You are in an Indian restaurant, admiring your empty food-stained plate, and the waiter brings these bowls to you at the end of the meal:
Don’t drink it. This is a ‘finger bowl’. “A what?” you ask. Yes, a finger bowl.
It’s well known that Indians don’t like using tools like knives and forks when eating a meal. A direct consequence of this habit is fingers lathered with the delicacy you just devoured.
When you are at a fancy restaurant, and waiter gets the signal that this is the end of the soiree, they bring these bowls with lukewarm water and a slice of lemon floating in it. You are supposed to drown your fingertips in the bowl and give them a gentle massage with the lemon slice.
It does two things:
- it cleans your hands (duh)
- the lemon attacks at the smell of food from your hands, so that everything you touch after the dinner does not taste like Chicken Tikka Masala.
Unfortunately, this piece of information has not traveled to the Indian joints here in the United States. This side of the Atlantic, we are all walking with smelly fingers.