What Tourists Need To Know About India's Unique Dining Etiquette

One custom that often comes as a culture shock for Westerners in India, is eating meals with your hands. Not just sandwiches or sliced veggies, but also rice, sauces, chutneys, and dal. In Southern India, the flatware may also surprise you. Platters of all kinds exist in India, including the distinctive metal thali, but one of the most surprising plates — to international visitors, anyway — is the banana leaf. Flat, veined, and recently plucked from an actual tree, the banana leaf is laid out on tables or floors, and then topped with little mounds of food.

Part of the surprise is that Westerners never encounter this custom themselves, even in Indian restaurants in their own countries. Curry, naan, and tandoor-baked meats are all the rage in the U.S. and Europe, but few tend to set aside their forks and scoop up dollops of chicken korma with their bare hands. This is often the case for tourists in India as well, where restaurant servers assume Westerners require silverware. After all, cutlery was imported by British colonists, who were fairly explicit about how they felt people should behave.

Accepting this tradition is just one of the ways you can be a respectful tourist in India at the very least. But you might also find that eating with your hands can be liberating. The experience is tactile and intimate, and you may feel a closer relationship with your sustenance. It's also harder than it looks; there's an art to eating manually without making a mess, and you'll likely need to practice.

Naturally, the first thing you'll want to do is wash your hands or at least use hand sanitizer. Speaking of which, people in India only use their right hand while eating. The left hand is used for cleaning and personal hygiene, and it can be considered offensive to use it at the dinner table. Even for tearing bread or holding sandwiches, practice one-handed dining to avoid disgusting or insulting everyone around you. This may be especially difficult for left-handed people, but the extra care you take will prevent a major social faux pas.

When you start digging in, a common impulse is to grab random glops, lift your head, and drop it into your mouth. But skilled hand-eaters keep their heads level, using pieces of roti (bread) as a scoop, or they clump rice together to solidify loose vegetables and sauces. You can use any combination of fingers — everybody does it slightly differently — but it's considered most cultivated to use only your fingertips; you can nudge food off your fingers with your thumb. Mastering this skill is especially helpful in street food capitals like New Delhi, one of the world's most vibrant destinations for foodies, but it's useful for sit-down restaurants as well.

The banana leaf is one of the niftiest aspects of traditional Indian cuisine: These unique, colorful, and sustainable plates never need to be washed and instantly start to biodegrade. Such divergences from everyday Western life can be thought-provoking for travelers — which is one reason Rick Steves considers India his all-time favorite country.