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

or tomatoes! thank you, conquistadores. 'marinara' = 'sailor sauce'

i LOVE when the stars align to have me in brattleboro. cuz it means i'm buying records.

ewww, sailor sauce...

A huge part of the reason I opened Baohaus is because everyone thought Momofuku pork buns were the original and it pissed me off. I’d been eating them since I was a kid, I knew they were from Taiwan and no one stuck up for us so I did. If you don’t defend the things that matter to you, no one will.

An important bit of context is that this is also a guy who started a $15 all-you-can-drink Four Loko deal at one of his restaurants, publishes recaps of Girls, and is generally known as more of a food-world personality than chef.

past a certain vintage "tl;dr" is a bad look unless it's being deployed for lols imo

― decrepit but free (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, June 7, 2012 10:17 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tl;dr

knew that was coming, lol'd anyway

maybe this weekend...

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TFFmGIJ7rZE/T7wLkIwai1I/AAAAAAAACfw/I6y7rnzqVOk/s1600/IMAG0210.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EReGgwHPlFQ/T7wLVESBc-I/AAAAAAAACfg/1Te_MkaZe0c/s1600/IMAG0207.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-t3fTYx9kWyE/T7wLcxuNAcI/AAAAAAAACfo/cD98AP6uF-s/s1600/IMAG0208.jpg

140 Characters in Search of A Short Attention Span

past the obvious annoyance of publishing your gchat exchange as an article, i don't think anyone in the second one says anything particularly wrong. or even particularly dogmatic: eddie doesn't say whiteppl shouldn't be allowed to make food or even market as they wish, just that it would be nice if the general discourse surrounding these things always framed it with "of course, this is at (x) levels of remove from the real thing, so to call it the best (y) food is kind of silly". it would be nice if.

before that started happening, i was more than happy to try super-spicy and hot food (esp. curries) and would still be if such food didn't tie my digestive tract in knots. so if i like watered-down and mild variants of whatever ethnic treat, it's not just b/c i'm a wussy meatloaf-loving American philistine!

i always kinda forget how chilis (the peppers, not the theme restaurants) didn't arrive in asia until 500 yrs ago or so. for some reason i think of those levels of heat in curries etc as being something that has just about always been a feature of foods in that part of the globe

How do food carts and their increasingly putrid preciousness figure in to all this

when people hate on food carts I'm like "cool, you stay out of the line, if they have good chow that is literally the only thing I give a shit about"

yeah i will admit to liking that food-personality dude's resentful voice in the second piece. he's obviously being hyperbolic all over the place, but he does cover the stuff said upthread about how first generation immigrant food shops are sometimes lackluster and often the classed-up, well-trained chef versions are better, he's just offering an analysis of why that's the case. his resentment does get in the way of the accuracy of his observations sometimes, but i don't think he's saying what some of the people in this thread think he's saying.

that was an xxp to thomp

"oh no I don't like the tattoos on the person serving me this delicious chow & the name of the cart is too cutesy, 4.5 worst new food cart!" fuckin whatever it's a sandwich

yeah, if you look at that food cart and think "putrid preciousness" and not "i could go for a banh mi" you probably have grown to accustomed to your lifestyle and should be exiled to texarcana or rapid city or stoke-on-trent or something

& yeah, i totally agree, i don't understand how a couple of posts hereare any kind of reply to what the guy actually says, rather than a cartoon of a related position someone else may have once held at some point in time

i've never encountered food cart hate. but there aren't a lot in boston, b/c of zoning/weather/licensing, and the ones in seattle/los angeles were pretty old school and benign. i'm under the perception that they exist and are managed and engineered more by hobbyists/starting chefs than wealthy restauranteur types.

