If you live in a major urban center, there is little want for variety when it comes to dining options, though interest in variety is not without its complications. Food can be an extremely personal articulation of class and ethnicity, and within the restaurant-sphere, it can easily be stripped of that context in the interest of profit.
Chefs and restaurateurs looking to push the restaurant industry forward are consulting with academics and researchers to infuse their menus with this very context. In return, these consultant roles offer food academics a chance to see their research practically applied in a way that people outside the academy can actively engage with. The result is food that plays on nostalgic expectations while pushing conversations about cultural appropriation forward.
These collaborations respond to impulses and practices that are widespread in the restaurant world. Since the industry relies so heavily on social media for marketing, restaurateurs try to capitalize on trending ingredients and dishes to improve cash-flow. These viral trends usually take the form of an inoffensive if unappetizing array of overstuffed burgers and rainbow-colored foods, but at their worst, can become a venue for cultural appropriation to rear its ugly head.
This happens most obviously when aspects of heritage cuisines are highlighted as “weird” or “exotic” for viral traction, but cultural appropriation also comes into play when restaurateurs claim to give guests “authentic” experiences based on generalized assumptions about authenticity. Gordon Ramsay’s “Asian eating house” Lucky Cat in London is a recent example of this type of marketing. The celebrity chef says the concept is inspired by “1930s Tokyo and the Far East,” and while the restaurant’s moody interior and geisha-topped cocktails do the numbers on Instagram, the tasteless branding smacks of exploitative exoticism.
Shinjuku, Tokyo, 1930s
The issue at hand is not whether Ramsay and his chefs are “allowed” to cook food from outside their heritage cultures or gain inspiration from multiple cuisines. It comes down to how they present the product to consumers. According to Ramsay, the “authenticity” of the restaurant stems from a head chef who spent six months in South East Asia, yet the restaurant is said to serve Japanese food–or Chinese food, depending on who you ask. Each of these regions has its own set of distinct food cultures, but this messaging conflates all 48 countries on the Asian continent. The perceived “Asianness” of the restaurant has very little to do with cultural representation and is used purely as a marketing tool.
Critics who downplay cultural appropriation in the food world rightly point out that cuisine is largely impacted by immigration and trade routes, meaning no cuisine exists as a fixed entity. Missing from this argument is an understanding of how politics and power have influenced this movement of people and goods, and therefore the relationship between food and cultural identity. Historically, food cooked by immigrants has been classed as low value and its continued consumption in immigrant communities seen as an act of resistance against assimilation. Filipino-American artist Joshua Luna succinctly sums up the frustration many people of immigrant backgrounds feel when they see their food festishized in a comic he posted to his Twitter account in 2017.
While it is exciting for people of immigrant backgrounds to see their foods represented in mainstream food media, many also have the lived experience of having been told their food was “gross” or “weird.” Seeing someone profit off the very same food they were made to feel bad for enjoying is doubly painful when the food is represented in a way that only perpetuates the cuisine’s “otherness” and does little to expand the customer’s understanding of the cultural context it comes from. By collaborating with scholars who understand that context as well as the dynamics of appropriation that erase it, some restaurateurs are choosing to offer their customers food for thought.
In London, chef Andrew Wong and anthropologist Dr. Mukta Das have found a mutual interest in the historic foundations of modern-day Chinese cuisine. The two work closely together on Wong’s “Tastes of China” menu at his restaurant A. Wong, and the partnership informs each of their personal projects.
Andrew Wong & Mukta Das
Wong and Das’s partnership began around 2013, and was largely a result of the pair’s personal interests in analysing the perceived origins of Chinese cuisine. Das, who was researching for her PhD at the time, came into contact with Wong via Twitter after tweeting about her burgeoning theories before she went off to do field work in professional kitchens in China.
“I was questioning what ordinary Southern Chinese food looked like, particularly Cantonese food, considering the region had been a cultural sponge for so many centuries and how modern-day chefs interpreted and recreated Cantonese food in their image. Andrew, who sort of lived on Twitter at the time, found me and started tweeting his own questions at me. I do think he was being a bit of a troll in the beginning, but he ended up inviting me to the restaurant and he gave me the lowdown on what he was doing. I was honestly so focused on China at the time, that I didn’t really know who he was at first!” says Das.
Wong had been working on the “Tastes of China” menu for a while before meeting Das, motivated by personal curiosity and an interest in rethinking the way Chinese food was presented in London. Before Wong took over the space, A. Wong had been a Cantonese take-out spot run by his parents, so he had an intimate knowledge of how the cuisine was perceived in London.
Soy chicken at A. Wong. © David Cotsworth
“I grew up in a generation where people were extremely judgemental about difference, you almost didn’t want to share your culture with your peers. When I was growing up, my fridge was the one that stunk.” Wong says, recounting that even recently, Cantonese food in London was largely seen as a homogenous entity. “I could have sold the restaurant to someone else and they [the customers] would still have just referred to it as ‘the Chinese.’”
