[malnourish]

It's almost certainly personal taste, but I found kaiseki to be rather unappetizing when I visited. The presentation was absolutely wonderful, most of the food didn't align with my palette.

It turns out some simple, wholesome curry really does the trick.

[vram22]

>It turns out some simple, wholesome curry really does the trick.

Japanese or Indian curry? :) I was reading about Japanese cuisine recently, and saw that they have some dishes they call curry. But IIRC it was somewhat different from Indian "curries" [1], which are again very different from what passes for "curry" in the West (generally, though I'm sure there are places that do not use that term generically like that).

[1] There is no such thing as an Indian "curry", though many Westerners seem to think so (being misinformed by whoever, from West or East). It is an umbrella term that means a variety of dishes that are usually somewhat wet or with gravy, that is the only common point. Other than that, a curry can contain anything, be hot or not, veg or non-veg, etc.

Update: Checked the Wikipedia entry for curry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry

That article says something a bit different from what I said above, i.e. that "Curry was adopted and anglicised from the Tamil word kari meaning "sauce", which is usually understood to mean vegetables and/or meat cooked with spices with or without a gravy."

So the article emphasizes the spices, rather than the gravy, as I did. Could be. But the biggest thing to understand about India is that a lot of words / terms (not just in the area of food) are used quite loosely and with sometimes widely different meanings.

[eadmund]

And then you get into differing meanings of 'gravy.' When I was on the Subcontinent, it meant what we in America would call a sauce; we use 'gravy' to mean a particular kind of sauce made from meat drippings.

Very weird at first for a Westerner to see vegetarian food described as having a gravy!

[vram22]

Ha ha, good one. And it emphasizes the point in my last paragraph, about the meaning of words. Yes, though curries are basically dishes in some sort of sauce, the word gravy is used here for that instead of sauce. It's probably only in a few high-end restaurants that they will call it a dish in a sauce (of some kind), on the menu, and when explaining it to customers. But another difference between Western sauces and gravy in India (the kind I said, used in curries), is that (as I understand it - not familiar with the details of Western cooking) the Western sauce is poured on the dish, or used from a saucer on the side, but in curries, the dish is cooked in the gravy - so the gravy is an integral part of the dish, not an add-on or pour-on.

[malnourish]

Japanese curry! It may be one of my most favorite foods.

[vram22]

Cool, I must try it sometime :)