Before beginning this essay, a note about the live event surrounding my memoir, “The Winding Road,” taking place on September 30th between 4 and 6 pm EDT. For those who wish to see and perhaps participate but can’t be there, we will be Zooming the event. When we get a bit closer to the event, I will be sending you information about how to access the Zoom.
That said, to begin at the beginning:
“What’s for dinner?”
Heard that before? It’s something I hear or say almost every day. Unless it’s this dialog:
“Let’s go out for dinner.”
“Where should we go?”
“What would you like to eat?”
“What are my choices?”
“Uhh, Mexican, Chinese, Italian, Thai, French, Indian, Ethiopian, American …”
You get the idea. The diversity of food choices in America, even rural America, has grown enormously over the years. In our largest cities, you can find examples of just about any national cuisine. Even in New York’s rural Columbia County in the Upper Hudson Valley, where I spend most of my time, you can find a pretty wide variety of cuisines. Go a little further north to Albany or south to Rhinebeck and Poughkeepsie or east to Great Barrington and Pittsfield, MA, and you can find even more.
Mexican restaurants seem to abound these days, even in Hudson, the county seat, a town of only 6,000 people. There are at least four that I know of, and that doesn’t count the other five or six in the county of 60,000. It strikes me that Mexican restaurants have become something like Chinese restaurants following the large-scale migrations from Asia that helped build America’s railroads in the West starting in the 1860s. One by-product was the proliferation of Chinese restaurants all over, not only in big cities like San Francisco but also in smaller towns in less populated states like Montana and the Dakotas. Perhaps one byproduct of large-scale immigration from Mexico in the 1970s and 80s (legal or illegal) is that it fueled a similar boom in Mexican restaurants in places that had rarely seen a Latin American face. It’s not too far-fetched to think that the seemingly sudden presence of Latino communities in small communities that had known only White and Black inhabitants for decades helped fuel anti-immigrant fervor, is it?
It's not just restaurants. In 1952 when I first started coming to Columbia County, looking for a bagel meant going to the freezer section of a supermarket and looking for Lender’s Bagels. They were a far cry from the fresh bagels in New York City of my childhood. Today, you can find fresh bagels in just about every supermarket that I’ve been to, as well as multiple shops that specialize in bagels. Whereas once bagels were a Jewish thing, now they seem to be everybody’s thing all over America. Arguably, the best bagel shop in New York City is Absolute Bagels. It’s owned by Vietnamese Americans. Another longtime NYC favorite was H&H Bagels, which for years was next door to Zabar’s. I think it was owned by Puerto Ricans. This internationalization is not just bagels. In every supermarket, at least in this county, you can find sections devoted to Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Indian items. And, of course, Italian.
I bring this up because of a recent email exchange between Daniel, my son-in-law, and a Chinese-American friend of his who lives in Seattle and is passionate about the cooking of authentic Chinese food that is not adapted for American tastes and Chinese food cooked by Chinese chefs in restaurants and not by Whites. But first, a little more background.
Daniel is an amateur chef. That is to say, he is self-taught. No degree from the CIA (i.e., the Culinary Institute of America, not the government agency). None from Le Cordon Bleu or wherever. He taught himself by watching his mother in the kitchen, reading cookbooks, talking to chefs, eating in every kind of restaurant, from the fanciest to BBQ shacks in cities and towns across the country, not to mention his frequent travels to China, which often seemed as much about trying out new restaurants as it was about conducting business, along with trips to Italy, Spain, and France, and cooking, cooking, and cooking some more. He and Alicia, my stepdaughter (or semi-daughter, as I sometimes call her when I’m not simply claiming her as my own), once had an underground supper club, The New York Bite Club, which NY Magazine’s Grub Street once called “the French Laundry” of New York’s underground dining scene. High praise, indeed, and well deserved. Before Bite Club started, my wife and I were fortunate enough to be included in their Sunday dinners for friends when they would try out the six to nine-course tasting menus that became the staple of NY Bite Club’s ever-changing dinner menus. In other words, Daniel can cook. And, by the way, so can Alicia.
About eight years ago, Alicia opened a craft beer bar/specialty food shop in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn. A combination of a bar specializing in craft beers, a restaurant serving gourmet sandwiches, soups, and small plates, and a specialty food shop selling arguably the best Babka in New York, organic produce, pasta, olive oils, condiments, frozen food, cheese, etc. A few years later, another larger Mekelburg’s was opened in Williamsburg’s Domino Sugar Factory housing development. And then, in the middle of the pandemic, she opened Guevara’s, a vegan coffee bar also in Clinton Hill. The menus and dishes at all these restaurants were largely the creation of Daniel. It is of no surprise that they have been highly praised by the likes of NY Magazine, The NY Times, The Village Voice, and various “best” lists of bars or restaurants in Brooklyn.