When Wong took over the family restaurant following the death of his father, he wasn’t sure how he was going to approach the project, and enrolled in culinary school to expand his skills. Once there, he realised that a baptism in mother sauces, though industry standard, was missing some elements for him. His formal training led him to ask more questions about the context of taste.
“There are all these misconceptions about what flavors do and don’t go together that are totally culturally created. Like, I biologically don’t understand why carrots and coriander [cilantro] go together. For me coriander goes with a lot of soy and fish, but in culinary school it was carrots and coriander,” says Wong.
A selection of A. Wong dishes. © David Cotsworth.
Questioning the standard also informed chef Ivan Brehm’s approach to Nouri, his restaurant in Singapore. In partnership with researcher Kaushik Swaminathan, Brehm introduced a formal research arm to the restaurant Appetite earlier in 2019 to function as generator for research from academics all over the world.
Much of Brehm’s career has been spent in Michelin-starred kitchens around the world, including the experimental kitchen at The Fat Duck in England where he worked under Heston Blumenthal. An early adopter of molecular gastronomy, members of Blumenthal’s development team manipulate the physical aspects of food to come up with cooking methods that could bring out different flavors and textures in each ingredient. For Brehm, this science-forward approach to cooking was interesting, but he felt there was more to dig into.
Ivan Brehm
“For me the element that was always missing was the ‘why’ behind it all. What Appetite came to supply for me and Nouri was a more closed-loop ‘why’ that housed all of the technical and historical explorations. Not only do we preoccupy ourselves with the technical element of our dishes, but we try and do that in the service of a greater kind of purpose to expand our understanding of food cultures.” Brehm explains.
Academic and food writer Dr Anna Sulan Masing, an Appetite partner and expert on the subject of cultural appropriation in the food world, thinks it is this kind of questioning that pushes the industry forward in a meaningful way.
“Questioning is probably the key to avoiding cultural appropriation. When you start to ask ‘Why are you doing that? What’s the point? How are you doing that?’ These questions that come out of interdisciplinary approaches make everything much richer,” she says.
Both chefs try to shy away from discussing the issue, neither quite wanting to give it too much weight. However, partnerships with academics mean the question of cultural appropriation is still examined in the production of their menus from a variety of different angles.
“We believe that food could actually move us and force us to question our own identities but in order for us to do that well, we needed the support and advice and expertise of people with far greater depth of knowledge in fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, history, philosophy and art, or wherever our menu research would take us. Appetite is our attempt to bring it all under one platform,” says Swaminathan.
Wild Rice Stem at Nouri: steam-roasted Makomotake, spiced buttermilk gratin, cultured cabbage. Credit Robin Thang.
The platform is in the process of growing and articulating itself in much the same way Swaminathan and Brehm’s partnership developed. Swaminathan initially started working with Brehm’s team in the kitchen to better inform his work as founder of a micro venture capital firm that helped to fund projects addressing the global food system. While kitchen work wasn’t something Swaminathan felt he wanted to continue, Brehm’s commitment to research-driven menus allowed for other opportunities.
“Kaushik’s initial mandate was to help me with research, generate more of it and allow that research to be more in-depth and complex,” says Brehm. “In the process, we realized we were coming across some pretty amazing bits of information that we thought needed to be shared.”
The project is based on what Brehm and Swaminathan describe as “chef’s intuition.” Research is generated from questions chefs have about the food they are cooking and that research affects how the dish develops. With the introduction of academic partners like Masing, there is also scope for the platform to publish in-depth pieces on culinary culture.
“At the moment we engage with research interns, students, and academics who want to contribute to our work. We are in the process of expanding and trying to raise cash to do this properly, but at the moment it is 100% funded by the profits from the restaurant. We’re actively trying to connect with institutions who can fund the project so we can work with more people,” Brehm explains. Nouri is currently formalising partnerships with New York University, Yale-NUS, and the Culinary Institute of America. They also actively seek out collaboration with independent academics like Masing, as well as people from other creative fields like artists and fashion designers.
The interior at Nouri. Credit Robin Thang.
While Brehm and Swaminathan work to bring academia into the restaurant, Wong and Das see the separation of their worlds as an important component of their work together.
“To be honest, it’s a bit weird to be too close to his work, because he has his own process. He’s working to make his restaurants successful businesses. When it comes down to actually working on the dishes, he works with his wife Natalie to make the dish successful both edibly and commercially. I give him the information I am able to gather, and he uses it to create.” says Das.
Instead of integrating herself into the restaurant space, Das’s interest in the partnership has more to do with her personal research into how chefs interpret cuisine. “I can get overly obsessed with finding concretely verified facts and he’s more likely to look at the information and think ‘Well, let’s play around with it’. In reality, that is also what earlier chefs would have done. So I really have to remind myself that the concrete things I have are really only a thin slice of what people did. Actually, the practice, putting everything into the pot and trying it out, that’s the other side of it, and it’s just as important to the research that I do,” explains Das.
