Curry Rice Emoji

A plate of curry and rice: orange-brown curry with meat or vegetables alongside a mound of white rice. Originally encoded as 'Curry and Rice' in Unicode 6.0 (2010), this emoji was almost certainly designed with Japanese curry (kare-raisu) in mind, given emoji's Japanese origins. But curry is one of the world's most universal foods, spanning Indian, Thai, Japanese, British, Caribbean, and Southeast Asian traditions. The emoji works for butter chicken, katsu curry, Thai green curry, Jamaican curry goat, or a weeknight Japanese home-cooked kare. It represents one of the most complex culinary histories of any food emoji: a dish born in India, globalized by the British Empire, transformed by Japan's Navy, and beloved from Birmingham to Bangkok.

Curry has no single origin, the word itself is a British colonial simplification. The Tamil word 'kari' (sauce/gravy) was adopted by Portuguese and then British traders in India to describe an enormous range of spiced dishes that varied radically by region, religion, and household. The British condensed this diversity into 'curry powder', a pre-mixed spice blend that horrified Indian cooks but made spiced food accessible to European kitchens. As the British Empire expanded, curry traveled everywhere: to Southeast Asia with ancient spice traders 2,000 years ago, to the Caribbean with indentured Indian laborers after 1834, to Japan via the British Royal Navy in the 1870s, and back to Britain itself with the post-war South Asian diaspora. The result is that 'curry' now means wildly different things depending on where you are: a mild, sweet roux-based stew in Japan; a coconut-milk-simmered Thai creation; a fiery vindaloo in Goa; or chicken tikka masala in Glasgow.

1. 2010Encoded in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F35B 'Curry and Rice', reflecting the Japanese dish kare-raisu. Part of the food emoji block standardized from Japanese carrier emoji sets
2. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0. Most platforms render it as a plate with orange-brown curry and white rice, with Apple showing a more Japanese-style presentation and Google offering a slightly more generic look

This emoji reads differently around the world. Japanese users see kare-raisu, their comfort food and unofficial national dish that overtook sushi in popularity by 2000. Indian users may see it as a simplified representation of their extraordinarily diverse cuisine, India has hundreds of distinct curry traditions, not one. British users associate it with Friday night takeaway from the local curry house, an industry worth £4.5 billion annually and largely run by British Bangladeshis. Thai users might not even recognize it as their food, since Thai curries look quite different from the emoji's Japanese-style presentation. Caribbean users connect it to curry goat and roti, dishes born from the Indian indentured labor diaspora after 1834. The emoji's Japanese-centric design means it somewhat underrepresents the sheer global diversity of curry traditions.

• Black pepper: Called 'black gold' by Roman traders, pepper from India's Malabar Coast was sometimes worth more than gold by weight. The pepper trade motivated Vasco da Gama's voyage to India in 1498 and drove centuries of colonial competition.
• Turmeric: The spice that gives most curries their yellow color. Used in Ayurvedic medicine for 4,000 years. The active compound curcumin has been the subject of over 3,000 modern scientific studies. Now a global wellness trend as 'golden lattes'.
• Cinnamon: Sri Lankan cinnamon was traded by ancient Indonesian sailors as far as the Mediterranean by 1500 BCE. It appears in ancient Egyptian embalming practices. The cinnamon trade was so profitable that the Portuguese colonized Sri Lanka to control it.
• Cardamom: The 'Queen of Spices', native to the Western Ghats of India. One of the most expensive spices by weight. Guatemala is now the world's largest producer, a legacy of German coffee planters who brought it to Central America.
• Cumin: One of the oldest cultivated spices, found at archaeological sites in Syria dating to the 2nd millennium BCE. The base flavor of North Indian curries. India produces 70% of the world's cumin and consumes 90% of that domestically.

• •Japanese curry (kare-raisu) was introduced to Japan not from India, but from the British Royal Navy in the 1870s. The Japanese Navy adopted it to combat beriberi (vitamin B1 deficiency) among sailors. Today, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force still serves curry every Friday as a tradition to help crews track the day of the week at sea.
• •Curry rice overtook sushi and tempura as Japan's most popular food by the year 2000. CoCo Ichibanya, the world's largest Japanese curry chain, has over 1,450 restaurants across 12 countries. A 2022 survey found curry rice is the #1 favorite school lunch among both Japanese students and their parents.
• •In 2001, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook declared chicken tikka masala 'a true British national dish', calling it a perfect illustration of how Britain absorbs and adapts external influences. The dish was likely invented in Glasgow in the 1970s by Bangladeshi-origin chef Ali Ahmed Aslam.
• •The UK curry industry is worth £4.5 billion annually and employs around 100,000 people. Over 80% of 'Indian' restaurants in Britain are actually owned by British Bangladeshis, 95% of whom trace their roots to the Sylhet region of Bangladesh.
• •Caribbean curry arrived with Indian indentured laborers who replaced enslaved workers on sugar plantations after 1834. About 240,000 went to British Guiana (Guyana), 144,000 to Trinidad, and 36,000 to Jamaica. Their curry goat and roti became national dishes of their adopted countries.
• •The spices that make curry have been traded for over 4,000 years. Ancient Romans imported Indian black pepper, which was sometimes worth more than gold by weight. Turmeric, cinnamon, and cardamom have been found at archaeological sites across the ancient Mediterranean.
• •The word 'curry' is itself a colonial invention. British traders adopted the Tamil word 'kari' (sauce) as a catch-all term for thousands of distinct spiced dishes across India, flattening an extraordinarily complex culinary map into a single English word.
• •Thai curries (green, red, yellow, massaman, panang) are fundamentally different from Indian curries: they use coconut milk as a base, fresh herb pastes rather than dry spice powders, and ingredients like lemongrass, galangal, and kaffir lime leaves that do not appear in Indian cooking.
• •Turmeric, the spice that gives most curries their yellow color, has become a global wellness trend. 'Golden lattes' (turmeric milk) are now standard at cafes worldwide. The active compound curcumin has been the subject of over 3,000 scientific studies examining its anti-inflammatory properties.