Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  And make no mistake: There are real financial implications to this, as well. It’s why Ramen Shop can charge customers $18 or $19 for a bowl of ramen—compared to, say, $10 or $11 a bowl at one of the comparably esteemed Japanese-run ramen shops in the South Bay. It’s why the Oakland restaurateur Charlie Hallowell can charge $20 for a plate of kefta-style meatballs at his North African-inspired restaurant, Penrose, whereas Aria Grill, a traditional Afghan kebab shop in downtown Oakland, charges $12 for a similar, more heartily portioned dish.

  There are valid reasons for restaurants like Ramen Shop and Penrose to charge what they do—reasons having to do with paying fair wages, supporting sustainable agricultural practices, and so forth. So, perhaps the better question to ask is whether similarly ambitious, immigrant-run, farm-to-table restaurants are able to command similar prices.

  Juhu Beach Club’s Mistry, who is of Indian descent, argues that this often isn’t the case: She said she gets a ton of pushback on her prices, which some customers feel are too high for Indian food.

  “People are willing to pay more when the kitchen is full of straight white guys because they look like they should be paid more,” she said. “If you see a bunch of brown people in the kitchen, the food should be cheap.”

  Beyond Delicious

  Of course, there are chefs and diners who will read this article (or even just the headline) and have a visceral response against it—who will, perhaps, feel that Moore and others are being needlessly apologetic for something that shouldn’t even be an issue.

  “Delicious is delicious,” the argument goes.

  And if Moore’s kebabs turn out to be tastier than any of the ones served at the Bay Area’s more traditional Middle Eastern restaurants, why shouldn’t he embrace that title proudly? Isn’t this all just a case of political correctness gone haywire?

  Jay Porter is the chef-owner of The Half Orange, a sausage and burger restaurant in Oakland’s Fruitvale District, whose menu dabbles in Korean and Mexican flavors—the latter, in particular, a tribute to the years he spent living in San Diego and his frequent travels to Baja California. (Coincidently, Porter was also the proprietor of Salsipuedes, the restaurant that preceded The Kebabery at 4201 Market Street.)

  According to Porter, intentions are what matter. In his view, every chef ought to have a good reason to be cooking whatever cuisine or dish he or she is cooking—perhaps all the more so if it’s a cuisine they didn’t grow up eating themselves.

  “If the answer is, ‘I learned these cool techniques and no one is applying it to this cuisine,’ that’s probably not about creating an experience or a bond with the diners,” Porter said. “If the reason is this genuine love and community with your people, that shows—and that’s a kind of authenticity.”

  Porter said that, if he were to open a restaurant that served a cuisine that he had no cultural context with, it would likely ring false with his guests.

  Indeed, he acknowledged that this was true to a certain extent with Salsipuedes, which closed after less than a year: The small plates menu might have successfully captured the essence of upscale New Baja cuisine, but the restaurant wasn’t able to re-create culture in which that particular food thrives—and, so, diners couldn’t connect with it.

  “I think that serving people food that doesn’t have some kind of emotional component is really cynical. Deliciousness cannot be measured on a scientific meter,” Porter said.

  What’s more, in extreme cases, immigrant cuisines in particular face the threat of having their stories erased, or taken away, from their native practitioners altogether. Take Mongolian food, for instance: In the United States, most diners associate it with the type of buffet-style grill restaurant that’s commonly found in suburban strip malls, but those actually have nothing to do with Mongolia whatsoever. “Mongolian barbecue” was invented by Taiwanese restaurateurs and has been widely perpetuated in the United States by a fair number of non-Asian entrepreneurs, as well.

  Meanwhile, real Mongolian food is mostly left to languish in obscurity, its banner taken up by just a handful of small, immigrant-run restaurants—including Togi’s Mongolian Cuisine in downtown Oakland—that tend not to get much press.

  Calavera, the upscale Oaxacan-focused Mexican restaurant in Uptown Oakland, also provides an interesting case study. The restaurant currently faces a lawsuit involving former employees, who accuse the owners of a number of different labor violations. At least one former cook claims that she was fired after the restaurant exploited her for her deeply rooted knowledge of tortilla-making, and other recipes she had learned as a native of Oaxaca.

