immigrant & ethnic food cultures, white ppl & appropriation, foodies

Also a $50/head meal to me involves booze and Service, neither of which I would think of when mentioning a Puck restaurant or Spice Market

I always interpreted this as meaning "it's not the neck, or the foot or tail of the animal so it's cool for whites ppl" vs. "we kill bespoke swine for your bunz"

maybe 20 years ago.

xpost - true about fries, not true about meat.

btw the 20.21 brunch had this on the buffet line, truly the height of asian fusion
http://www.food.com/recipe/asian-ramen-coleslaw-180352

Minneapolis had good Vietnamese food 20 years before most places in Europe (and arguably America, including the West Coast).

Nakh, I'm thinking about the Sichuan chew-with-a-view place in the Shard and Bar Shu etc as haute. As more Chinese money moves into London, more fancy Chinese regional cuisine. London's Vietnamese community are at the point in their establishment here, where they'll start opening fancier restaurants than, say, Viet Grill. In another 10 years, London will probably have about five fancyish Somali places and a couple of dozen Persian.

Agreed UGH at rich wannabe-chef bros who bring a bunch of recipes back and don't involve the people who came up with the cuisine in their business.

xpost to LG, provenance of ingredients is important, as is animal welfare. It's not snobby to want to minimise people's impact on environment or to work towards better animal welfare.

anyway like, there is no way anyone, not even foodies, would claim these places are authentic. authenticity is fetishized hugely by foodies with prob just as many awkward racial issues as the idea of the high-end ethnic restaurant staffed by white superchefs. seems that'd be an interesting angle to come at this from too.

puck & co should be burned at the stake if they really have some sort of tourist narrative printed in their menus, imo

like literally our ideas about authenticity in things seem to have some weird obsession with the idea that the unsanitised is holy - even when we're actually eating something, putting it into our bodies - dirty equals real.

by our i guess i mean white people

You're paying $10 for french fries with truffle oil regardless of where the fries are 'sourced'
totally
it is a waste of money on top of everything, that's extra gross on top of gross. i don't even like going to restaurants that are that expensive. no matter how tasty the food is, it is always totally overpriced and guess what -- that brand name potato tastes like a potato.

i still kinda think the appropriating celebrity chef is a boomer man thing.

She never claims that those restaurants are claiming to be authentic! She's just pointing out that they are using Asian cuisines to lend themselves a little different-than-our-neighbors gloss - and that most people would be fine with paying higher prices for this 'refined' or 'reimagined' asian cuisine but would turn up their noses at paying similar prices at an actual Asian restaurant

Do you mean a restaurant with an Asian chef, or a diff definition of actual Asian restaurant? In London I think there are quite a lot of high-end Asian restaurants with Asian chefs.

I feel like the idea of a high-end restaurant has sort of boxes to tick that are nothing to do with food anyway, esp the higher up you go. Like probably even the price when you get to the really formal places.

Did any of you read Eddie Huang's memoir? Interested in what you guys think of it if so.

Anyway for all my repressed ire I actually think Andy Ricker is a cool dude, this was a good interview

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/2013/10/pok_pok_ny_andy_ricker.php

You took an online reviewer to task for expecting free rice. Tell me about that.
This speaks to a much bigger problem: People view Asian food as a cheap commodity food. It should be plentiful and cheap and you should get free shit with it. And that's in our mindset because people who have sold Asian food in our country are just trying to survive. But we all live in the same economic reality. You're keeping your food cost below 30 percent, so if you're charging $7 for a giant plate of food, something has to give: labor, rent, or food. Most places aren't going to be buying natural meats, organic vegetables, top-grade seafood, or even top-grade rice. We don't make a big deal about it, but we use all-natural meat and high-quality ingredients, and we pay a fair living wage to employees. High-quality jasmine rice from Thailand costs more than $1 a pound, and you have to be careful in how you prepare it. We don't charge that much money for our food, so I don't feel bad about charging $2 or $3 for rice. And to top it off, in Asia, you pay for rice. Free rice is an American invention.

Talk to me about authenticity. Does it matter?
We don't use authentic, and we don't use traditional; those words are not in the literature. In my new cookbook, there's an essay on the absurdity of authenticity. Most Thai restaurants call themselves traditional, authentic Thai--to me, that means what you get in an American Thai restaurant. I like that food. Everyone likes that food. It's fucking delicious. But if you call yourself traditional or authentic, you're putting yourself in a position to piss people off.

Do you mean a restaurant with an Asian chef, or a diff definition of actual Asian restaurant? In London I think there are quite a lot of high-end Asian restaurants with Asian chefs.

I feel like the idea of a high-end restaurant has sort of boxes to tick that are nothing to do with food anyway, esp the higher up you go. Like probably even the price when you get to the really formal places.

― Legitimate space tale (LocalGarda), Monday, November 25, 2013 10:52 AM (59 seconds ago) Bookmark

Thinking more of restaurants where the clientele are primarily Asian. There are a bunch of places out in Flushing like this where you probably couldn't get away for less than $30 a head and the food is great

Minneapolis had good Vietnamese food 20 years before most places in Europe (and arguably America, including the West Coast).

― hatcat marnell (suzy), Monday, November 25, 2013 7:45 AM (8 minutes ago)

http://www.addictinginfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Everything-You-Know-Is-Wrong-250x364.jpg

the best vietnamese in london is haute cuisine by quality just not decorated or presented thusly etc

I feel like ,in London, restaurants where the clientele are primarily Asian tend to be given coverage by critics, a dedicated few anyway, but I can't be certain good spots aren't being ignored. The real food-obsessed people seem p open-minded but I dunno if that's a UK-centric view. I dunno, I just feel from my experience people who are into food hunt down the best stuff they can.

