Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

Both Chang and the Passion Food team know that those terms have become toxic, the victims of chains such as P.F. Chang’s or even your favorite neighborhood Chinese restaurant, which have blurred the lines between regional cuisines or between the dishes of vastly different countries without losing sleep over who might be offended.

  No, pan-Asian restaurants aren’t dead, despite the rise of such places as Bad Saint, Pok Pok, Ivan Ramen and others. They’re just hiding in plain sight, disguised as noodle houses or new American restaurants, where the chefs may bury their pan-Asian inspirations among a wider variety of culinary influences. Have you noticed how often Asian ingredients and flavors crop up at Rose’s Luxury, that darling of the D.C. dining community?

  In this context, TenPenh can come across as the middle-aged dude trying too hard to fit in with the cool kids, who see through this transparent attempt at relevance. They see the Nashville hot chicken steam buns, the bibimbap “arancini” fritters, the pork crackling chips with Thai chili and cucumber chimichurri. But what the kids don’t see—maybe refuse to see—is that TenPenh has much in common with those restaurants that may be better at concealing their pan-Asian inspirations.

  They share an emotional connection to Asian cooking. Their chefs have often spent time in the countries that inspired their food, and they frequently have been tutored by older cooks who had to patiently explain the importance of foreign ingredients like gochujang sauce.

  Asia by way of California

  Scott Drewno has been tutored by such a chef. After dropping out of college in New York, Drewno moved west and found a job at Chinois, the Las Vegas outpost of celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck’s groundbreaking Santa Monica restaurant, which used French techniques to fuse Asian flavors and California ingredients. The inspiration for Chinois was little more than Puck’s surroundings, the Asian markets and strip-mall eateries that make Los Angeles such an intoxicating food town.

  The Asian flavors certainly went to Drewno’s head. In 1996, when he was just 21 years old, this former meat-and-potatoes man fell for Puck’s Shanghai lobster with curry sauce, an elaborate preparation that looked like an expressionist painter’s cry for help.

  “So many different ingredients go into making that sauce,” Drewno remembers. “That was certainly a dish that started my love affair with Asian food.”

  Two decades and several trips to China later, Drewno leads the kitchen at the Source, Puck’s restaurant in Washington, where diners can sample his refined takes on dishes from Taiwan, Shanghai, Sichuan, Thailand and other locales. It’s pan-Asian fine-dining, though you’d be hard-pressed to find those words in the Source’s marketing materials.

  Puck wasn’t the only chef looking East for inspiration. Jean-Georges Vongerichten made a strong first impression on diners and critics in 1992 when he opened Vong, his Frenchified take on Thai cooking in Midtown Manhattan. The late Barbara Tropp, a Chinese scholar at Princeton, would spend two years in Taiwan before moving to San Francisco and opening China Moon Cafe in 1986 in a space that conjured up old-time diners, not Chinese temples. The place became a magnet for celebrities and young cooks; one of Tropp’s apprentices was Lee Hefter, who would become executive corporate chef for Wolfgang Puck—and have a formative influence on a young Drewno.

  When David Chang was growing up in Vienna, Va., his father frequently would take him to Pho 75, a beloved Vietnamese chain in the D.C. area. The pho parlor imprinted itself on Chang’s palate: In 2004, when the chef opened his first Momofuku Noodle Bar in Manhattan, he didn’t provide togarashi, the Japanese spice blend often sprinkled into ramen. Instead, he offered Sriracha, the hot sauce found at pho shops everywhere. (Momofuku would later create its own chicken pho, too.)

  A groundbreaking bun

  Momofuku’s opening menu also featured gua bao. They were a last-minute addition based, in part, on Chang’s frequent stops at Oriental Garden in New York’s Chinatown, where the spongy bao were stuffed with duck, scallions, cucumber and hoisin: a Taiwanese variation on Peking duck pancakes. Chang wanted to tuck pork belly into his steamed buns, since he would be producing the fatty meats for his ramen.

  “If there’s a claim to fame that I know that I can [make],” Chang says, “there wasn’t a ramen shop in the world that served pork buns with ramen. Anywhere. It was only gyoza or fried rice. So the whole phenomenon of the pork bun really started when we served it with ramen.”

