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

there's also a place called "cafeteria" that i am fairly sure serves everything in plastic trays with the multiple compartments. never been there. it's always busy.

a table of itinerant foodies going crazy over a cilantro-infused pineapple jello mold, taking DSLR snaps of the house-made stovetop stuffing crust on their turkey casserole

fronting ground zero

http://www.haute-dish.com/

i would take a gift card; their beer list isn't bad.

haha wow, that actually exists.

would eat

inevitable last frontier will be the place called Le Dumpster. foodie diving behind supermarkets will be the ultimate in locavore sustainability. still think the new yorker article on the "fad" of "foraging" signals endtimes. you can get FOOD right out of the GROUND! who knew?

that belongs on the future foodie trends thread though.

Shit White People Eat

this dude's food is pretty good, even if the atmosphere is a bit much and the decor borders on/crosses the line to bad tase: http://newasiancuisine.com/5179-zak-pelaccio.html

maybe it's cause I grew up on ground beef casseroles bound w/cream of mushroom soup & mayonnaise, but beyond the LOLs those frankfurter dishes don't strike me as more outlandish and/or indigestible than some of the stuff I read about in high-end restaurant reviews

there is nothing left to do but invent entirely new foods, foods incomprehensible to human perception, foods whose very flavors come at the cost of sanity

At The Mushrooms of Madness

haha

even then some foodie would one-up you - "ah the manna from heaven I had in the middle east was better"

there is nothing left to do but invent entirely new foods, foods incomprehensible to human perception, foods whose very flavors come at the cost of sanity

ilx has done this before: dr. strongo's neuvo cuisine.

an appetizer that turns into a dessert as you eat

does the appropriation of eastern european foods work differently than that of Latin American or Asian foods?

besides generally being less yummy

maybe it's cause I grew up on ground beef casseroles bound w/cream of mushroom soup & mayonnaise

Had this at an elementary school potluck last night, it was amazing and I went back for seconds.

there were tater tots in it too, obviously.

hahaha my mom made that tater tots casserole 1000x

does the appropriation of eastern european foods work differently than that of Latin American or Asian foods?

Data point: the hipster Russian dumpling shop here went out of business. Pelmeni were the only menu item and the in-house music was provided by LPs played on a fetishistically displayed wood-cabinet record player. I miss it, actually.

hahaha my mom made that tater tots casserole 1000x

Just trying to say that this kind of food is not somehow far away in time or space; people around this great nation are eating tater tot casserole as we speak. They sell it in the grocery store prepared-food case here right next to the eel sushi and roasted beet salad.

I don't have a horse in the 'authenticity' race, but I do think pan-Asian places are frequently pretty bad. I think they cast too wide a net, as in "we're going to cook you region-specific food, from a region comprised of more than half of the earth's population and containing every conceivable biome and ingredient and also there will be probably be ginger"

this is fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epoIPgQrAyQ

the future is now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh9CdDzfU5g

Note: I love food carts to death, I live about 50 feet from a great lot of them.

I also live in a city also infused with folks convinced they can out-clever and out sub-niche each other, and food carts is a battlefield they have chosen. to paraphrase a local alt-weekly, if they spent as much energy into having regular or even stable opening hours as they did coming up with a gimmick and punny name, not nearly as many of them would fail.

Thus my putrid preciousness comment.

this thread worked out surprisingly well. would eat at haute dish.

in the linked conversation/rant, i thought eddie was OTM with this:

At a certain point, food isn’t an ethnic thing, it’s a class thing.

imo americans cloak their class aspirations in ethnic identity and not just w/food choices

well, we also cloak our class aspirations in class aspirations

there's no class in america, remember

there's no class in america / whoa-oh / everybody live with the elephant bar

from the haute dish page:

Haute Dish is the first local restaurant for the Millennial Generation and it's as important as any we've got

oh hi i want to murder you

http://www.wwd.com/eye/food/tao-downtown-opens-in-the-meatpacking-district-7211530?module=Eye-hero

gross

yeesh

we really just need that picture at the top of the page to draw our conclusions

Scamardella stumbled upon the dish at a restaurant in Hong Kong. After begging the kitchen staff for the recipe, he finally broke them down by bribing them with a round of beers. Although this method wasn’t the norm, the chef was able to procure a trove of recipes, as well as some skilled help. During his travels, Scamardella recruited a handful of chefs from China, Singapore and Japan to move to New York and cook for Tao.