Similarly to the pair at Nouri, Das and Wong are also learning how to grow their partnership to engage more people in the conversations they’re having about culinary cultures and the concept of “authenticity” when it comes to cuisine.
“I’m bringing him [Wong] into my world and making him research associate for the Food Studies Centre that I am part of at SOAS [University of London]. He’s going to be leading workshops with other food academics and then we’re all going to try and bust this thing open a little more in the academic world. There is so little discussion between our worlds and the different fields of research. With his workshops and his more practical input, the hope is that we will all engage in a different type of conversation that will add another layer to how we approach the study of Chinese food,” says Das.
A. Wong’s Plum in a golden vase. © Great British Chefs
Neither project may be embracing the commercial appeal of virality, but they are no less on-trend. As giants in the world of fine-dining, both are poised to bring more people into the conversation about the politics of cuisine. As millennials get older and have more expendable income, the generation that spends most of its money on food is looking for a way to enjoy cuisine intentionally.
“The idea that these big name chefs have to be authorities is shifting, instead they’re also allowed to ask questions about their process and the product they produce. This is in large part because millennials are not as secure in what they’re doing and who they are. The whole concept of ego, in the sense that one person can contain all the answers, is shifting as we start to look inwardly and ask questions of ourselves and of the world around us,” argues Masing.
This makes for a very exciting world for chefs and food academics alike. “It’s a very different world than it was 20-30 years ago. Now, I get to sit here and say ‘Oh, I work with this food anthropologist to get inspiration for my menus’ and it’s a privilege I don’t take lightly,” says Wong.
While Nouri and A. Wong occupy the privileged spaces of fine-dining, the accolades and attention they receive for their commitment to research makes room for more accessible spaces to start interrogating these ideas of identities through food. Through a clear articulation of how a chef approaches their product, the guest is given a framework to start understanding the food on their plate. This can give guests a chance to rethink assumptions made about cultures outside of their own and question the prescriptiveness of “authenticity.”
Kanzuri risotto, carabinero, 25 year old balsamic, and nasturtium leaf at Nouri. Credit Robin Thang.
My own work with London’s Island Social Club is a direct result of this growing interest. Founders Marie Mitchell and Joseph Pilgrim use the restaurant as a platform to discuss British-Caribbean identities. They brought me on the team earlier this year because of my background as a chef and someone who studies the impact of nationalist-driven assimilation on food. My employment in the restaurant in a capacity outside of the kitchen is due largely to the fact that interrogating identity through food is a commercially-viable business plan.
These interrogations in turn change how people value the food on their plate. Nouri and A.Wong are able to charge upwards of $70 USD a head for dining in their restaurants, but when working with foods that are generally relegated to “cheap eats” lists, it’s harder to convince people that the cost of their meal also funds a larger project. Changing the conversation about food also has a huge impact on the commercial success of restaurants serving heritage foods outside of the fine-dining context.
Through her work in academia and with chefs, Das sees the partnership between the two worlds as something that can have a positive impact on academia as well. “Food academia shouldn’t be the same in the traditional sense, we should be literally tearing up the rule book. In my role as an associate of the Food Studies Centre, I am working on outreach and experiential research projects. Eventually what I think it will do is change the curriculum with the Centre’s MA program and also maybe the nature of what the Food Centre does,” she explains.
On its face, it’s a strange marriage, but the reality is that there is very little progress in either sphere without conversations between the two in an accessible way. Both chefs and academics have reputations of holding weird hours and being singularly focused, but where those focus points merge, the creation of a wider alt-academic conversation is incredibly inspiring.
For Nouri, this takes shape with Appetite and its engagement at food conferences around the world. With Wong and Das, it is through a collaboration with Great British Chefs where they publish recipes and articles about the research process behind their development. At Island Social Club and growing projects like it, the outreach is through social media and subscriber newsletters. In all forms, the interest is in bringing people into the conversation rather than presenting a fully articulated product. In the context of millennial interest, this has much more longevity than a unicorn sundae, no matter how delightfully whimsical those may be.
As a universal need, food is an incredibly accessible starting point for people to have conversations about identity and politics in ways that can be both enjoyable and productive. The Gordon Ramsays of the world will still scream their way into these conversations, but those who thoughtfully approach their work with food are contributing to a larger articulation of identity that will hopefully bridge the divides that nationalist fervor has created.
“In our own humble way, we’re trying to think about the forces of globalisation and right-wing populism and the forces of fragmentation that exists between cultures,” explains Swaminathan. “We want to address those questions intelligently and creatively using food as a starting point, and if we’re successful as a research center, hopefully this expands past food.”