  Erik Bruner-Yang knows all about the pork bun phenomenon. The chef behind Maketto (a restaurant that mixes Bruner-Yang’s takes on Taiwanese and Cambodian dishes) remembers when he was still creating the menus at Toki Underground, the popular ramen shop located on the same H Street NE strip in Washington. Toki didn’t offer steamed buns on its opening menu.

  “Literally, like, every other customer wanted bao buns, and that’s because David Chang served bao buns at Momofuku,” Bruner-Yang says.

  Add up all those stories, and what do you have? A lot of pan-Asian restaurants that draw inspiration from a great many sources, some more random than others. For every dish inspired by research trips to Vietnam or Shanghai, two more were probably inspired by trips to a local strip-center Sichuan joint.

  Tunks of Passion Food knows the value of travel in understanding another culture’s food. He has traveled widely throughout Asia. But he and Miles Vaden, the executive chef at TenPenh, also understand the value of calling other chefs, watching YouTube videos and good, old-fashioned recipe testing. They’ve spent countless hours developing a recipe for Peking duck, landing on a painstaking, multiday process that involves shellacking, stuffing, skewering, drying and roasting the birds.

  Still, despite the work they’ve invested, Tunks is not certain TenPenh 2.0 will connect with modern D.C. diners. It’s not about the food, which Tunks will put up against the trendiest of pan-Asian haunts. It’s the intangibles: The new TenPenh is suburban, family-friendly, eager to cater to many palates and, with more than 200 seats, very large. Plus, TenPenh doesn’t make customers stand in line.

  “That’s what people like,” Tunks says. “They want to wait in line for it a little bit. They want to… Snapchat about it, as opposed to making a reservation and coming in.”

  If modern diners are attracted to the smaller, more targeted and, well, more difficult-to-attain restaurant, Tunks says he’s not about to reverse course and cater to that market, no matter how trendy it may be. “With two other partners and being at my age,” says the 55-year-old chef, “it’s hard for us to go back to a 35-seat restaurant and do that with a real, more finite focus.”

  In Defense of Mexican-American Chefs

  BY GUSTAVO ARELLANO

  From OC Weekly

  Here’s the underbelly of the cultural appropriation debate: What happens when ethnic chefs turn on each other in the quest for authenticity? Gustavo Arellano, son of Mexican immigrants and author of OC Weekly’s “Ask a Mexican” column, has a ringside seat on this contest over culinary tradition.

  Last week, our own Sarah Bennett wrote a cover story for our former sister paper, LA Weekly, about the ascendance of Mexican-American chefs in Southern California. It was a good piece that obviously focused on chefs in Los Angeles, hence leaving out OC’s Carlos Salgado of Taco María, he of the James Beard nomination this year, Jonathan Gold’s silver medal last year as the second-best place to eat in Southern California—but I digress.

  Sarah’s article got good traction online, but also brought on the haters. These weren’t Trumpbros or jealous restauranteurs, however, but the most persistent threat to successful Mexicans: Mexicans. And these aren’t the self-hating, George P. Bush–style pendejos but rather self-proclaimed real Mexicans, the kind who have a checklist of what makes a “real” Mexican that they obtained from Cuauhtémoc (with an assist by Zapata) himself. They started whining on Twitter and Facebook (including, alas, my own ¡Ask a Mexican! fan page) immediately: What Mexican-American chefs cook isn’t authentic. It’s overpriced, and therefore for gabachos instead of Mexicans. They’re gentrifiers. They’re tryin
g too hard to appeal to non-Mexicans and hence selling out Mexican culture. No taco is worth $3 even if the masa is from heirloom corn and doesn’t use Maseca. They’re not down with la causa. The food sucks and can’t possibly compare to even the worst lonchera taco. Vendidos. Pochos. CHAVALAS.

  Typical of this train of thought was one commenter on LA Weekly’s Facebook page who saw a video and wrote, “Excuse me but traditional pozole is not made with lamb, it’s made with pork neckbones, lamb? that’s getting a little too gourmet.” (Actually, baboso, “traditional” pozole had no pork, because pork isn’t indigenous to the Americas. But you knew that, right?)

