Focus

There will come times in a man's life when he is left in periods of deep introspection. He is shut out from any stimuli, his smartphone will be out of battery, and he will contemplate one of the many unanswered questions of our generation.

Does God exist? If so, why is the world in such disarray if it seems to have both creator and steward?

Why are we here? Am I an existential accident? Is my life curiously meaningless?

Is there such a thing as love? Is it a biochemical phenomenon or can souls find one another in simultaneously serendipitous and predestined fashion?

Why do all expensive electronics come in packaging that could thwart the Incredible Hulk? Is that much anti-theft deterrence necessary? How often does the Big Green pillage a Best Buy?

While these are all complex questions worthy of intense cogitation, I have spent much more time attempting to structure the reasoning behind why menus are designed the way they are.

Why does something have to be decidedly Italian, or Chinese or French?

What is authenticity and to what degree must we strive to achieve it?

Is a restaurant defined by its menu, or is the menu defined by its restaurant?

As many of you know, I am a fairly voracious reader. What many of you don't know is that all this "reading" I'm doing is of cookbooks, which might as well be big picture books with small words and basic sentence structure. My elementary reading comprehension aside, what I really like about reading these books is less often the recipes (which, excluding the most heavily professional-focused cookbooks, are always a little watered down for home cooks), and more often the short chef and restaurant biographies that precede the pretty pictures.

My career is just beginning and naturally I am curious as to how all these cookbook-author-level-chefs came to achieve their chef-dom and their eponymous restaurants (though, naming a restaurant after yourself is decidedly 1970s porn; stylistically bankrupt and masturbatory). To see how others did it, achieved greatness not only gives me a bit of a personal benchmark to measure up to but gives me greater insight as to how the whole thing happens.

The most reoccurring theme is a romanticized depiction of the chef in his childhood; hovering around his mom or grandmother, and smelling and tasting the food of their heritage for the first time. Though kitchens are often incredibly diverse workplaces in regards to nationalities and ethnicities, it still largely remains true that Italian guys grow up to cook Italian food, American guys grow up to cook American food, and Asian guys grow up to cook Asian food. Regardless of any reinterpretations or modifications, all of their cuisine is anchored in memory, in upbringing, in culture.

I have concluded that there are many reasons for this.

Firstly, a chef is obviously going to cook food that they feel deep emotional attachment to. They cook the kind of food that is not only delicious to them, but comforting as well. We all have certain dishes that can be categorized as "comfort food" to us. Things we eat when we're feeling a little vulnerable, homesick or indulgent, whatever it may be, it exists. Sure, the food may be dressed up to match the expensive linens in the dining room, but rest assured it begins with genuine soul in the kitchen. Chefs want to share this kind of cooking with their customers and hope they come to appreciate it as much as they do.

And then there are the practical reasons to consider. They feel most familiar with this kind of cuisine. They are more intimate with the flavors, ingredients and techniques and are able to expand upon them with respects to authenticity and know-how. And despite this lovely rose-tinted shade we like to pull over the world that we aren't racist creatures, as chefs become the faces of their restaurants we still, as customers, expect to see some fat Italian guy personally rolling out pasta, or some wizened Japanese sage expertly slicing sashimi off a Cretaceous-era-sized tuna. Though there are notable exceptions beginning to emerge, including Brooklyn Jewish guys elevating Japanese ramen (see: Ivan Orkin), and Asian-American chefs manning the helms at the world's best French restaurants (see: Alex Lee, Corey Lee), most everyone is going to be a little skeptical if they see some Hollister-catalog white boy opening up a Thai restaurant. It's not impossible, there are many examples of success, but I'm guessing there are many more examples of failure. Every time you put forward a winning dish people will applaud you out of surprise, and every time you put up a pop fly they will scorn you out of knowing contempt. Such is human nature.

So I feel there is a little bit of pressure as to what kind of food I should know about and cook. If you asked me right now what I felt most comfortable making it's definitely a Parisian roast chicken, or a bucatini alla amatriciana. I am still quite uncomfortable making shrimp dumplings or even a roast pork fried rice. Even though I grew up with this stuff I didn't ever handle it and I just ate it with the kind of fat-kid-loves-cake mindset; I didn't think about it, I just put it in my mouth and enjoyed it (that's what she said?).

