‘I only cook when it can potentially lead to sex,” says Aasif Mandvi, “The Daily Show”

correspondent and co-writer and star of “Today’s Special,” which opens the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival tonight at the Paris Theatre. This means that all the hot and heavy slicing and dicing he appears to have mastered in the film won’t help him get laid.

In real life, he says he can’t really cook that well — although you’d be fooled by his character, Samir, an accomplished sous chef at a French restaurant in Manhattan. In the film, Samir is later forced to take over his father’s dilapidated Queens Indian food joint. Samir, who doesn’t know the difference between curry powder and cumin, enlists the help of a loony immigrant cab driver, Akbar (Naseeruddin Shah), after a fortuitous run-in in the back of his cab, where Akbar claims to have cooked for Indira Gandhi and the queen.

Aasif Mandvi plays a sous chef in "Today's Special."

“It’s about the integration of cultures, about the old versus the new, the idea that it’s about an immigrant family and the joys and struggles of that experience,” he says.

Food fetishists in New York will appreciate the details. For research, Mandvi and co-writer Jonathan Bines spent time hanging with chef Rocco DiSpirito at Union Pacific, and former Elettaria chef Akhtar Nawab doubled as Mandvi’s hands in certain scenes. The ubiquitous disposable blue-and-white Greek coffee cup is perched on the kitchen counter for a chef to use as a chewing-tobacco spit cup. And anyone who has ever hopped a Queens-bound 7 train to Roosevelt Avenue will recognize the screeching and groaning of the tracks and the Indian wrap vendors who serve the tasty stuff near the station.

“I grew up eating Indian food all the time. My mom’s a great cook,” says Mandvi. “Today I feel like Indian food is my comfort food. Whenever I’ve had a sh - - - y day or I’m stressed out, I crave chicken tikka masala. That’s where I go.”

Tickets for the MIAAC film festival are available at iaac.us.