It’s possible that Asian food is more prominent in the American imagination than the Asian people who produce it. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, the political scientist Harold Isaacs became curious about how average Americans had formed impressions of far-away China and India. Isaacs and a team of researchers interviewed U.S. citizens from a variety of backgrounds and professions to learn what, exactly, had prompted them to decide that people from these countries were friendly or suspect, hardworking or lazy, intelligent or uncivilized. The subjects rarely spoke of personal encounters: Americans didn’t travel to China or India much, and decades of restrictive immigration policies in the U.S. meant that there were few Chinese- and Indian-Americans then. (The few that were here tended to live in small, sequestered neighborhoods.) Instead, the interview subjects had come to know Asia through TV and the movies, comic books and bestselling novels (like “The Good Earth”), or via the occasional news story or a funny character in an anecdote told by a globetrotting uncle. When it came to the Chinese, one experience in particular seemed to evoke universal feelings of appreciation: “The familiar and pleasurable experience of eating Chinese food.”
Once an indictment of barbaric ways, Chinese food had, by the end of the fifties, become a commonplace delicacy that seemed to bring an exotic people a little bit closer. As one of the people Isaacs interviewed remarked, “One feels that a people who have evolved such food must have high qualities and a high civilization.” But even as Asian food became ubiquitous, the profile of the Asian chef lacked texture, and this was the case for decades. The genial PBS showman Martin Yan, whose show “Yan Can Cook” first aired in 1982, might have been the first Asian-American man I ever saw on television. I remember wondering why, even after hundreds of hours in front of the camera, he had been unable to shake his accent.
This began to change about ten years ago, when the success of David Chang’s Momofuku restaurants, as well as the inroads he made on television and in the publishing world, gave him an unprecedented visibility. In recent years, a frenzied interest in all things Asian has given chefs like Roy Choi, Dale Talde, and Danny Bowien an opportunity to turn their restaurants and cookbooks into sites of autobiographical exploration. In her new documentary, “Off the Menu,” the filmmaker Grace Lee asks: “Do we think we understand a culture better when it’s in our stomachs?” By and large, the answer seems to be yes: the belief that we can better understand one another by eating each other’s food quietly underwrites an increasingly expansive vision of American cuisine. Whether we can actually consume our way to cultural comprehension is, of course, another question entirely. And what if it’s your own culture you’re trying to understand?
“Off the Menu,” which will air on PBS in December, follows Lee on a road trip in search of Asian-American stories, from a community-run organic farm in Hawaii to the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, where, in 2012, a white supremacist gunned down members while they were preparing langar, the traditional communal meal that is open to anyone. Once Lee enters the realm of commerce, though, she realizes the limitations of letting such intimate encounters determine her narrative. Immigrants, after all, are often more concerned with survival than with accurate self-representation. Lee meets Glen Gondo, the affable Sushi King of Texas, whose empire not only comprises Japanese food but bastardized takes on other Asian cuisines as well. Gondo eventually brings Lee to his test kitchen, where two Korean chefs stretch the ethical limits of sushi rolls, speckling them with crushed-up Flaming Hot Cheetos. Elsewhere, Gary Chiu, the thoughtful heir to a Texas tofu fortune, regards his chipotle-tofu egg rolls and tofu-stuffed green-chili tamales and asks himself, “Is this something I grew up with? Or is this something I created to sell?”
Being able to ask such a question suggests relative privilege—it’s the kind of existential quandary that only vexes those with enough distance to look back at where it all began. As the documentary progresses, the self-conscious way that traditions evolve becomes its most fascinating through-line. Jonathan Wu, a thoughtful, meticulous chef who honed his technique at Per Se before opening Manhattan’s celebrated Fung Tu, explains that his dishes start with “a flavor memory,” a sensation that he hopes to reconstruct and translate into something surreal and new. Lee tags along with Wu as he visits his grandfather in Yonkers, a trip he often takes to find inspiration. Communication with his grandfather is halting but pure, and the distance between them becomes a space for play, for projection and dreaming in the kitchen. Wu assembles his version of an egg roll, spiked with the surprising tang of chilies and olives, for his grandfather and his grandfather’s friend. They like it. And then they ask: What is this?
