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

my neighbors keep complaining about my local fish sauce operation but the neighborhood cats are chill w/it

i've never heard of stale soy sauce lol

white people at it again

http://bedfordandbowery.com/2016/03/get-that-griddle-sizzle-at-mr-bing-chinese-crepe-pop-up-at-bowery-station/

But it wasn’t until recently that he learned the optimal recipe, after tasting the wares from upwards of 40 jianbing carts. Once he settled on his favorite one, he paid the “master chef” to teach him her secrets of sauces and seasonings.

if your whitebread midwestern family makes stir fry in a 70s-style electric wok (lol) once every couple months and the soy sauce bottle is a couple years old it gets pretty lame

i would have no problem with years old soy sauce

Though he insists his bings are otherwise authentic, Goldberg says Mr Bing’s is a “cleaner, healthier and more fun” jian bing than what he ate in Beijing. The 38-year-old Columbia graduate actually had a business plan written for a Mr. Bing shop since 2001, when he was studying for a masters degree at the university. But then he got a little busy.

anytime white people say their take is "cleaner" and "healthier" that's some dog whistle for "chinese people are gross and unsanitary"

otm

i dont understand how it's "more fun"

uh that is, you are otm, not the gross undercurrent in that statement xp

20 years ago I made stir fry somewhat regularly and when I saw a gallon can of soy sauce at Smart and Final I bought it. That can lasted several years (I slacked off on the stir fry) and I swear it got better as it aged.

I've had one of those half-gallon jugs of kikkoman last a really long time

http://www.eater.com/forums/reviews-critics/2016/3/23/11290082/please-stop-writing-racist-restaurant-reviews

http://www.wnyc.org/story/can-food-be-racist/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/americans-need-to-stop-being-defensive-about-their-food-culture/2016/03/21/44008e86-eb88-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html

Krishnendu Ray otm

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/dining/dominique-ansel-korean-french-dip-sandwich.html?ref=topics&_r=0

mmmm

i will admit to having posted on this thread a few weeks back while eating a "korean steak sandwich" that i really like at a white ppl market/cafe

went to seoul sausage company this weekend

not good at all actually

i don't understand the hype

i always try fusion places but there are very few that are actually any good

The story of food has been dominated especially by the French model, the idea that it’s about territory, it’s about terroir, good, solid things that never change. I think Americans — especially American elites — need to stop being defensive about their food culture. What is attractive about it is precisely this flow and reconfiguration of American cuisine.

i think this is otm - obsession with fine dining

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/04/have-they-run-out-of-provinces-yet-by-calvin-trillin

lol what is this garbage

he is a humorist

and 800 years old

jfc

I wonder if the whole piece was an excuse to rhyme uighur

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/04/gustu-fine-dining-for-a-better-world
http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2013/jun/13/gustu-restaurant-la-paz-bolivia-review

This is a different phenomenon than we've been talking about, but it's similar. The Guardian article begins "Gourmet Bolivia. Now there's an oxymoron.... Few of us can name any classic Bolivian dishes..."

Why Bolivia? There are lots of foods eaten regularly in Bolivia that are fairly unique: lots of potato varieties, ways of preparing potatoes (maybe you know chuños, potatoes that have been left out to dry in the freezing night air), native breeds of corn with huge kernels and the corn drink api you can buy on street corners, fruits like tumbo, llama and alpaca and ways of cooking pork, salteñas and empanadas, quirquiña, an herb we use to make the salsa called llajua, a cake called penco that is like a huge alfajor with crispy layers, and so on. They're not "foodie" foods for Bolivians, just regularly daily-ish stuff.

Recently a Danish chef (from Nomo, "the best restaurant in the world" for several years) opened a fancy resto in La Paz. The articles I include above give a flavor of the American and British press response. Here's a bit from the New Yorker:

Yet when Meyer visited La Paz, he recalled, he was “frustrated and depressed.” The altitude made him so sick that he brought an oxygen tank to meetings. “I would never take my family to live there,” he concluded. “You can’t even drink the water.” The average monthly wage was less than two hundred dollars, and most locals preferred to eat traditional Bolivian dishes sold at sidewalk stalls and markets; soups made with dehydrated potatoes or beef kidneys were popular. The tourist trade catered largely to backpackers looking for cheap hostels and coca tea. Meyer remembered thinking, “This can never happen. There is no market for this. We will have forty employees but no clients.” Then he descended to Calacoto and began to feel better. “We found a place in La Paz that looked as if it had some well-dressed people.”

I'm glad he felt better.

The Guardian observes that "Diplomats, tourists and the Bolivian elite are the key clientele, due to prices that are unaffordable to most of the population." The chefs are Venezuelan and Danish, though "several" sous chefs are Bolivian. They cook with local ingredients, so you get "fancy" takes on some of the dishes I mentioned above, like charquekan, Bolivia's jerky.