  The lawsuit is still pending, and the owners of Calavera—one of whom is Latino—have vigorously denied the allegations. But this narrative—of an immigrant cook having her cultural knowledge co-opted so that someone else can profit—resonated with many people.

  Calavera’s current chef, Sophina Uong, began working at the restaurant subsequent to the allegations and is herself a relative newcomer to Mexican cuisine, as a Cambodian-American who has cooked at restaurants specializing in everything from Southern food to California cuisine. She says she’s spending a lot of her time tweaking Calavera’s menu, but also learning techniques and recipes from the Mexican cooks who have been on staff since the restaurant opened.

  When asked why she has always worked in cuisines that are fairly far removed from her own personal background, Uong said she’s simply always looked to challenge herself by learning something new.

  “There are no borders in cooking, I think,” Uong said. “You cook from the heart.”

  Perhaps, as Porter argues, it does come down to intentions. For some customers, the chefs who aren’t cooking from the heart are the ones who get in trouble when they cook a non-native cuisine—especially when it’s a cuisine of people who have been historically oppressed, to whom the food has deeper significance than just playing with a new set of flavors.

  Noah Cho, a multiracial Oakland resident whose father was Korean and whose mother is a white American, has commented extensively on this issue via social media, particularly as it pertains to Korean dishes, many of which were created as survival foods and thus have deep roots in hardship endured by the Korean people. To Cho, it becomes offensive, then, when non-Korean chefs tinker with a dish like bibimbap—the classic rice bowl with meat, vegetables, and hot sauce—to the point that it’s unrecognizable: “You can make a quinoa bowl with veggies in it, and just not call it ‘bibimbap.’”

  Cho explained that the reason he takes food so seriously is because it was the only way he was able to communicate with his paternal grandmother, who didn’t speak English. He recalls sitting with her for hours folding mandu, a kind of Korean dumpling.

  “If you serve me bad mandu casually, that’s very offensive to me,” Cho said. “Maybe if you understand that, you can even make it better.”

  The Iggy Azaleas of Food

  Ultimately, this isn’t about who is allowed to cook what food. Like so many different narratives that are playing out in America right now, this is just another story about privilege: who has it, and how those who have it should use it.

  At the end of the day, chefs should cook whatever kind of food they love to cook, and they should do it with all of the passion, skill, and technique they can muster. But, as Juhu Beach Club’s Mistry pointed out, white chefs in particular should also be willing to engage their critics and speak to why they’ve chosen to focus on a certain cuisine or why they’ve decided to prepare a dish a certain way.

  “Since when did ‘white’ become a pejorative term? You are. You get a lot of privilege from it. In this instance, you’ll have to talk about it—plain and simple,” she said.

  Mistry acknowledged that, even as a queer chef and an immigrant kid, she too benefits from privilege: “Embody that in how you run your business—how you hire, what neighborhood you’re in, what your price point is.”

  In the meantime, those of us who write about food for a living should perhaps thin
k a little bit harder before we declare some fine-dining chef’s passion project to be the best Mexican (or Japanese or Chinese) restaurant we’ve ever been to. And everyone should make sure that there is a certain amount of respect paid to those who have come before us—to the generations of cooks who made a cuisine what it is before today’s chefs started riffing on it.

  In Mistry’s view, at least, the chefs at Ramen Shop really do embody that kind of respectful attitude toward their adopted cuisine—a reverence for the techniques and sensibilities of Japanese culinary culture, even if some of the dishes the restaurant serves can only very loosely be described as Japanese. But she said other chefs take a more “Columbus-y” approach and then bristle when they’re called out on it.

  “It’s very Iggy Azalea,” Mistry said, alluding to the Australian rapper who has been accused of co-opting Black hip-hop culture and not having a particularly nuanced understanding of American race relations. “Have respect for the history and heritage—especially when you’re a privileged person cooking a cuisine of a historically oppressed people.”