  I’ve covered food of all kinds in Orange County and Southern California for 15 years now. And seeing the negative reaction to the Mexican-Americans Sarah hailed reminded me of an ugly reality in the food world: no ethnic group is less supportive of innovation in their cuisine than Mexicans in the United States. And that’s a pinche desgracia—a fucking shame.

  It’s true! The luxe lonchera revolution has seen the children of immigrants push their mother cuisines to all sorts of levels, picking and choosing from other cultures to create dishes of dizzying heights, whether Roy Choi’s Kogi sorcery or Ed Lee’s Southern-fried pan-Asian grub. Regional American food keeps seeing homegrown chefs refine the stuff they grew up on. African-American chefs play with soul food; Native American chefs are doing the same with their long-suppressed traditions, putting dishes that get praise from the rez to the Ritz. It has led to soul-searching essays about cultural appropriation by brainy types, sure—meanwhile, customers largely don’t give a damn as they weather hours-longs waits for everything from Halal Guys to hipster Asian churros, and proudly cheer on their peers on social media and beyond.

  The same applauding has happened in the past with Cuban-American and pan-Latino chefs. But there hasn’t been that same level of support by Mexicans in the U.S. for Mexican-American chefs like Salgado, Soho Taco, Wes Avila of Guerrilla Tacos, Thomas Ortega of Playa Amor and Amor y Tacos, and so many more. They do get Latino customers—but at nowhere near the level that they deserve. And their biggest fans? Not Mexican.

  And that pisses me off. It’s one thing to not patronize shitty food—we should never support a Mexican chef just because they’re Mexican. But Mexican-American restauranteurs are cooking some of the most delicious, forward-thinking meals in Southern California right now—yet raza would rather hail Chalino and Chicharito as bigger heroes than them. Why? I get that some folks can’t afford to regularly eat at the higher-end establishments these Mexican-American chefs inevitably run. I’d remind consumers, though, that cheap food is literally that—exploitative of some part, if not all, of the food chain, from the people tasked with picking or slaughtering the food to the dishwasher in the back—and that most of the acclaimed Mexican-American chefs believe in elevating our food system with higher wages and better-quality products that result in a higher bill.

  No, the real sin here for yaktivists is the very act of Mexican-American chefs daring to reimagine Mexican food—nay, daring to reimagine Mexicans as deserving more than one-buck tacos. It’s as if such chefs are expected to not aspire to be anything higher than a paletero, to hawk a humble, prepackaged product even if they have the opportunity and resources to do new things for a bigger audience and advance what we eat and who we are. Because Mexican food—like Mexicans—is sacrosanct and not expected to evolve, period.

  This is an atavistic, ahistorical atrocity. Such a philosophy forgets what Mexican food fundamentally is—a mestizo, ever-progressing mishmash in which German and Czech beers (Bohemia, Negra Modela, et al.), liquors distilled via European techniques (tequila and mezcal), Lebanese meat on a spit (al pastor), French pastries (most pan dulces), Peruvian seafood (ceviche) and American-style sodas (Mexican Coke, Jarritos) combine to create one of the most thrilling foodways on Earth. Wanting to encase Mexican food in amber ignores the current scene in Mexico proper: young chefs from Baja to Mexico City and beyond are taking Mexican food to levels never before seen. And those chefs respect the hell out of their pocho cousins: earlier this summer, Salgado cooked alongside Enrique Olvera, who just happens to be the one of the most important chefs in the Americas right now.

  But none of this is good enough for the Mexican haters, who fulfill with every snide Facebook comment or Yelp review that legendary Chicano Studies prophecy of crabs pulling down any crabs who try to climb out of the bucket. Shit, such anti-progress bullshit even extends to actual Mexican chefs in Southern California trying new things with classics. Take Danny Godinez of Anepalco’s, whose cylinder-esque chilaquiles is one of the greatest dishes in Southern California but, when explained to pochos who haven’t visited Mexico outside of their parent’s ranchos for a week of puro pinche pari, are dismissed as fancy paisa bullshit. Shit, I’ve even heard such grumbling about birria de res masters Burritos La Palma: I’ve seen Mexicans walk away from their food truck, pissed off that the acclaimed lonchera doesn’t sell carne asada tacos even though owner Albert Bañuelos is selling food straight from his family’s restaurant in Jerez, Zacatecas. Somehow, birria de res burritos aren’t “real” Mexican, while greasy-ass tacos are.