What is the purpose of this restaurant if it's not for locals? It's complicated because Bolivia is so poor, and spends a lot of energy trying to stimulate foreign investment. With this they've succeeded. But they've succeeded by making a playground for foreigners. They're using Bolivia's amazing food diversity to serve to foreigners.

Still, Gusto sounds interesting and I'd love to try it next time I'm there, along with the usual salteñas at 10:30, empanadas at 4:30, and milanesas galore.

three white ppl are gonna open a vietnamese restaurant in st marks http://evgrieve.com/2016/03/theres-vietnamese-restaurant-proposed.html

What is the purpose of this restaurant if it's not for locals?

Reaping large profits by selling overpriced food to anyone willing to pay.

in Portland a white owned "British colonialism-themed restaurant" called the Saffron Colonial has opened in a formerly black neighborhood, serving drinks like the "Plantation Press"

http://harlot.media/articles/2054/saffron-colonial-and-the-colonisation-of-cuisine

http://www.wweek.com/2016/03/29/colonial-themed-restaurant-offers-free-brunch-situation-devolves-after-publicist-calls-protestor-a-cunt/

https://medium.com/@dunx/an-invitation-9f96a0827309#.5hc2sy682

1st link in particular relates to this thread

so, uh, i was gonna link to http://www.wnyc.org/story/is-this-food-racist/, but is this basically the same piece as the brian lehrer show thing linked above?

Saffron Colonial sort of reminds me of a place near me called Pub Royale, which bills itself as "Anglo-Indian" (it also serves kedgeree, e.g.), but wisely doesn't focus on the historical roots of that cuisine.

lol, that just got me thinking about an English pub across town: the Elephant and Castle. So that's where they got the "elephant" from. Never ate there, but I went online to check out their menu: bangers & mash, shepherd's pie, yorkshire pudding. Looked like everything checks out. But hold everything. The Slum Dog - a panko crusted all beef dog, wrapped in garlic grilled naan with curried tomato sauce, caramelized onions, chopped cilantro and spiced yogurt.

the Bouillon Racine in Paris is pretty famous & probably a bunch of you know it, it's in a cool art deco building with ok "classic French" food; but the owners a few years back opened next door a partner resto they call Bouillon des Colonies, and they serve Asian and African recipes. I may have eaten there once, I can't remember, but I've seen the room a bunch, and it's decked out in rugs and other objects from former French colonies. I'm going to look into local criticism of this place along the lines of that Portland article, if there is any (the internet is not as important in French cultural life as it seems to be in American cultural life at the moment). I'm not sure if a resto with a colonial theme can be justified---like, maybe if that food wasn't available elsewhere locally, but there are lots of Asian and African restos in Paris, and plenty of them are in the same price range / "class" as this one.

What is the purpose of this restaurant if it's not for locals?

Reaping large profits by selling overpriced food to anyone willing to pay.

It's pretty hard to make money on high-end restaurants and a lot of them only stay afloat on wine margins. Noma itself only makes a margin of 10% - which is considered pretty great by industry standards. You'd be better off opening a McDonalds franchise. Gustu averages $55 a head which is obvs very high by Bolivian standards but not an investment vehicle for Meyer.

If there's a noble intent behind it, i'd imagine it would be partly around training up local chefs who can then go away and start their own restaurants - which is a huge element of what has made Noma so influential. Beyond that, there's something very modern-chef about wanting to go somewhere 'undiscovered' and stamp your mark on it which is probably partly around self-aggrandisement and partly like climbing Everest because it's there. It has echoes of colonialism (in the sense that the colonial sphere was terra incognita for new Western experience) but probably has little to do with extracting financial value.

there's a vegan/organic/buzzword place in nyc called freefoods that's very whole food-y etc. etc. but they do a take on banh mi called 'le colonial' :|

yes I don't think large profits are the goal here. in principle I'm down with foreigners coming to Bolivia and turning other foreigners onto its culture: that's what my family did 400 years ago! the articles don't paint the owner in a very good light, though. I've eaten at the Swiss Chalet one of the articles mentions, it's indeed where your local family brings you if you've left to a richer country and then come back to see the old country. I had a nice llama steak there. but it isn't particular good or (obv) local otherwise. locals look north for "validation", but in practice that tends to mean "money". & what else should it mean to a poor country? people can say "oh Bolivia is a profound country, deep cuisine, multicultural, beautiful sites" but that doesn't mean money. & foreigners since the 17th century have chiefly come to Bolivia to drain its resources and bring them home. is that what this is too?

lol, that just got me thinking about an English pub across town: the Elephant and Castle. So that's where they got the "elephant" from.