“They are all living in a house in Staten Island now. We brought everybody back,” Scamardella said, chuckling, before underscoring that Tao, which has a Midtown location in New York and one in Las Vegas, “has always been a restaurant first.”
O_O

"...and you know how Jesse was working for Todd there towards the end? That's how we roll with the Staten Island house, except we got a lot of guard dogs too."

Grrrrrrrrrross.

http://bitchmagazine.org/article/craving-the-other

Really good piece

When I go to contemporary Asian restaurants, like Wolfgang Puck’s now-shuttered 20.21 in Minneapolis and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market in New York City, it seems the entrées are always in the $16–$35 range and the only identifiable person of color in the kitchen is the dishwasher. The menus usually include little blurbs about how the chefs used to backpack in the steaming jungles of the Far East (undoubtedly stuffing all the herbs and spices they could fit into said backpacks along the way, for research purposes), and were so inspired by the smiling faces of the very generous natives—of which there are plenty of tasteful black-and-white photos on the walls, by the way—and the hospitality, oh, the hospitality, that they decided the best way to really crystallize that life-changing experience was to go back home and sterilize the cuisine they experienced by putting some microcilantro on that $20 curry to really make it worthy of the everyday American sophisticate. American chefs like to talk fancy talk about “elevating” or “refining” third-world cuisines, a rhetoric that brings to mind the mission civilisatrice that Europe took on to justify violent takeovers of those same cuisines’ countries of origin. In their publicity materials, Spice Market uses explicitly objectifying language to describe the culture they’re appropriating: “A timeless paean to Southeast Asian sensuality, Spice Market titillates Manhattan’s Meatpacking District with Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s piquant elevations of the region’s street cuisine.” The positioning of Western aesthetics as superior, or higher, than all the rest is, at its bottom line, an expression of the idea that no culture has value unless it has been “improved” by the Western Midas touch. If a dish hasn’t been eaten or reimagined by a white person, does it really exist?

Also vibed much with descriptions of growing up an immigrant

I wanted the straightforward, prefabricated snacks that I saw on television: Bagel Bites, Pop-Tarts, chicken nuggets. When my grandmother babysat me, she would make tiny concessions, preparing rice bowls with chopped turkey cold cuts for me while everyone else got caramelized pork. I would make my own Bagel Bites by toasting a normal-size bagel and topping it with Chinese sausage and a dash of Sriracha. My favorite snack was a weird kind of fusion: a slice of nutrient-void Wonder Bread sprinkled with a few dashes of Maggi sauce, an ultraplain proto–banh mi that I came up with while rummaging through my grandmother’s pantry. In our food-centric family, I was the barbarian who demanded twisted simulacra of my grandmother’s masterpieces, perverted so far beyond the pungent, saucy originals that they looked like the national cuisine of a country that didn’t exist.

...

All of this makes the experiences of the immigrant’s Americanized children particularly head scratching. We’re appreciated for our usefulness in giving our foodie friends a window into the off-menu life of our cuisines, but the interest usually stops there. When I tell white Americans about the Maggi-and-margarine sandwiches and cold-cut rice bowls that I used to eat, they tend to wrinkle their noses and wonder aloud why I would reject my grandmother’s incredible, authentic Vietnamese food for such bastardizations. What I don’t tell them is, “It’s because I wanted to be like you.”

Brought back memories of my packed school lunches

We'd go to Pathmark and load up on cold cuts

My dad would make these really thick cold cut sandwiches. About an inch thick of honey ham or w/e and lettuce and white bread and both slices slathered in mayo. The lettuce would be wrinkly and soggy and the bread mushy because the mayo would have permeated everything

Those sandwiches were not made with a love or understanding of American cuisine

Also remember coming home every day and my dad making two hot dogs, boiled, heavy on the ketchup, ate while watching GI Joe and X-men and all the other after-school cartoons

wolfgang puck invented food (foodie mansplaining)

also, my dad just did this to me re my thanksgiving dish.

i always blame boomers for everything annoying, but i'm gonna call this a primarily boomer problem?

if you wanted to go to an asian restaurant in minneapolis why would you go to wolfgang puck's?!

Notice the adjective 'contemporary'

oh wait i only read the first post! sorry.
i'll read the whole thing before i have anything else to say.

If I want to go to an Asian restaurant that's michelin rated and run by Asian dudes I think my options are pretty much limited to sushi places in NYC

'doctor, my arm hurts when i do this…'