But maybe that's a diff type of person to the one who goes to Wolfgang Puck restaurants, I suspect there's huge ignorance when you get that high end anyway, same as with the fashion choices of the rich or whatever else.

Why is she wrong? The Vietnamese and Hmong populations in Minnesota were among the first in the west, right?

Xpost

suzy i agree and hope you are right and we get more high end places from other cuisines than french japanese italian etc

Minneapolis had good Vietnamese food 20 years before most places in Europe (and arguably America, including the West Coast).
― hatcat marnell (suzy), Monday, November 25, 2013 7:45 AM (8 minutes ago)

Need to point out the historical reasons for this being so

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indochina_Migration_and_Refugee_Assistance_Act

I feel a guilty thrill from enjoying articles and television spots hosted by middle-aged white men criticizing the bland, expensive haute cuisine of other middle-aged white chef men served in tourist destinations and overpriced downtown urban locales

xpost to LG, provenance of ingredients is important, as is animal welfare. It's not snobby to want to minimise people's impact on environment or to work towards better animal welfare.

btw I agree with you completely on this Suzy, but I guess it could be argued it's not something everyone can afford to care about either, and hence in effect tends to be a concern for the more well-off.

Also Vietnamese food often has a heavy French influence, so what does authenticity even mean in a case like that.

great britain had curry before it had fish & chips, makes u think

Gee I wonder why it has such a heavy French influence

nice french people bringing exotic french cooking techniques and spices

I could do without the splaining

hunan is probably the best echt-chinese or as close to it as possible place in london (though it is hunanese reimagined via taiwan i think), described by loudmouth pleb giles coren as the best chinese place in the world which typifies the sort of ludicrous climate anyone in the london restaurant world operates in

i am curious about the peculiar food of ppl's childhoods like dyao's double mayo honey ham sandwiches.

Even when I was eating them I realized they were really bad sandwiches. It takes a lot of mayo to make iceberg lettuce wilt, which is what we used because it was the cheapest

The school lunches were much better. For $1.50 (or .40 if you qualified for the reduced price rate like I did) you could get a chicken patty sandwich, a bag of chocolate milk, tater tots or fries if you were really lucky. Or you could go to the hoagie line and get a sweet tuna salad hoagie. But I never had forty cents

Glucose powder straight from the packet or in a sandwich

deems what irish food should people appropriate

Deems have you ever thought about opening a Chinese-Irish fusion restaurant. Let's do it. But in all descriptions it's imperative that the 'Chinese' come in front of the 'Irish' part. What part of Dublin would be best do you think

Minneapolis had good Vietnamese food 20 years before most places in Europe (and arguably America, including the West Coast).

Why I'll be sure to pass that RIGHT along to a lot of folks right here in OC, about ten minutes up the 405.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Saigon#Orange_County

I mean I don't work in a library that has this here or anything

http://seaa.lib.uci.edu/

when I was in ireland I went to a mexican restaurant with a picture of africa in the front that had potato nachos

xxxxxxp
so it wasn't even a peculiar child's palate thing? you wouldn't be at all tempted by an authentic home-made one now?

Also not irrelevant (and the book she wrote is a great one)

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/mar/29/food/fo-viet29

Hell no. I mean I liked cold cut sandwiches as a kid and I still do now. A really good italian hoagie is incredible

But no I would not be tempted by a double meat both sides mayo iceberg lettuce wonderbread sandwich. No way

Peanut butter and bacon sandwich (bread toasted, always) was a thing in my family. Also fried bologne sandwiches with mayo.

xposts Have told the story of '70s arrival of Vietnamese and Hmong communities in MN a number of times, which takes about the same effort to check as it does to pull up a tres amusant JPG to deploy in telling me I must be wrong. ~sigh~ A quick Google just showed me there are at last Hmong restaurants in the Twin Cities - the lateness of which makes sense because the Hmong have found integration a bit more difficult to manage than the Vietnamese did.

In London, I'm a short walk from Chilli Cool so I don't think I've eaten much in other Chinese restaurants since I started going there.

My Proustian childhood sandwich is either deli bologna with French's mustard on heavily buttered egg twist/cholla bread (an especially bitey sandwich) or Pillsbury crescent rolls stuffed with a hot dog and melted Kraft slices, then baked. My mom bought our bread from bakeries; Wonder and its ilk were banned. Would still eat both, or switch the bologna for ham. My dad ate peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches, which has to be the most repulsive combo in the world.

The Vietnamese population (I'm not talking Laotians or Cambodians, but strictly Vietnamese) is pretty insubstantial in MPS compared to the rest of the country*.

*Concentrations of Vietnamese-born population of the USA:
http://i.imgur.com/1ArxEK7.png

Of the 231,000 Vietnamese population in the USA in 1980, less than 3% lived in the state of MN, with over 50% living in CA. (Apparently the USA census states there were 0 Vietnamese people living in the USA prior to 1970.)

Why anyone would think that the Minneapolis was privy to better Vietnamese food 20 years prior to anywhere else in America or Europe (like Pho Banh Cuon 14 in Paris which will be 100 years old next year) is beyond me.

fancy azn places to eat in ny that aren't freaky appropriation-fests:

danji, red farm, mission chinese (tho yeah i know about the temp shutdown by the health dept, ick).

appropriation-ish azn fusion that's still tasty:

fatty crab.

other suggestions?

I've been meaning to check out red farm for a while

(oh add salt&fat to the first list)

I've heard Yunnan Garden is okay but requires a more 'sensitive' and 'delicate' palate

(first list should be fancy + fusiony, actually.)

There's a new place by the owners of Nom Wah that just opened

http://fungtu.com/

Might go tonight