  Fuck that.

  Many Mexican-American chefs privately grouse about and even get stung by the lack of support by their own kind, but would never dare say publicly for fear of getting labeled a sellout or uppity. I have no such qualms, so lemme say it for them here: Mexicans in the U.S.: There is nothing wrong with our food being “gourmet”—shit, it was gourmet before gourmet was a thing. There is nothing wrong with our youngsters pushing and prodding our culture forward while simultaneously respecting it. Support your fellow raza doing new, delicious things and pushing us to reimagine what “Mexican” is.

  Otherwise? You’re no better than Donald Trump. Oh, and #fuckthehaters.

  Foodways

  Salt of the Earth

  BY RONNI LUNDY

  From Victuals

  James Beard Book of the Year Victuals (officially pronounced, yes, “vittles”) is a master work, documenting in essays, recipes, and stunning photographs the food culture of the Appalachian region. Scholar and native daughter Ronni Lundy not only knows whereof she speaks, she makes us love it, too.

  Rich Valley Road, the asphalt two-lane into Saltville, Virginia, runs through a wide valley along the base of Clinch Mountain. I slow down as much to savor the glide as for safety, and in slowing, I note what is happening roadside. The closer I get to town, the closer it seems that the small frame and brick houses sit to the road, their porches facing it.

  I come from porch-sitting people, so it pleases me to see most of these are occupied. Wearing clothes that still speak of work—jeans and overalls, apron and housedress—the older folk on them have earned the right to sit idle at noonday. Even in the yard of a single-wide—flower-bordered, well kept, yet porchless—three iron-haired men have arranged their lawn chairs out front in proper porch order: not clumped conversationally to face one another, but turned in a single line to the road, the better to see who is passing by. Raised in the vernacular, I don’t wave but lift two fingers from the 11 o’clock position on the steering wheel and give a short nod as I pass, receiving same in return.

  While porches in this valley would have been availed of an evening, or after church on a Sunday, such midday midweek idleness would not have been common in the past. In its peak years, the salt mining industry in Saltville required three shifts of workers daily and provided livelihood for both town and country dwellers. And well before salt was discovered here by colonial entrepreneurs in the 1700s, this was a lively, active place. The salt licks made a rich hunting ground for the Native Americans who came to seek the diverse game that flocked in abundance to satisfy their salt need. And before the deer, elk, bear, and buffalo, the salt drew huge prehistoric beasts: mammoths, mastodons, musk ox, the giant ground sloth whose bones have been found in local archaeological excavations.

  And before those enormous creatures? These mountains wer
e the site of activity of seismic proportions. What we call the Appalachian Mountains was once part of a larger chain on the ancient supercontinent of Pangea. When that continent split apart, the mountains came asunder, too, leaving sister peaks in what is now Morocco, while this section drifted on to slam and shift and shape into North America with these peaks, then steep as the Andes, running up its eastern side. Those shifts were not gentle when tectonic plates crashed and collided, creating sharp peaks and high plateaus. At one point a whole oceanic plate crashed in and under, storing in spots a secret wealth of saltwater beneath the ground, the Iapetus Ocean.

  I see the record of all of this at the Museum of the Middle Appalachians in the quiet, almost deserted downtown of Saltville. In a large, softly lit room the huge skeleton of a woolly mammoth shares space with a tabletop diorama of the town and surrounding valley. The table lights up salient points in the town’s historical geography when buttons are pressed.

  The museum has a smaller space for rotating exhibits. When I am there, that room is full of quilts handmade by women from the town, a different sort of history told in scraps and imagination and impossibly small stitches. And in a large, sunny third room, the story of the first people who lived here—shown with flints and arrows, beads and feathered apparel—shares space with that of the latest. The early history of a 20th-century company town is told in photographs and artifacts, presented with fond nostalgia by those who lived here and their descendants.

  Salt sparked the first extractive industry in the southern Appalachians. Its processing required the harvesting of timber, then the excavation of coal, to keep the evaporative furnaces burning. In time, those resources were exported out as well, and that became a defining moment in the history of the region.