Thus my problem emerges. When I look back and try to conjure up memories of my first gastronomic epiphanies, I come up short. I don't seem to have any significant culinary history even though my whole upbringing is deeply rooted in good Chinese food and the restaurant business as a whole. I'm afraid I don't have any kind of sepia-toned flashbacks to invoke for any cookbook I may inevitably write.

As an Asian-American, what exactly am I expected to cook? How can it be seen as authentic, unique in bearing my own signature yet paying homage to a greater culture that came before me? Even if I figure it out will I be forever bound by the first building I lease or the first menu I write?

Now I know I'm getting ahead of myself. There are many years of working as a kitchen slave, cooking other chefs' food to their exacting standards, and many if not all techniques to hone and master. But as a big picture person, someone who is seemingly incapable of existential myopia, I know that one day I will open a restaurant, I just know it. And when the time comes, when my dream is headed screaming for the plate, can I knock that son-of-a-bitch out of the park and feel good it hit the fucking rafters, not just eked by on a roided facade? Or worse, got lucky and some kid snatched it from the outfielder's leaping grasp? (See 1996 ALCS, Yankees vs. Orioles, Jeffrey Maier)

When I think back there have been three primary caregivers in my life in terms of keeping me well-fed.

Mom, grand-mom, and McDonald's.

If I had to detail the three favorite dishes of my childhood they'd each hold a spot. My mom's Sesame Chicken (well, the restaurant's; just think Chinese chicken nuggets with the sweet-and-sour sauce built in), my grandmother's tonkatsu pork chops with ketchup, and the good ole' #1, Big Mac with fries.

There's a theme there. Those are all fried foods with somewhat sweet components. I was a fat kid and there is little mystery as to why. I like crispy-anything paired with sweet-tangy-anything. There are few foods that I think cannot be improved with a little deep-fry and sauce. My inner fat boy is an easy creature to please and it craves processed chicken and chemical-laden sauces. So what the fuck kind of deep food-related emotions can I write about should I ever write a cookbook? What kind of picture can I paint when I never hovered around my grandmother's Sunday tomato sauce? (Okay, yeah, Asian people don't make tomato sauce I get it, bear with me for a second)

We need to go deeper.

I think it's important to assert my cultural identity. Minus my panda-like appearance, I very much consider myself American. I love American food, I generally have had an over-privileged life laden with first-world problems, I'm loud, larger than average and love the three-day weekend that I never, ever get anymore. So really, I'm an American who happens to be Asian. That means I honestly believe chopsticks are a more efficient utensil, my life will be forever burdened by parental guilt and the life they sacrificed to raise me, and the general female population finds me effeminate and/or unattractive.

I'm not so crass or simple as to be like "Herp derp Cantonese-style hamburgers, yeahhhhh! Great idea!" But I think its important to acknowledge the phenomenon that is the Asian-American upbringing. Though we grossly overpopulate your higher education (suck it, America, we're like intellectual locusts) there aren't all that many of us in the big picture. Our story is not yet written, and our food is not yet completely understood.

I've gone on and on about how Chinese-American food has become the way it is. It boils down to good business practice. You meet the demand of your consumers. Back in railroad-building days that meant the first Chinese immigrants selling steak & eggs and apple pie alongside their dried scallops, sea cucumbers and other funky shit. Slowly, as Americans became more adventurous, they delved in to the strangeness and it began to merge. Now we have General Tso's chicken. But the frugality and money-equals-success business model proved too effective, and like corporations, the food lost its soul. It lost all artistry and character, and along with it, its respect. Now, curious Asian-American cooks like myself, need to dig through the pieces and sift out the gold; to find meaning, to create anew.

I think the process is much more organic than one would originally believe. You don't sit there with a whiteboard and start listing American foods on one side, Chinese foods on the other and start criss-crossing to see what works. I think growing up here as a minority, knowing naturally what you've eaten your whole life and what makes sense goes a long way.

This is an obstacle my grandmother regularly hurdled. Being an annoyingly picky eater for a fat kid, she was constantly figuring out ways to get me to eat. Knowing that I would lap up any American food, like hot dogs, burgers, steaks, etc., she would often improvise "fusion" dishes to my liking. So really when I think about my childhood food I think about this strange combination of traditional Taiwanese food and American junk food. There'd be soy-braised pork riblets on one plate, and then next to it a potato hashbrown cakes with scallions and A1 sauce. There'd be miso-noodle soup sometimes along with pork braised in ketchup and onions. Steak and pork chops rubbed with Chinese five-spice served with a side of garlic bread. Ground beef seasoned with soy sauce before being turned in to spaghetti sauce. I loved all of this kind of stuff and obviously she wasn't trying to impress me, she was just trying to cook something tasty using the flavors and techniques she already felt comfortable with. Is it the kind of stuff you could serve in a restaurant? Maybe not, but it gets the ball rolling on the thought experiment...