also would read his girls recaps tbh

http://thepopchef.blogspot.co.uk/

feel like the GIRLS connection was what was missing from original post that really could take this to clusterfuck summary territory, maybe now if someone argues that he has some kind of illness misrepresented in the drm-iv we can break ilx

other than mentioning pork buns i can't help but notice the wack dude doesn't mention one of the most famous resellers and reinventors of grandma's peasant food. he also doesn't mention all the people lined up to pay 200+ a head for sushi master cuisine. new york is weird and new york food life is unlike anywhere else in the country but one thing foodies are good at is hyping "traditional" places run by immigrants. that's what i don't get about that guy's argument. for every snobby white hotshot fusion chef in a million dollar restaurant (and this is really the whole thing - the hotshots get big money backing and thus can pay for PR and prime real estate) there are a zillion more humble places to go to where the food is appreciated. even the new york times is pretty good at covering bling bling hotshot places AND the out of the way noodle shop/taco/etc place. they give a lot of ink to those small grandma shops! street food is as beloved as le bernardin in new york. that guy just has an inferiority complex or something.

well he's not really angry about the white hotshot fusion chef, he's angry about the white traditional Thai chef who's getting keys to the upper echelon of the world of fine dining that aren't being given to the Thai chefs

he is just mad at white people. i get it; it's made me say some really dumb stuff in my life, probably will continue to. there's something kind of exhilarating about reading it. possibly this is all bad for him and me and we should take care to moderate our tone, but i did enjoy reading it.

maybe i just don't get what the hip-hop chef wants. other than respect for immigrants. which is fine. i respect that. or maybe i just don't get the axe he's grinding. he sounds kinda jealous.

i think the food cart hate like most of the general antipathy towards extremes of foodies culture is due more to the breathless blogging and overhyping of that shit and not so much the thing in itself. like ppl talking how the new korean tacos with a twist down the street are the absolute soaring heights of human cultural achievement and pleasurable experiences

there are a lot of asian fine dining chefs, no?? i mean, yeah, some people might be better at marketing themselves or know the lay of the land better. there are definite advantages to being from here. and obviously benefits to being white/connected/school chums with investment brokers/etc. but asian chefs are also brought here from asia all the time to cook in fancy restaurants. or maybe i'm wrong.

when people hate on food carts I'm like "cool, you stay out of the line, if they have good chow that is literally the only thing I give a shit about"

― decrepit but free (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, June 7, 2012 10:44 AM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^ OTM

Cleveland has really embraced food carts/trucks and we're a lot better off for it. Every Wednesday during the summer they block off part of a downtown side street at lunchtime, bring in a ton of food trucks, have live music, etc. It's awesome.

the empanada resentment wing of the black bloc is going to be turning over food carts during this summer's protests

yeah, it's sort of a weird thing if you live in a place (like madison) where it's just a given that you get lunch at a cart a lot of the time, some of them are yummy, some of them are crappy, but there's no particular cultural value (pos or neg) attached to being the kind of person who patronizes food carts or has opinions about which food carts are better than others.

susanna foo was the talk of the town when i moved to philly years ago. not white. very influential to a lot of people. people forget about these people. they've been here for decades. have more respect for pioneers! they said a chef from Mongolia would never make it in the land of the cheesesteak!

(not to mention a chef opening a restaurant in philly in the 80's that blended french and chinese)

yeah, i think that's one of the realities that that dude's bluster obscures, for sure. and i'm sure you're right that his anger is partly jealousy/wishing he had a higher profile/whatever. i don't know enough about the restaurant business to know if he's right about anything, to be honest, but i found his discussion of the dynamics of the immigrant-owned restaurant + the immigrant community compelling. mostly it is a relief to me when other people sound as resentful as i sometimes sound.