As you might expect, Daniel and Alicia often talk about how to change things at Mekelburg’s, what to add, what to subtract, and what to do differently. One recent thought has been to have a special full multi-course dinner once a month or so that would specialize in a specific cuisine, say Chinese one month and Italian red sauce another.
Daniel’s interest in cooking Chinese food is long-standing, fueled by dinners in Chinese restaurants every Sunday night as a child, his many business trips to China, dining in as many Chinese restaurants as he could in NYC, and cooking, cooking, cooking. Dinners at his house are almost always Chinese these days. It has become his favorite cuisine.
Not surprisingly, Daniel decided to ask a long-time Chinese-American friend in Seattle (who is very much a foodie) what he thought of the idea. He got an answer, but I don’t think it was what he expected.
“My main issue with this is the fact that America is super racist. Both blatantly and casually. That casual racism shows itself when your Andy Rickers and Rick Baylesses get all the James Beard awards, cookbook deals, and magazine pieces. While Thai and Mexican chefs making better Thai and Mexican Food go unnoticed. I have no doubt that Ricker and Bayless have a true appreciation for the respective cultures they are fetishizing. But there is only so much oxygen in the room. If Ricker and Bayless were not sucking all of it up, maybe some recognition would find its way to others just as/more deserving of it. It is my opinion that it is their privilege of whiteness that makes them more palatable, approachable, and marketable to the American public. This is through no fault of their own, but just the circumstance they operate in, and benefit from.
“And then you have an example like Jerry Traunfeld. He is a pretty famous chef here in the Seattle area. This is the guy who literally did a 2 week trip to Szechuan, then came back to Seattle and opened a Szechuan restaurant. He called it Lionhead, a traditional meatball dish not even from Szechuan (as I'm sure you know) that is not even on the menu. It's a classic example of using a culture as mere window dressing. This restaurant is still very popular among the people who are afraid to go into Chinatown. I can't say for sure, but I don't doubt that some motivation for these kinds of places is to cater to those people.
“Another example is Andrew Zimmern, who famously opened a Chinese restaurant in Minneapolis (I think), making statements to the press about most of the Chinese restaurants run by Chinese people in the area were making Americanized Chinese food. How he would bring authentic Chinese food to the area. He says this without even understanding that historically, Chinese restaurant owners had to alter their food specifically in order to cater to the desires of the white customers. It's that kind of arrogance and blindness to privilege that really pisses me off.
“I have no doubt of your appreciation for the Chinese culture and our food. I do realize that my opinion on this is coming from my own prejudices as well, and my opinion may be on the extreme end of the spectrum. I don't think most people care. I think you should do what you love, and people will either get it or not care.”
I must say that I bridle at Daniel’s friend's characterization of America as being “super racist” as though being “super racist” put America in a category different than other countries. Not that racism and all forms of bigotry are not a serious problem in America. But it’s the “super” adjective that bothers me. I wonder what he thinks of Chinese attempts to wipe out non-Han cultures in China’s western reaches. Any thoughts about Russian attitudes towards its minorities (including Ukrainians). And Japanese attitudes about Koreans, French towards North Africans, the British towards everyone? Have you ever heard Cubans talk in private about Puerto Ricans? Racism, super or not, is not solely an American sin.
But this column is about food, not about racism. Well, maybe the distinction is a bit fuzzy. What is clear, though, is that Daniel’s friend is not voicing a ringing endorsement of the idea that Daniel should be cooking a Chinese dinner for paying guests. The clear implication is that only Chinese people should be cooking Chinese food, at least in restaurants. In other quarters, someone might be chastising Daniel for “cultural appropriation,” a favorite phrase among the cultural gatekeepers these days.
From Britannica.com: “Cultural appropriation takes place when members of a majority group adopt cultural elements of a minority group in an exploitative, disrespectful, or stereotypical way.” It goes without saying that “exploitative, disrespectful, or stereotypical” lies in the eyes of the beholder, something without any real definition.
Is that not what all those White chefs are being accused of? Isn’t that what Daniel is being accused of, even if he is sort of excused in the last paragraph, possibly because he is never expected to win a James Beard Award?
