Closing, Not Fusing, The Gap

It’s the reason why I find the particularity of this kind of hyphenated cuisine so interesting: Rather than participating in a debate about authenticity, this style of cooking questions the very concept. It wrestles with the tragedy of losing one’s proximity to the familiar by seeing how far we can stretch a dish like pho or doro wat without losing... See more

It’s like any other comfort food, Keval says. “It comes from a longing for home. Second- or third-generation immigrant kids might not ever be able to taste what our families originally ate, but we still long for it—the taste is coded into us.”

Keval hypothesizes that this kind of cooking is powerful because of how it grants colonized subjects a degree of agency. By adapting the cuisine of their occupiers and warping the “authentic” flavors with their own, they’re able to reframe that relationship on their own terms.

what I’m talking about is food that’s made to close the gap between homes: a critical need when one lives in exile. It’s hard to give it a label, but other immigrants and children of immigrants recognize it when they see it. Unlike “fusion,” which is often focused on aesthetic innovations and mashups, these immigrant dishes are more like culinary f... See more

As a concept, fusion stinks of the imperialist instinct to civilize foreign cultures and rehabilitate them into respectability.