 Uh, yeah, I mean, you look Puerto Rican, but I guess you can be in this club. Yo, what's going on everybody? Welcome to a special episode of Fung Gros Food. This is a video that I've been wanting to do for a long time because I love buffets and I always wanted to go to an Indian buffet with a half Indian YouTuber. So today I got Michelle Kare. Hey! Welcome back to my YouTube channel for the next six weeks. I am going to be training and dieting just like the Victoria's Secret models. So in this video, we're going to get back in the kitchen. We're also going to hit the buffet. We're going to talk about Indian identity a little bit. Then we're also going to talk about being YouTubers and also being a former bus feeder. Seems like there's a lot to talk about. Let's go! Inside of a commercial Indian kitchen for me. I actually have not. I've just been in my grandmother's kitchen. This is definitely an Indian thing. Like everything is made out of like aluminum or silver and these little like cups. This is very nostalgic for me. Nice to meet you. This is Caesar right here. And what are you doing right now? This is the process for the samosa. Oh, okay. Oh, those are samosa skins. Okay, so they're flattening the samosa skins out right now. So they can wrap it up and fry it. I saw you walk up to Caesar and just stare at him. You were like, yo. Making samosas is a really nostalgic thing for me because some of my earliest memories with my dadima are making samosas and we'll be together. Yeah, this is the sandu. That's the tandoor oven. Whoa! It's like sticking to the side of it. All right, so we got Kapit back here making fresh naan. It smells so good. Let's hit the buffet. All right, Michelle, we're here at the beginning of the line. Do you get the saucepan on the plate? How do you do this? Okay, first I like to get rice. Rice is usually the base of the dishes and absorbs all of the curry. Then you can just put like the different curries on top. What I also like to do is then take all of it and mix it together and put it in a roti and then kind of wrap it like a burrito almost. You can put raita, which is like a yogurt. Raita is perfect because it's kind of like a natural anti-spice. So if something's too hot, you can have a little raita. This is chana masala, which is basically like a chickpea-based dish. Dahl is a really popular lentil soup. But this is really nice just to like go on the rice. Vegetable pakoras are kind of like, they're basically fried vegetables. I'm making a great wall of basmati rice. I'm going to divide like the sauces and stuff like that so they don't run together. So this is a tandoori chicken, grilled chicken in that tandoor, which we just saw in the background. I actually really like, I really like chutneys. So chutneys are a mixture of spices and fruit. It's cold. I think one of my favorite things about an Indian buffet and just a chip in general is like, don't be afraid to try something new. I cannot believe some people come to a buffet and just get like two things. You know what I liked about your whole rice-based tip? Is that when you put the stuff on, it doesn't flow together because the rice absorbs it. So it kind of keeps it in its pocket just like right here. Here's a bite I'm making right here. I got the naan. I have the basil fish. I have the pakora. I really love naan as a bread. It's just so thick and fluffy, but also dense. It's bendable. It doesn't break. It's a little flexible. Chinese people, we eat a similar thing. It's called like a scallion pancake. So the jennama sauce is really nice because it's definitely got that flavor of spice and the texture of a chickpea is really nice. It's really satisfying to bite into a chickpea because it's like kind of hard on the outside but then really soft on the inside. Try this basil fish. I love the basil. Really, really tender. Nice hit of basil. There's always like a little bit of back splash of spice like in the back. Oh, yeah. Woo! These pakoras are really fine. These little like fried slices. Honestly, it's like an amazing version of a potato chip. It's kind of like tempura minus the batter. This is the butter chicken. Did you make butter chicken growing up like with your grandma? I did, yeah. Man. Okay, I'm going to try some of the mint tamarind chutney. So vegetarianism is a really big thing in India for religious reasons. My grandmother is Hindu. And I think now like things are more modern. Obviously there's a ton of different meats in Indian cooking. Oh my gosh. I was going to say something, but... Yo, and actually the cool thing is I think a lot of Indian restaurants, they like to advertise that they are vegetarian and vegan friendly even. It's really about the flavor of food, you know. It's not about necessarily eating meat, but it's like I think Indian food has so much flavor that even when it's just like vegetables, it's always flavored very heavily and very nice. Yo, look at this chutney. This is the cool thing