  Then there is the matter of how successful chefs use the platform that they’ve been given. Or, as Mistry put it: “When you come up, you bring others with you. That’s a tenet of being.”

  One thing that stands out about The Half Orange’s Porter is that, at least on social media and his personal blog, he very rarely talks up his knowledge of Mexican food culture as a way to drive business to his own restaurant. Instead, he constantly shines a light on the immigrant-run mom-and-pop businesses in the Fruitvale, who are ostensibly his competitors. It was through one of Porter’s tweets that this critic first learned about Taqueria El Paisa@.com, which Porter asserted serves the most delicious tacos he’s eaten in California. He also collaborated with one of his neighbors in Fruitvale, the Mexican ice cream shop Nieves Cinco de Mayo, whose owner, Luis Abundis, created all of the desserts for Salsipuedes. And he said nothing makes him happier than when he sees customers at his restaurant wander over after their meal to buy a churro from the cart parked outside.

  “Whatever kind of food we’re doing or whatever our background is, everything is going to be a better experience for everybody if we include our influences and our neighbors,” Porter said.

  When asked about Comal’s success, Gandin stressed that the restaurant has never made any claims that it’s serving “cleaned up” or more “refined” Mexican food. Then, he started talking about how not enough is said about the collaborative aspect of a restaurant—how one of his cooks in particular, a hardworking Jalisco native named Martín Blas, had contributed to the development of certain recipes.

  Given how crucial Blas’ role has been, and all of the articles that have been written about Comal, why hadn’t we heard about him before?

  In an email, Uong explained that executive chefs tend to be the ones who get all the credit in the restaurant industry as a whole. “The fact that kitchen staff don’t get a lot of visibility in the front of house isn’t unusual, nor does it indicate that they aren’t valued,” she wrote.

  This is a fair point. But it seems like it might behoove restaurants that have non-native chefs, and that lean heavily on the deep-rooted, traditional knowledge of the immigrant cooks on staff, to find ways to shine more of a spotlight on those cooks—whether it be through pop-ups or other kinds of opportunities.

  Dominica Rice-Cisneros, the Mexican-American chef-owner of Cosecha (and yet another Chez Panisse alum), said she understands that, for magazines such as Sunset and Food & Wine, there’s real appeal to running a big photo spread of some blond surfer dude who cooks Mexican food. But she said what she looks for when she visits a white-owned Mexican restaurant is whether there are Latinos in high-profile, upper-management positions—“not just the part-time prep cooks,” Rice-Cisneros said.

  Moore, on the other hand, said he only hopes that The Kebabery might act as a kind of gateway for the type of customer who will drive out of their way to dine at a Russell Moore restaurant, but might never set foot in any of the Bay Area’s many excellent traditional kebab restaurants.

  “You’re crazy if you live in Oakland and you don’t try the Middle Eastern restaurants, Asian restaurants, or Mexican and Latin-American restaurants,” he said.

  “That’s most of the good food in the area.”

  A “Pan-Asian” Restaurant May Seem Dated. In Fact the Trend Is Hotter Than Ever

  BY TIM CARMAN

  From the Washington Post

  WashPo staff food writer Tim Carman normally trains his sights on the D.C. market’s affordable end, with his $20 Diner for the Weekend column. So when ethnic dining drifts into the chic/trendy market, Carman’s got the goods, expertly delineating the fine lines that restaurateurs skate.

  Standing in the Jade Room, a retro-chic lounge with a glass-walled wine cellar and the air of Japanese minimalism, chef Jeff Tunks instructs his staff on the proper way to serve dolsot bibimbap, one of several Korean-style hot-stone dishes available at the recently resurrected TenPenh in Tysons Corner.

  “A lot of people don’t really know how to eat it,” says Tunks, a partner with Passion Food Hospitality, the group behind TenPenh.

  The chef stresses the importance of the spicy gochujang sauce—“which is not super spicy,” he quickly adds—and how diners need to squeeze at least half the bottle of the house-made sauce into their stone bowl before mixing the ingredients together. “If they don’t know how to eat it, then they’re going to be picking at the spinach with chopsticks,” he says. “That, on its own, is not that flavorful.”

