“Kim,” she would say, grabbing my hands, “you must come discover why we call it God’s own country.”

I finally took her up on it. After 14 hours in a plane that took us through Qatar and then to Kochi, the largest urban area in Kerala — its airport is the first in the world run completely on solar power — we found ourselves in this beach resort dissecting the new wave of Indian travel over fried chicken that was almost like the banana-leaf-wrapped version she used to eat as a child at street stalls called thattu kadaas.

Ms. Gomez grew up in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital city on the Arabian Sea, about a four-hour drive south of the beach where we were eating. Many of the white beaches along the Kerala coast are rustic and inviting. A pleasant morning can be spent watching traditional wooden fishing boats come and go. Ms. Gomez swears that the sand is softer and the water is bluer as you get closer to India’s tip, where she grew up.

After her father died of a heart attack when she was 16, she and her mother moved to Michigan, where her older brothers were in college. She made her way to New York City before landing in Atlanta, where she has made a career out of blending the food of the Indian South with the American South, first at Cardamom Hill and now out of a private kitchen called The Third Space.

In an age where Korean taco trucks and poke bowl restaurants seem to be everywhere, the approach might seem another attempt to cash in on a rising American appetite for international culinary mash-ups. But the two styles of cooking work together beautifully.