Distribution and habitat
Further information: List of Indian states by elephant population

Indian elephants are native to mainland Asia: India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Thailand, Malay Peninsular, Laos, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and not the U.K. They inhabit grasslands, dry deciduous, moist deciduous, evergreen and semi-evergreen forests.

Elephant and Castle is a little area of London, though.

Oh, my mistake.

also I thought for a second you meant they served elephant. or "elephant". :)

No, I just figured the most obvious connection to elephants for an English pub would be through the colonization of India.

To do this to cuisine, then, would be for the colonising power to appropriate, and claim the profits from selling, the colonised peoples’ cuisine, making it impossible for the colonised people to profit off their own cuisine in the same way.

- from Lace Dagger's Harlot piece, linked upthread by sleeve

The phrase "in the same way" is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence, and LD is primarily talking about access to "fine dining" designation, with associated prestige, attention, and perhaps investment/expansion opportunity. But where simple ability to profit is concerned, I've never seen any indication that culinary colonialism makes it harder for people serving their own cuisines to attract customers or turn a profit. Quite the opposite. The colonialists seem to follow where taste-making early adopters go first: bahn mi and pho joints for cheap lunch in cities with large Vietnamese populations, for instance. Newspaper articles get written and gentrified, white-owned outposts of the cuisine then start showing up in hip neighborhoods where the real thing has no presence, usually with slick signage and clever names. When this initial interest reaches a certain level, "fine dining" takes its stab. From what I've seen, the resulting expansion of consumer interest lifts all boats, from the small neighborhood shops that attracted foodies in the first place to the white linen trend-hoppers that came later.

Of course, that's just my perception. Like LD, I'm not basing it on anything but secondhand observation. Would love to see some hard data or serious investigation. Agree that "fine dining" is a deeply racist construct. And fuck "Saffron Colonial" in the eye.

From what I've seen, the resulting expansion of consumer interest lifts all boats

lol

Elephant and Castle is a little area of London, though.

Named after a pub; the pub name came before the area.

there are loads of places in london that say "a celebration of the days of the old raj" etc. though some are run by indians.

fine dining is hardly inherently racist - personally couldn't gaf about it but plenty of fine dining restaurants are just doing variations of french or italian or euro cuisine. it's surely on the wane though. nobody you'd ever actually meet goes to these stupid megachef restaurants and there are many many informal and high end restaurants in every major city which would never use the term "fine dining" to describe what they do, but still attract people with money. for that matter, most of these places aren't clumsily racist either.

ime most of the ultra-expensive places mentioned itt are like those hotel restaurants where the ultra-rich go. in london they're prob frequented by oil billionaires, at least given nobody else lives in a 5-star hotel or wants to eat there and the residential areas they're in are all millionaire dormitories.

it doesn't end up surprising me that the copywriting to sell food to people who don't carry notes or coins and buy £10,000 vertu phones in diamante louis vutton covers is gauche and awful and offensive. the food is prob awful too.

there is plenty of blatant racism itt, but the perception and value and status of dishes and foodstuffs is always changing, even within a given culture. oysters and lobsters used to be seen as peasant food. pork belly, offal, mackerel, short rib, so many trad cheaper cuts becoming expensive based on chefs and how they cook them.

in one of the fuschia dunlop book she talks about (afair) twice cooked chard becoming a big hit in fine dining restaurants in china, when it started as a dish for people who couldn't afford pork.

i mean racist in that "fineness" is inextricably linked with the values of the dominant (white) culture in an exclusionary way. to the point where, while the kitchen & cleanup crews of many/most upscale restaurants are racially/ethnically mixed, the visible floor staff tends to be white. "it's what the customers prefer."

"From what I've seen, the resulting expansion of consumer interest lifts all boats"

lol

if this isn't true, do you have a good source for data/investigation? i'm basing what i say on a couple decades of life in seattle, casually watching foodie culture colonize a variety of "ethnic" cuisines. from what i could tell, interest booms tended to broaden the city's appetite for the fashionable food in question regardless of the source. this at least seemed to increase patronage at older, more "authentic" places as well as the newer, gentrified joints. like the ramen boom of 2010-12 was exploited most visibly by white entrepreneurs, but established places in the ID were slammed, too.

I'm not an expert but I get the impression that French high cooking is still sort of the filter through which the food in every "fine" restaurant passees, even if it's an "innovative ethio-cambodian fusion" restaurant or whatever. Like french cuisine sort of supplies the majority of technques and building blocks and presentation standards even if the flavors and ingredients come from elsewhere, and I think this winds up true whether the chef/owner is a white person or a person of the same nationality/background as the food (but trained in french-influenced culinary schools or restaurants).

for some reason I just had a nostalgia attack and really miss giant robot magazine's food features

This is sort of interesting:

http://eatoffbeat.com/who-we-are/