What Wu and the past decade of celebrated chefs represent is a turn away from the Asian chef as some kind of native informant. When Irene Kuo published “The Key to Chinese Cooking,” one of the first major cookbooks devoted to Asian cuisine, in 1977, it was presented as a glimpse into the Chinese psyche as much as an introduction to Chinese cooking technique. In her preface, Kuo writes of the Chinese, “They eat boiled bark, weeds, and roots when there is nothing else; they eat shallow-fried transparent prawns from preference, jasmine blossoms out of poetic sentiment, and wine-braised camel’s hump from blatant extravagance. If there is anything the Chinese are perpetually serious about it is food.” In the years since, cookbooks devoted to Asian food have continued to adopt a tone of expertise, parsing regional differences or historicizing spice tolerance, approaching their subjects with a kind of scholarly reverence.
Peter Meehan’s essential “101 Easy Asian Recipes,” on the other hand, is typical of a newer, more relaxed sensibility. A punky, frenetically curious food writer best known for his frequent collaborations with David Chang, Meehan explains early on that his book’s title is a bit of a joke. “We are acutely aware that Asia’s size and complexity are so vast that it is a ridiculous idea to reduce its cuisines—each its own private infinity once you begin to parse regions and subregions and the variations and innovations that individual cooks employ in their kitchens every day—down to 101 recipes that are representative of anything.” The acknowledgment becomes liberating, as Meehan and the staff of Lucky Peach, the food quarterly he edits, run through a greatest-hits of primarily East Asian favorites. Despite moments of big-city insiderishness—references to Chang and their chef pals, mostly—the book is welcoming and, as the title promises, very easy to use.
It’s also very funny. My favorite recipe is for the classic standby dessert of many Chinese restaurants: “Oranges.” Alongside familiar and subtly tweaked classics are recipes that might appeal to those who first encountered Asian food as the alien half of some unholy fusion. The St. Paul Sandwich is a Midwestern staple born of necessity—essentially egg foo young on a bun—while Chinese Chicken Salad is, as Meehan acknowledges, “as Asian as David Carradine.” And then there is Lucky Peach’s take on that food-court classic, the mysteriously satisfying, sweet-and-sour simulacrum known here as Mall Chicken.
On the back of “101 Easy Asian Recipes” is a tiny starburst that bills the book as “100% Inauthentic!” It’s a word that Dale Talde, the Brooklyn chef who first made his name during a charismatically aggro stint on “Top Chef,” also likes. Many restaurateurs build narrative tension into their cookbooks by describing the struggles of getting their kitchen together. But Talde’s first cookbook, “Asian-American: Proudly Inauthentic Recipes from the Philippines to Brooklyn,” is as much a manifesto of immigrant belonging as it is an introduction to his two Brooklyn restaurants, the pan-Asian Talde and a neighborhood bar, Pork Slope. While many of his professional peers may hope to “transport” their diners to some obscure corner of Asia, Talde writes, his food, inspired by taquerias, gyro shops, diners, burger spots, and Chinese takeout, “is meant to remind you that you’re home, in that strange and awesome country where we live.”
Growing up in a Filipino household, this other America often seemed out of reach to Talde. He writes passionately of his mother smuggling illicit ingredients back from her homeland, and of the outsider funk that filled the air when he and his Asian friends unpacked their lunches at school. Much like Eddie Huang and Roy Choi—whose “L.A. Son” remains a high point in this new wave of memoir-cum-cookbooks—Talde found in the self-fashioned, outlaw pose of hip-hop a way to assimilate on his own terms. (It’s worth noting that the most famous Asian-American chefs are almost all men who chose cooking as a mode of self-expression; kitchen work was not a responsibility that the culture thrust upon them.)
