Meandering out after a book fair at Spring Street Studios in Sawyer Yards in August, I scope out the food options and find Tikkas and Takkos parked outside, one of many food trucks in the city selling fusion food. I’m instantly drawn to the mix of tacos: some on flour tortillas, some rolled up in puri parathas.

While much has been made of other culinary mash-ups, like creative takes on Vietnamese and Korean food, it’s places like Tikkas and Takkos, which serves Indo-Pakistani-Texas fusion, that I’m noticing pop up more and more across the city.

Fusion can emerge from anywhere—sometimes it’s just a matter of easier substitutions of basic ingredients.

Cookbook author Shubhra Ramineni, a first-generation Indian American raised and based in Houston, adapts traditional Indian recipes to suit working professionals and busy moms like herself in Entice with Spice and Healthy Indian Vegetarian Cooking. For example, she uses tortillas to make samosas, which happens to also make for a lighter snack. And while most Indian families don’t even bother with making samosas and opt for buying them premade, Ramineni’s tortilla samosas are easy enough to make live on TV, which she once did on KHOU’s Great Day Houston segment.

When I talked to Ramineni, she mentioned other ways fusion makes it into her cooking. She uses vegetables that aren’t indigenous to India, like parsnips and collard greens, that are simply more accessible locally. “And why not support our local farms,” she says.

Amchur—a powder made from dried, raw mango—is a traditional ingredient in Indian cooking, but can be a bit hard to source. Instead, she uses lime to obtain a similar tart taste.

Eating my way through Houston over the years, I’ve come across a number of dishes that mix Indian and Texan sensibilities. Some, like London Sizzler’s Bombay nachos, Pondicheri’s butter chicken kolaches, Velvet Taco’s paneer tacos, and Kiran’s papadam nachos, are one-off items.

But other restaurants run with it more. Cowboys and Indians in Rice Military describes its cuisine as Indian-Tex fusion, showcased with dishes like Huevos Naancheros and a Big Texas Chicken Fried Chicken with a masala buttermilk batter.

Out in west Houston, Twisted Turban digs deeper into fusion with dishes like the chalupa chaat, made with spicy chicken, roasted corn, sweet pomegranate, yogurt, and chutney topped with a crispy “Texas-style” papdi. I particularly like how the restaurant’s Turban Tacos use an Indian-style mango chutney to cut through the richness of the braised beef, and the team serves the tacos on a paratha instead of a tortilla.

Fusion can also come from pragmatic marketability. For Atyab Khatri, co-owner of Rollin Phatties, accessing different demographics was key to the concept’s success. Indian and Pakistani cuisine is often perceived as unfamiliar or messy to eat. Khatri and his partners Hamza Ali and Hamza Paracha decided to focus on kati rolls, which have become popular with the rise of Halal street food carts in New York. It didn’t hurt that kati rolls are similar to tacos, which Houstonians are intimately familiar with.

And when there’s a particular type of food that’s more familiar, why not lean into it?

“We added the quesadilla element to our menu to do an homage to Mexican cuisine,” Khatri says, “but in our own way, so instead of tortillas we do it in parathas.”

And it worked. Originally launched in November 2020, Rollin Phatties has shifted from food trucks to food halls, opening a counter in Post Houston in November 2021, with a second location launching in the Conservatory in the Galleria area at the end of this month.

In the future, I have no doubt that other chefs will take up the call in even more creative ways. Chef Mayank Istwal and his team at Musaafer have already done an excellent series with local chefs, like their collaboration with recent James Beard Award–winning chef Benchawan Jabthong of Street to Kitchen. Himalaya’s “Daily Friendly Fusion” menu includes Indian-spiced Southern fried chicken and a “Paratha-dilla,” an Indian quesadilla. Amrina in The Woodlands offers masala-rubbed steaks with a madras curry sauce, and both Kiran’s and Cowboys and Indians do a South Asian spin on a margarita.

I have yet to see a masala-spiced pecan pie, a rogan josh Texas chili, or Indian-Texas barbecue like chef Ryan Fernandez at Southern Junction in Buffalo, New York, is doing.

But I’m sure it’s coming.

About a year ago, at a random stop for a pint at the Big Ben Tavern in Sugar Land, I chatted up chef Kaliamat Kallatt (known as “Chef KK”) while he was prepping a crawfish boil. He’s already gone wild injecting Indian flavors in his pub grub, but as I leave he talks about doing an Indian-spiced crawfish boil in the future.

And I hope he does.

Fusion comes from many places. Some dishes are so similar it’s like they’re begging to be united. Ramineni talks about traditional dishes like eggs bhurji, which she describes as an Indian answer to migas. Fusion emerges from pragmatic expediency or from immigrants struggling to find local substitutes for a bite of home. It comes from understanding a global smorgasbord of progressively more available ingredients while honoring traditions, all mashed together with a sense of play and whimsy.

And even then it can still all go wrong. But to Khatri, it’s worth the risk. “I think when it goes right, it almost transcends anything you could’ve thought of…so the risk of nailing it is worth the potential situation where it flops,” he says.

As an Indian born and raised in Texas, I’m a fusion myself. So while I remember some spectacular disappointments in the past (a pad Thai burrito that I couldn’t help but order comes to mind), checking out the menu at Tikkas and Takkos fills me with hope and excitement.

In Houston, it’s always a pleasure to toss the dice and find out for yourself.