So, let’s try this question. What should White chefs be allowed to cook to escape this kind of accusation? One answer might be to only cook that which is your particular ethnic or cultural background. Let’s take one famed restauranteur as an example: The best Italian meal I’ve ever eaten was at Danny Meyers’ now-closed Maialino. Originally, Meyers was a Jewish kid born in St. Louis. He shouldn’t cook Italian? Or is he allowed to without being accused of cultural appropriation because he is White, and White chefs are allowed to cook any ethnic food that originates in a White country? Perhaps Daniel should only cook the Pennsylvania Dutch food of his mother’s family or the German Jewish food of his father’s. Or should we say that he can cook anything that is representative of any cuisine that isn’t Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, or African. Leaving what? Is the real answer that he should only cook American food? But what, you may well ask, is American food? Well, here’s a definition from Wikipedia:
“American cuisine consists of the cooking style and traditional dishes prepared in the United States of America. It has been significantly influenced by Europeans, indigenous Native Americans, Africans, Latin Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and many other cultures and traditions. Principal influences on American cuisine are European, Native American, soul food, regional heritages including Cajun, Louisiana Creole, Pennsylvania Dutch, Mormon foodways, Texan, Tex-Mex, New Mexican, and Tlingit, and the cuisines of immigrant groups such as Chinese American, Italian American, Greek American and Mexican American. The large size of America and its long history of immigration have created an especially diverse cuisine that varies by region.”
In other words, there is no “American” food, no food that is distinct and separate from all the immigrant groups who have settled in this country for the past four hundred years. I guess the exception to that would be the remnants of the indigenous population of America that we tried to exterminate, but even their use of food has found its way into whatever we think of as American cuisine. And that is totally appropriate and consonant with the reality of America, a land mass entirely populated by people who emigrated here (voluntarily or involuntarily) from every corner of the world. By the way, for what it’s worth, America’s indigenous population emigrated here as well, even if it was a few thousand years earlier than the first Europeans.
As people came here from other lands, no traditional food remained entirely as it was in the “old country.” Food from every culture found itself modified, at least somewhat, to make itself palatable to people who were strangers to it. That includes Chinese food in Chinese restaurants. Is it all that surprising that a Chinese restaurant established in, say, the 1880s in Cody, Wyoming, would want to attract customers who weren’t Chinese?
But ever since the end of World War Two, with the advent of the interstate road system and the proliferation of both domestic and international air travel, Americans have been increasingly exposed to the rest of the world. We’ve become increasingly used to the idea of authenticity when it comes to the foods of other cultures. Whereas at one time Chow Mein, Chop Suey, and Egg Foo Yong, were the staples of Chinese menus, those are pretty much forgotten these days. America discovered Szechuan food not all that long ago and realized that it was different than Cantonese food, which was different from Hunan food.
That’s not only true of Chinese food, or Mexican food, or food that emanated from anywhere in the world. Sushi, once the sole province of Japanese restaurants, can be found in supermarkets in many places. Indian food has infiltrated small towns. And one can be sure that not all of it is prepared by people who are of the same ethnic background as the type of cuisine. But there’s one thing you can be sure of when it comes to Chinese restaurants: most of them are pretty mediocre, no matter if their food is cooked by Chinese, Latino, Thai, or White Americans. But then that’s true of restaurants in general.
Cooking is basically a skill, something that anyone can learn how to do. Anyone can cook anything if they are willing to put the time and effort into learning how to do it well. Anyone with the requisite skills can follow a recipe. Want to cook Chinese food? Try Fuschia Dunlop’s three books on Chinese cuisine. Maybe you’ll be able to make Kung Pao Chicken as well as it is turned out by Peking Gourmet Inn in Falls Church, VA. Italian? Try Marcella Hazan. Her recipe for a simple tomato sauce with just three ingredients is better than you’ll find in most Italian restaurants unless you’re looking for a meat-based sauce, in which case ask my wife for her recipe. But I must say that I’ve never had a mole sauce made by anyone in any restaurant or at home better than the one I used to get regularly at La Serenata de Garabaldi in East LA.
But if you want to be a true chef rather than simply a cook, then something more is needed — an innate sense of the flavors of various spices and how they will react to the raw material of the dish, the meat and/or vegetables, and with each other, an imagining of what the final result will be after heat is applied or withheld, and an ability to create rather than simply copy. Or maybe it’s simply the ability to imagine and turn that imagination, that vision, into a physical reality. In other words, the difference between a skill and an art.
Daniel is not a cook. He’s a chef. Are all his creations a success? No. What artist’s creations are? But I know of no reason why he shouldn’t be able to create a completely satisfying Chinese meal, authentic in every way other than the requirement that it be cooked by a Chinese chef, and one that will stand up to the standard that NY Magazine conferred upon him when they called NY Bite Club the French Laundry of the NY underground dining scene.
So, Daniel. Are you up for the challenge? If so, then do it. Just let me know when it’ll happen so I can be there. And maybe ask your Seattle friend if he’d like to join us.
Bravo