  The dolsot bibimbap is one of many new elements at TenPenh, a restaurant that once held down the corner of 10th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW in downtown Washington. The address, in fact, provided the inspiration for the restaurant’s vaguely Asian moniker, a mash-up of street names that mirrored TenPenh’s approach to food, a fusion of Asian flavors and familiar Western ingredients, like its miso-glazed sea bass or its Wagyu beef tartare with wasabi guacamole. In its prime in the 2000s—it closed in 2011—TenPenh was a trailblazer in its ability to synthesize East and West for a (then) generally conservative D.C. dining public.

  The new TenPenh is less a revival than a makeover. Tunks and his partners—David Wizenberg and Gus DiMillo—have salvaged precious little from the first incarnation save for the logo, a few dishes and some statuary they acquired in Asia. This time around, TenPenh is placing bets on its chef-driven (and playful) interpretations of Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Thai and Korean dishes that have entered the American mainstream, no matter how tentatively. Think ramen, sushi, dim sum and those Korean hot stone bowls.

  In that way, the revamped TenPenh has essentially shifted from Asian fusion to pan-Asian, a distinction perhaps lost on many diners. Yet both approaches seem to swim against the current of contemporary Asian dining. In recent years, chefs and restaurateurs have rejected the mantra of their predecessors who believed that Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and other Asian eateries in America needed to pander to the widest possible audience, even if that meant dumbing down the cuisine or asking cooks to have a passing knowledge of an insane number of dishes.

  These 21st-century Asian restaurants are hyper-focused on a single regional cuisine or a long-neglected cuisine or even the street foods of a particular country. You see these places popping up across the country, their reservation lists booked solid or a line of hopeful diners snaking down the block. This singled-minded charge into the U.S. dining scene has sometimes been led by white chefs, such as Andy Ricker (whose study of authentic Thai food led to his small Pok Pok chain, first launched in Portland) or Ivan Orkin (whose obsession with Japanese noodle soup led to his iconoclastic Ivan Ramen shops in New York).

  But just as often, the modern Asian dining movement has been led by those who grew up with the cuisine and knew (or hoped) the time was right to present it to Americans with authority.

  Master chef Peter Chang, the son of a poor farming family in Hubei province, has introduced real S
ichuan cooking to the Mid-Atlantic via his eponymous restaurants. The family members behind Xi’an Famous Foods gambled that their Shaanxi cuisine could find an attentive audience in New York City. And the Filipino-American owners behind Bad Saint have created one of the best new restaurants in the country, based on a cuisine previously thought unmarketable in America.

  This new wave of Asian eateries has had a ripple effect on those earlier restaurants, such as TenPenh, which adopted a pan-cultural approach to Asian cookery. Jennifer 8. Lee, a former New York Times reporter who has written extensively about the assimilation of Chinese food in America, put it bluntly via text: “I never trust a pan-Asian restaurant. If I see pad thai and sushi on [the] same menu, I cringe,” she writes. “Pan-Asian is almost by definition not authentic.”

  This apparent conflict between old- and new-school Asian restaurants can raise some uncomfortable questions, such as: Who’s qualified to present a region’s cuisine to American diners? And is it okay for outsiders to alter a region’s food because they think it’s too funky for the stereotypical American palate?

  “I always look at pan-Asian as sort of being racist,” says David Chang, the Northern Virginia native responsible for the Momofuku empire. “Think about it this way,” he says. “If I open a barbecue restaurant and I said, ‘This is pan-barbecue, and we’re going to serve barbecue from around the world,’ I would get laughed out of town. No one would take me seriously. But if someone was doing it as Asian food, no one would laugh. No one would think it’s weird.”

  Yet Chang is not calling Tunks and his ilk racists. It would be hypocritical: Chang, after all, operates his own pan-Asian restaurants, featuring Japanese, Vietnamese and Chinese dishes that are not part of the chef’s Korean heritage. He just doesn’t call them “pan-Asian” or “Asian fusion.”