Today, Talde’s food is all about lust and satisfaction—he wallops the diner with richness. At his eponymous restaurant, this means piling bacon and fried oysters atop pad thai, or roasting a fish in banana leaf and putting it in a taco. One of the highlights at Pork Slope is a classed-up yet eerily accurate version of a McDonald’s cheeseburger. “I grew up infatuated with burgers and pizza and fried chicken and tacos because they had the thrill of the forbidden,” Talde writes. He was unable to shake “that early high of eating something I knew I shouldn’t be and tasting the America I wanted badly to be a part of.” His recipes feel like an attempt to make up for lost time. He even defends MSG.
The “strange and awesome” possibility of America might be found, then, in its openness to the hustling spirit—to Talde’s flair for inauthentic, upmarket versions of traditional recipes, which self-consciously echo the way his mom, like many of her generation, mastered the possibilities contained in a brick of Spam. And this admiration for the improvisational skills of immigrants seems to prevent Talde from taking himself too seriously. That lightheartedness is another hallmark of his generation of Asian chefs. Where many contemporary cookbooks come across as beautiful, immovable objects meant to be displayed rather than used, the “Mission Chinese Food Cookbook” is more like a carefully constructed and deeply personal zine. Its protagonist is Danny Bowien, a freakishly good-natured Korean-American most famous for San Francisco’s Mission Chinese Food, a restaurant that he initially operated in an existing Chinese restaurant, Lung Shan, during its off-peak hours. As Bowien explains, his offerings are neither pure nor authentic; his approach is “profane” by design, turned up to eleven, Chinese food made not by “experts or historians” but by loyal “fans.”
It’s strange to say, but the “Mission Chinese Cookbook” is one of the most affecting books I’ve read all year. There are recipes, of course; many of them, like Bowien’s signature dish, kung pao pastrami, are ingenious in their simplicity. But it’s also a remarkably candid story of life as “a white kid in an Asian kid’s body.” Bowien was born in Korea but raised by adoptive white parents in Oklahoma. He rarely had an opportunity to seriously reflect on his Korean heritage, but he began to appreciate the stories that food could tell when he was still a child, staying home with his mom, watching the Food Network and idolizing Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay. His path from small-town party animal to celebrated chef is filled with impulsiveness and moments of cavalier self-destruction.
Part of the book’s charm is in its structure. Every so often, Bowien’s co-author and friend, Chris Ying, surfaces to interrupt the story, probing the chef and his friends with questions and provocations, giving the enterprise a kind of self-awareness. When the odd recipe pops up, it feels like a lifeline, or a turning point. One particularly moving passage consists of an extended excerpt from a conversation between Bowien and the celebrated Danish chef Rene Repzedi. The subject isn’t technique or the pressures of superstardom but how fatherhood—finding priorities beyond a new restaurant opening or food innovation—saved them. When Ying chats with Sue and Liang Zhou, the owners of Lung Shan, the no-frills joint out of which Mission Chinese grew, they express a familiar hope that his food will help immigrants “merge” into the American mainstream.
All cookbooks are inherently hopeful: they help us to imagine who we might become. (Someone who cooks all their own meals, for instance.) Talde and Bowien’s books suggest a shadow aspiration: to pay tribute to the anonymous genius of immigrants, and to build a “strange and awesome” new America in their honor. Inauthenticity becomes a kind of power, a refusal of someone else’s expectations and tastes. The great lengths that diners are willing to travel to eat their food, the hours they are willing to wait for a seat at the bar, may dramatize a desire to return, impossibly, to something unrecoverable—the “flavor memory” of childhood, the simple ecstasy of a packed family dinner table, a transformative Styrofoam plate of food-court stir-fry. A wish to glimpse highs more common in some neighborhoods than in others. Sometimes it has nothing to do with taste at all, but instead is about the chain of associations triggered when you hear the squeak of a lazy Susan, or the sound of a bundle of chopsticks being run under a faucet, and you remember the rote explanation for why your family has an extra refrigerator in the garage, secreting all the ingredients that make you different—that will one day make you special.