(not to mention a chef opening a restaurant in philly in the 80's that blended french and chinese)

did this person end up independently inventing vietnamese food because that would be kind of amazing

like, the thing he said about food being all chinese-americans have in this country; as you rightly point out, scott, that's not true! but i get how it could feel true! i have heard myself get weirdly culturally nationalistic when indian food gets brought up in conversation and been like, what is this about???

yeah - I think his resentment also stems from being the child of immigrants, ie someone who ought to be better at navigating the whirls and whorls of the restaurant business than his FOB forbears, but is still losing out to the famous white pastry chef who happened to marry into a Mexican family

i get the resentment. and totally understand the immigrant resentment. and feeling left out in a country that just keeps taking your shit and making it seem like a novelty. and, mexico, i am deeply sorry.

there is no real answer to cultural imperialism. just make your food and be true to yourself. that's all you can do. and kill white people.

eat white people

we are talking about a country that made this. and supposedly ate it. some crazy motherfuckers. watch your back.

https://fbcdn_sphotos_c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/s720x720/547553_3701821697805_1511526505_n.jpg

is that a weight watchers recipe card in the sense that those lists of public enemies are CIA playing cards

there's broccoli!

mods pls nsfw this thread

is that pasta? cabbage? lemon rind?

grilled onions, presumably

no, apparently sauerkraut

this one is better:

http://www.greenstardesign.com/blog/barf_dog.jpg

3 slices bacon
½ cup chopped onion
1 can Cream of Chicken Soup
¼ cup milk
3 cups sliced cooked potatoes
1 ½ cups cooked cut green beans
1 pound frankfurters

Heat oven to 350°. Crisply fry bacon slices, crumble and set aside. Drain off excess bacon fat and brown onions in remaining drippings. Stir in soup, milk, potatoes and green beans. Pour into a 1 ½ quart casserole. Cut frankfurters in half, and stand up around the edge of the baking dish. Bake for 30 minutes, top with bacon and serve.

Serves:4
Preparation time: 50 minutes
Approximate calories per serving: 520

I hear white people are trying to sing the blues too. When Muddy Waters was asked whether they could, he supposedly said, "Sure why not, I have a dog that can bark the blues."

if your recipe looks simultaneously like excrement AND genitalia then...

plus the broccoli isn't overcooked enough for that era!

Mayonnaise and cream of mushroom soup are implicated in so much of this shit, thry're like the Bat-signal of shitty American taste trends.

final step: push Frankfurter Volcano into trash, eat marigolds

xxxp

xp
ahem JELLO MOLDS

with marshmallows in case you're feeling especially gelatin-deficient

next dinner party:

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_jyIYP1-t1W0/S9Bq_uIeXnI/AAAAAAAAJZ8/i5or1a2JaSk/vintage-recipe-cards_thumb%5B3%5D.jpg

Last year there was one about 'the soul of the nation bound up in the flavors of the durian... acrid and off-putting to the naive and foreign, but rich and rewarding for the (journalist), the educated, and the noble native." Always reminds me of the schoolbus bit in Altman's 'Nashville.'

I love durian and this is totally tangentially related but last weekend I bought a (frozen, but pricy) jackfruit and holy shit it was a fucking chore to uh... dissemble/extract. I was youtubing hacks and it still took the better part of 90 minutes.

Recommended if you have a passion for extracting pomegranate and pomelo fruit I guess?

mangosteen and rambutan are some of the tastiest shit ever. still have not found a way to enjoy durian. this has been kevin k from white man reports, ILX. signing off

i love all of these fruits, but i was raised by people who were into food culture and am married to someone with a broad knowledge of Asian cuisine (he's Chinese), so i am always baffled by these articles, and also baffled by how insular and boring most Americans' tastes are.

Horrible to contemplate what "Chris" has to eat at home:

https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/08/parenting-indian-food-bubble-covid-families-judgement.html

ahaha, wtf, I was at least expecting that to be about a toddler. my small children love mildly spiced dhal etc.

am now dreaming of being invited to a home-cooked Indian food feast...

people can be horrible about what they think their kids should eat

I remember when friends of my parents were shocked that we let our kids eat olives.

do we have a rolling "these people are horrible" thread for horrible people that aren't politicians or celebrities?

I think that thread is called reddit.com