Food; Home @ 19 Aug 2008 05:43 pm by Christina Waters
The subtext behind complaints about multi-cuisine restaurants (see my mini-rant below) is not only that it’s incredibly difficult to get one culinary genre right, much less two or three. But that calling a place, e.g. an “Asian Restaurant” implies that there is such a thing as “Asian” food. And that implies the devolution of specific ethnic cuisines and traditions into a glob of fused, homogenous cookery that merely nods in the general direction of its various influences.
How much of so-called “Asian” cuisine, for example, is Japanese? And how much is Thai? or Cambodian? or Mandarin, Szechuan, Vietnamese? You see where I’m going.
If I drove by a restaurant that billed its specialty as “American cooking,” I would not only be confused, but I’d wonder what happened to, e.g. Cajun, or Chesapeake, or Texas-style, or California, or Southern. What I mourn in this postmodern, globalized environment is the details of specificity - in wine it’s called terroir. Those unique flavors, styles, histories, influences, ingredients, which distinguish this place from that, one climate from another.
When you globalize cuisine, you cheat every one of those powerful, unique and honorable influences. You neutralize them in the name of convenience, i.e. $$$.
Yeah, Italian cooking has slid since it succumbed to cheap imported tomatoes. 400 years ago. We could claim Thai cooking lost its pristine flair when it allowed chilis into the wok, if only that mongrel melange of Indian, Chinese and Malay influences had existed before those vulgarly prolific fruits spread like a capsaisin plague.
Terroir didn’t even matter much in wine until bottling technology improved enough to put $$$ into fussing about it.
There is definitely a difference between food that meets all the different needs–nutrition, status, entertainment, epiphany, flattery–of those it is fed to, and food that falls short for any number of reasons.
Food innovations, like others, fall under the dictum that theft is the act of lesser artists, robbery the province of the great.
Regardz, India Joze
Always nice to hear from you Joe, although as usual you jump in too quickly to make your social justice pitch.
I’m not railing against cuisines cross-pollinating, and hence adding depth and richness, not to mention sexiness to the mix. It’s the one-size-fits all mind set that irritates me. The sub-merging of nuance under some global brand. And terroir has always mattered in winemaking - just ask the Burgundians.
Funny, how this genericization of food is occurring at exactly the moment when locavore consciousness is blooming, and stirring up grass roots passion for the specific foods of a place, time and tradition.
Guess you think that’s only for elitists?
Christina
Okay, you two are too deep for me. But let me explain what I think in layman’s terms. I don’t think this post was meant as a plebiscite on India Joze, but as a former chef at that “multi-cuisine” restaurant, I think we got a number of cuisines right, or at least we were pretty close on our good nights. We were pleased, our patrons were pleased. The palates, if not the consciousness, of all involved were expanded. I don’t think of the dishes we cooked as “fusion,” but they certainly were an interpretation. And with interpretation comes change. But this has been happening ever since people started sharing dishes and recipes with one another. Cuisines, like languages, change every time somebody attempts to express themselves through these means. Nothing is really pure, is it? And that strikes me as only human, not elitist.
Fair enough Aaron - Joze was a great restaurant that indeed wok’d up a range of culinary styles, all approached with a passion for authenticity (even if California interpretive inflections were inevitable).
But I’m not targeting India Joze - which did not, as far as I recall, ever call itself an “Asian Restaurant.” I was actually reacting to the sign I saw on a yet-to-be-opened restaurant (see my Aug.6 post), which calls itself an “Asian Restaurant.” It also advertises itself as specializing in Chinese and Japanese cuisine.
Obviously I’m no postmodernist and the global melting pot trend - however interesting the results may be - just gives me metaphysical indigestion.
Thanks for your response!
Christina