James Charles Compared Butter Chicken to Vodka Sauce. NDTV Food Has the Tape.

On October 26, 2026, NDTV Food published coverage of a video in which James Charles, the YouTube makeup creator with approximately 24 million subscribers, rates Indian food. The item surfacing in his Google News feed is headlined "Popular Makeup Artist James Charles Rates Indian Food, Compares Butter Chicken To 'Vodka Sauce'." That comparison is the sentence doing the work here.

What's documented

For the record, the concrete record on this one is thin but specific. Here is what the signal actually establishes, attributed to its sources:

1. NDTV Food, an Indian food and lifestyle outlet, published a video or article on or before October 26, 2026, covering James Charles rating Indian food. The piece is indexed in his Google News feed and attributed to NDTV Food directly.
2. The headline, as reproduced in the feed, states that Charles compared butter chicken to "vodka sauce." The comparison is presented as a direct quote. The source for this quote is the NDTV Food piece; MAFKR has not independently verified the clip.
3. The IMDb entry for "Sidemen Try James Charles Make Up Tutorial (2019)" surfaced in his feed on October 23, three days before the NDTV item. That entry is a listing for a seven-year-old video. It has no apparent connection to the butter chicken assessment but establishes that the feed continues to pull from a wide temporal range.
4. A BuzzFeed article dated December 12, 2020, headlined "James Charles Tweeted The Tinder Message He Constantly Gets And It's Very NSFW," also appears to have surfaced in his feed during this reporting window. That article is approximately six years old. No editorial rationale for its current appearance has been offered.

The comparison itself

Butter chicken, known as murgh makhani, is a tomato-cream-based north Indian dish. Vodka sauce is an Italian-American pasta preparation, also tomato-cream-based. The structural similarity is real. Whether the comparison lands as compliment, critique, or simple culinary free association is not established by the headline alone. NDTV Food's framing uses quotation marks around "Vodka Sauce," which suggests the phrasing is Charles's own.

No response from Charles on the comparison has been indexed in the feed as of this writing.

What happens next

Open questions: whether the full video includes additional ratings that have drawn comment; whether NDTV Food's coverage prompted reaction from Indian food media or Charles's audience; and what explains the December 2020 BuzzFeed article appearing in the feed now, six years after publication, which would represent the longest documented lag in an ongoing feed anomaly that has been running since at least September 2026.