about, I like always about the mint tamarind chutney. The chutney is awesome. It glows green. I'm just packing everything on there. You know, I don't know if that's more New York style to hold it that way or Indian style, but I just made myself a pizza. You can do however you want. So I love the chutney because it just adds this burst of flavor. I'm going to dive into this samosa. These are really big. So samosas are something that's very dear to your heart. I feel like of all the items that we ate, you were like yo, there's samosa. I'm like... Samosas are kind of like the egg roll of Indian food. It's filled with aloo, which means potato and peas and like a bunch of spices. So it's a pretty simple thing. Yep, this is great. Yo, this tandoori chicken, I can't believe it was cooked in that same oven as the naan. You can tell it's tandoori because of like the black inside of it. It matches the same blackened style spots on the naan. Goat curry. Tastes like lamb. Let's check out this paneer right here. I don't think I got any. Can I have some of yours? Yeah, this does not look like a peanut dish for a lot of people, like aesthetically wise. It tastes really good. I mean, I think people are just like, oh, a green spinach vegetable. All right, so we ate a lot of food, but now let's get into the identity portion. You're half Indian, your dad is Indian. Mom is white. Do you consider Indians Asian or not Asian as far as the larger conversation? Identity for me has been something in general I've always struggled with. Personally, my view is that Asia is a continent which includes India. So yeah, like I would put Asian down if it's like a census thing or something. If there's no space for India as a separate thing, I would choose Asian. Would you say you're half Asian or you would specifically say half South Asian? I've said both, you know? I usually say half Indian just to be as specific as possible. Culturally, there are a lot of things with parent relationships, familial things that overlap between both of our cultures for sure. For strict parents or stress on education, those are definitely like very Asian experience. And just the pressure to succeed as a first generation American? I know half Indians. There's like some famous half Indians out there that don't look as Indian as other people. I would say you look wise may lean more Indian. A lot of people think I'm Latina. I am privileged in that I can pass as a lot of different things. I mean, I think visually, it's cool to be kind of like racially ambiguous. You know, a lot of people can identify you. It's maybe more about like your personality and what you say as opposed to just visually. How would you say you can use that to your advantage? Auditions, for example. A lot of people fetishize ethnically ambiguous people aren't now. It's like in right now to look unpinable. Oh yeah, for sure. Even appealing to different audiences, different markets. Yeah. So you've got Filipino, Spanish, Hawaiian, Indian. Yeah. Indian. Sometimes Indian. And we're like, yeah, maybe Indian. Is anything South Asian? Yeah, I pass for a lot of things too. Chinese, Korean, Southern Chinese, Northern Chinese, Cantonese, Taiwanese, a wide variety of things. Do you think Indians should be included in being Asian? There are definitely times when I feel like Indians or South Asians in particular are excluded or forgotten from conversations about Asian America. For example, diversity in Hollywood when people are like, we need more Asians in cinema. Usually the examples given are East Asian. But what about South Asians? People will respond with, well, there's Baldwin. I don't feel like that. A good reason to say that, you know? Other people forget that India is a part of Asia in that conversation. I think that it's because, I guess, Indian people, they're seeing pretty differently. There are conversations where I definitely think Indians should be included in conversations about Asia, like representation and Hollywood. And then there are other times where it makes sense to separate. In my high school, there was like an Asian American club and like I went as a freshman. It's kind of like a, oh yeah, I guess you're part of Asia, you know? I said Asian club. Indians are Asian. I'm sure it was probably a lot more East Asian people just to be like, yeah, I mean, you look Puerto Rican, but I guess you can be in this club. Let's talk about YouTube real quick. You were with BuzzFeed first and then you left BuzzFeed and now you're an independent creator. What is it like going from the big, big dog BuzzFeed with the huge platform and the huge brand name and then now you're kind of on your own? You know, anytime you quit your job to do something for yourself. It's a massive risk. And I was really nervous about it, but I kind of got to this point where I was like, I have to do this. I have no other choice. I felt this massive responsibility to live up to all the things my parents had to sacrifice