67 Krishnendu Ray Fed by the Other. City Food and Somatic Difference Excessive attention to territorialized taste – linked to terroir – has elided over the fact that tastes travel. ey travel quite well, obviously in terms of produce as the history of potatoes, chilies, and tomatoes show, or as stimulants such as coffee, tea and chocolate illuminate, but also via immigrant-designed food businesses in global cities. Urban Americans have been fed by the foreign-born since we have historical records. Based on census data, newspaper records, and interviews with immigrant entrepreneurs and native consumers, this article takes the case of South Asian restaurateurs in New York City, to argue that transactions around literal tastes can provide an instructive window into power and urban cultures. e earliest archival trace of South Asian food in New York is among a group of itinerant merchants selling textiles between Chittagong in East Bengal, New Orleans and New York at the end of the nineteenth century. In the United States they established the first settlements oſten in black neighborhoods, replete with cafés, restaurants, cook-shops and teashops. In Bengali Harlem, Vivek Bald draws a finely textured portrait of about two dozen such itinerant Bengali peddlers of chikan (a textile), circulating from Hoogly to New York in fin de siècle nineteenth century, sliding in the interstices between the dying throes of the British Empire and the birth of the North American emporium. 1 According to Claude Markovits, such peddlers may have added up to a quarter million merchants and financiers operating outside the subcontinent, mostly in the Indian Ocean world, between 1830 and 1930. 2 Caroline Adams provides us with an analogous handful of Bengali trading pioneers in the United Kingdom. 3 When these