure out that it wasn’t the clientele that was responsible, it was the people who were coming out of a bar across the street. Now the LAPD officers are helping the same vendors.

How does the attention around gourmet food trucks — and food truck lots — affect you?

Any attention is good attention. I think it keeps food trucks and the idea of food trucks in people’s minds – and it can get legislators to remember that this is an industry that is important and that people care about. If legislators in any city want to make a move against catering and food trucks, given the media attention, they’re going to have to think twice about it. 

Where did it come from?

While Malava Relax launched in 2006, and was followed shortly be something called Ex Chill, the first high-profile anti-energy drink was Drank, released in 2008 by Innovative Beverage (which also distributes Arizona iced tea). The drink gained notoriety because its name played off a dangerous cough-syrup cocktail called “Purple Drank,” which is popular among rappers — Houston rapper DJ Screw died of an overdose — and according to Drank’s press release “was inspired by today’s popular hip hop artists who embrace the much sought after hip hop lifestyle that encourages people to capture a stress-free state of mind.” Classy.

A half-dozen products have followed in Drank’s footsteps, including Mary Jane’s Relaxing Soda, the suggestively named brainchild of a laid-off nutritional supplement developer (which was recently the subject of an L.A. Times profile), and a Drank imitator called Purple Stuff.  Not afraid of taunting Red Bull with its name, Slow Cow, a Canadian product, will hit U.S. shelves this year.

Who’s drinking it?

While the makers of Drank initially targeted the hip-hop community (Slogan: “Slow your roll”), the controversy around its product has likely helped it grow beyond fans of Lil’ Wayne. (It claims its drinkers also include students, professionals and insomniacs.) According to Time magazine, Innovative Beverage’s sales were up 198 percent in 2008, and its first quarter 2009 revenues were up 534 percent compared to the previous year. Bizarrely, Mary Jane’s is by far most popular in Southern California (which constitutes 70 percent of its sales), where it sells an average of 14 bottles a day per 7-Eleven store. If we had to guess, it’s the Golden State’s stoners that are stocking up.

Longevity rating: 5 (out of 10)

It’s nice to see an antidote to the overcaffeinated, stomach-churning energy drinks of the past few years — at a time when people are worrying about mortgages, student loans and getting laid off, we’re all looking for something to bring us down from the anxiety ledge — but when the novelty wears off and, god help us, the economy improves, it’s hard to imagine this trend lasting. And those people who are truly suffering from recession-related anxiety aren’t going to be spending their hard-earned cash on a fancy bottle of soda — they’ll be splurging on something even trendier: house payments.

What is it?

As the name suggests, black garlic is a  version of the familiar household ingredient, produced by putting garlic through a three-week-long fermentation and a week-long drying process (making it look like a secret ingredient from the Land of Mordor). Its taste has been described as “sweet, sugary and molasses-y.” The New York Times compared it to licorice, while Restaurant News praised its (very specific) ability to underline “the deep sweet umami flavors of slow-braised meats.” The black garlic Web site describes it most eloquently, and thoroughly, as “sweet meets savory, a perfect mix of molasses-like richness and tangy garlic undertones. It has a tender, almost jelly-like texture with a melt-in-your-mouth consistency similar to soft dried fruit.”

Where did it come from?

While it has long been used in Japan and Korea for its supposed health benefits (it’s loaded with antioxidants, and was rumored to bring immortality), it was only introduced into the United States in 2005, by a California company unimaginatively named Black Garlic. When it went on sale at San Francisco’s Le Sanctuaire food store in 2008, it elicited a brief mention in the New York Times, and its reputation spread among a group of the country’s elite chefs. Since then it’s also made appearances on “Top Chef: New York” and “Iron Chef America.”

Who’s using it?

The popularity of black garlic is still largely confined to the world of upscale restaurants — famous fans include Matthias Merges (of Chicago’s Charlie Trotter) and Bruce Hill (of San Francisco’s Bix) — but it’s likely to expand in the coming months, given that the company has begun selling its product at many supermarkets, including Whole Foods, and shipping to Great Britain and, most recently, Australia.

Our longevity rating: 8 (out of 10)

Black garlic’s strange appearance may make it look like a flavor-of-the-month novelty, but with everybody raving about its taste, its high-profile champions, and its recent move from haute cuisine to the grocery store, we think this ugly little discovery’s going to be around for many years to come.