Liked watching them experience and experiment!
When I hit my favorite Indian buffets, one of my “hacks” is to drown my tandoori chicken with the sauce from the chicken tikka masala. The tikka gets hit HARD, with people fishing most of the meat out and leaving the sauce behind. But by using that excess on my tandoori thighs, I get the best of both worlds.
Tangential addendum: while trying to get my Mom and one of my cousins into Indian food a few years ago, we wound up taking a big serving of chicken biryani home. The next day, we were working on finishing off some of my home-cooked leftovers, including some creole style greens. But I was out of rice…and Mom was getting hangry.
Instead of taking it out on me, though, she “put on her big girl pants” and mixed my greens with the biryani. She stopped after the first bite, looked at me, and said’ “You have to try this.” Pretty sure she used The Voice.
I tried it…and it actually worked surprisingly well, even though the two cuisines handle spices in polar opposite techniques. Indian food typically has certain grossly chopped spices, so when you get something, it makes an immediate and distinct flavor impression. Creole, being an amalgam of African food with a lot of European (esp. French) techniques, predominantly uses finely chopped or ground seasonings which get diffused throughout a dish.
And it absolutely worked.