and give them to me, which totally made me kick my own ass to do well in school and go to college and everything, but also limited me in the idea of I never felt like I could actually do something risky. If I fail and if I don't, you know, make it profitable or succeed, then I'm not only letting myself down and embarrassing myself, but also what did it mean for them to move across the world for me? So I had no choice but to succeed. Why did you leave BuzzFeed? The videos I was doing were incredibly physically taxing. Running for a marathon. I did an actual UFC fight. But it kind of got to this point where I was like, if I'm going to be taking these risks and doing all this stuff, I may as well do it on my own, but I will never deny that it was an amazing place to begin my career. As an independent creator, how do you feel personally when you see that video not hit the numbers that you want? You cannot let go as a YouTuber. Like, we look at the numbers and it sucks, but we look at subscribers. We look at views, of course, and it's just like, oh, this video's not doing well. No one's like watching it. No one's clicking on it. And that's like the most stressful thing in your life at that moment. People look at BuzzFeed and they're like, oh my God, it speaks for whatever. Massive view counts, subscriber count. If you look deeply at their videos, it's the same disparity of some goal, like if I were worth it, and then others get a couple hundred thousand views. Our output was so high. I was making six to eight videos per month. I love this content. I make this content. I put it up. I let go. Learning to let go of something in that way was really helpful to me when I went to my own channel and was experiencing like, okay, this video didn't do well. I'm going to learn why. I'm going to fix it and I'm going to move on. The views, they matter. But what matters more is, do I love this piece of content? Because what I was reaching a point at at BuzzFeed was, with such high output and so much pressure on me to get views, I was making stuff I didn't care about. Artistically, I mean, you get more fulfilled, which means a lot more. So much more. And when you put up a video that you love and you care about, you're like, all right, whatever you care about. And then sometimes it's like, oh, wow. Even after all the views and the videos and the BuzzFeed, it's hard to have that formula. It's hard to have a secret formula that's going to hit you. Yeah. But do you want your art to be a formula? No. Like, I don't. I guess some people don't look at it as art. For sure. Do you want your art as formula? That is a question to ask. But do you want your art as a business? I mean, yeah. Definitely like talking about, like fulfilling an immigrant parent's dream. How could you sum it up? I think for me, for so many years, growing up had this mindset of, I have to be successful to make my parents' immigration worth it. But then I think there's another perspective of, they did all that for me to have this opportunity. And it would be a disservice to them if I don't. Not just do it, but like f***ing go for it. It only started to make sense to them when they recognized like, oh, that number of views is number of people seeing it. Right. And where people recognize you when you're out with them. Or if they're Indian parents, friends, kids talk about you. Yes, yes. All right, everybody. That wraps up our Indian buffet episode with Michelle Karey. Thank you so much for coming out here. And it was just good to talk about a lot of things, eat a lot of great food. I guess as far as Mahangos, which couple dishes stuck out to you? My two favorite dishes were the naan. The naan was perfect, fluffy, and we got to see it made in the back. So that made it even more special. My second favorite thing was probably the butter chicken because you can't go wrong with butter chicken. The pakoras were really good. I love the chutney, and I really like the tandoori chicken. What's your major takeaway from this conversation? I don't know. I just think in general, I wish more people were having these conversations. I'm fortunate that like I am in a circle of people who talk about these issues all the time, but it's really cool to like have this conversation with you, get to share, you know, different perspectives on things. All right, everybody, in the comments below, let me know what your favorite Indian dish is and let me know what other cuisines you guys want us to check out. Yo, shout out to Michelle Hari for being here. Thank you so much. My brother couldn't be in this video. I replaced him. I'm a fang bro. Third fang bro right here. All right, everybody, thanks for watching that video, and until next time, we out. Peace. Make sure you have the post notifications on because this channel is awesome. And also give this video a like, comment below your favorite Indian dish, and subscribe. Yeah, I feel like you've done that before. More videos with Andrew.