UK · The deepest South Asian food city outside the subcontinent, and the one where the regional distinctions actually survive.
London has South Asian food at every level at once: Gujarati vegetarian cafés, Punjabi dhabas, Bangladeshi curry houses, Sri Lankan and Keralan kitchens, and a generation of restaurants doing regional Indian cooking at serious prices. It is one of the few cities outside the subcontinent where you can eat genuinely different regional traditions in a single week rather than variations on the same Punjabi-descended menu.
Where to look: Southall, Tooting, Brick Lane, Wembley and Harrow
Japan · Where the Indian restaurant is usually Nepali-run, and the lunch set is the point.
Tokyo's South Asian food is dominated by a specific format: a Nepali-run kitchen serving a largely North Indian menu, built around a weekday lunch set of curry, enormous naan and a small salad. It is so consistent that it is effectively its own genre. Underneath it sits a smaller, more interesting layer of genuinely Nepali cooking, and a handful of serious regional Indian restaurants.
Where to look: Shin-Okubo, Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Nishi-Kasai
India · A South Indian city that eats everything, where the benchmark is a two-rupee-cheaper idli done better.
Bangalore's food is Karnataka's first — idli, dosa, vada, bisi bele bath — layered with everything the city's migration has brought in: Andhra meals, Kerala kitchens, North Indian chains and a large Nepali and North Eastern presence in its service industry. Unlike most cities in this directory, here South Indian food is the default rather than the specialist option.
Where to look: Basavanagudi and Gandhi Bazaar, Malleshwaram, Koramangala, Indiranagar
UAE · A majority–South Asian city where the best Indian food is usually the cheapest.
South Asians make up the large majority of Dubai's population, and the food reflects that far more honestly in the cafeterias of Deira and Karama than in the hotel restaurants. Kerala, Tamil and Pakistani cooking are everywhere and inexpensive. The emirate also has a genuine high end, but the everyday food is the reason to eat here.
Where to look: Karama, Deira, Al Quoz, Bur Dubai
USA · Where the regional map is in Queens, not Manhattan.
New York's South Asian food splits sharply by borough. Manhattan has the expensive modern Indian restaurants and the remains of Curry Hill. Queens has the actual communities — Jackson Heights for North Indian, Bangladeshi and Tibetan, Floral Park and Hicksville for South Indian — and is where the regional cooking is both better and cheaper.
Where to look: Jackson Heights, Queens, Curry Hill, Manhattan, Floral Park and Hicksville, Elmhurst, Queens
Germany · Plentiful and cheap, but read the sign carefully — many 'Indian' kitchens here are not.
Berlin has a lot of Indian restaurants and a specific quirk: a large share are run by Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Nepali owners cooking a generalised North Indian menu adapted to German taste, often heavily sweetened and very mild by default. There is genuinely good food here, but it takes more filtering than in London or New York.
Where to look: Kreuzberg, Neukölln, Charlottenburg, Prenzlauer Berg