Take for instance, chow-fun noodles. I've talked about them before, even mentioned some experimentation I've done with them (nothing naughty), but it's still not right. Chow-fun noodles are only exceptional when they're fresh, have never been frozen, and honestly, the kind we get are way too thin. Careless cooks vigorously toss them in a wok and they break in to ragged and uneven pieces. They're rice noodles, the chewy proteins and starchy amylose compounds make that springiness delectable, you have to respect and showcase that. The noodles need to be thicker, they need to be treated more delicately and they need to be fresh. This is something that is just far too much hassle for a restaurant that has about 80 other dishes on the menu and doesn't have enough discipline to treat the product properly. But with a well-trained French culinary brigade, with people who actually fucking care about cooking something with integrity, I think it can be done. Sure, it's a pain in the ass. But cooking anything right, treating it with real care is always a pain in the ass. Professional cooks are the only people who are crazy enough to do it every day.

But that's just the first step of natural observation. The next is pairing. In America, pasta has become somewhat bastardized but few people can deny the deliciousness of spaghetti and meatballs. If it's done right, it works, it's a simple combination. Protein, savory, sauce, acidity, starch, body, there's a lot of components that just boil down to three ingredients and make sense. So I suppose that's the next step...

Chinese sausages are mostly dried. They're delicious to be sure, but they lack that meatiness that Western sausages often have. Whereas Chinese sausages are thin and dry, Western sausages are fat and juicy. I think a properly cooked bratwurst or andouille sausage is an incredible thing. A thick, natural casing cooked on a griddle so that the skin cracks at 165 degrees and has its juices run all over mixed with mustard, it's quite sexual...

Wow, that got gay and suggestive real fast.

What I mean to say is that I think chow-fun noodles and their chewiness can benefit a lot from the meaty texture of a properly cooked sausage. Add an acidic yet flavorful sauce and you basically have the balance in flavor profile that spaghetti and meatballs does.

We can go deeper.

The sandwich. The ultimate food item. Chinese food culture has sandwiches for sure, they just don't enjoy the kind of distinction and reverence that Western sandwiches do. Not only do we love sandwiches in America, there are endless varieties of them to appreciate. The basics remain the same though; starch, protein, vegetables, sauce and very often cheese (more on dairy later).

My focus is on the sub or the hero or the hoagie, whatever you want to call it. A crusty white bread filled with cold cuts, mayo and American yellow-cheese. There isn't much in the way of crusty breads in Chinese food, but there are mantou, which are big, fluffy white buns. If you deep fry them (oh yes, I've gone there... though I'm not the first) and you bring 'em out quick, they do not retain greasiness and they have a delicate crispness to them. They are the perfect hot bread for which to make sandwiches with. I'm not saying slather mayo and dump dry turkey slices in there with Iceberg lettuce, but there is a lot of potential for experimentation right there. A way to retain the firm structure of the hero loaf but along with a means to expand the flavors in to another realm.

Of course there remain road blocks. Mainly with the aforementioned dairy products. That being, there are no dairy products in Asian food. And yet butter might as well be one of the most important things to have in a Western kitchen. How to negotiate this gulf? Butter has an assertive flavor on its own along with being an incredibly useful fat in the kitchen. How can you make a bridge out of butter when it doesn't belong in one place, but is heavily relied upon in the other?

This is a question I am not completely able to answer. You have to resort to using butter for its technical applications rather than its flavor, I suppose. Mounting butter in a sauce gives it thickness and lusciousness without asserting its pronounced flavor. A light brush of butter on a (rested) sliced steak gives it that extra note of luxury while still letting a well dry-aged beef do its thing. Butter-poached shallots and lobster give the respective ingredients a protective and delicious bath to cook in without becoming overly buttery, yet still bestowing incomparable texture and flavor on almost anything.

So these are just preliminary thoughts. Just some ideas perhaps as to how to bridge the gap. But in wondering we are lead to the inevitable question, is this authentic and does it matter?

What is authenticity? Well, it's hard to put that label on anything that is American. Food, culture, demographics, language, anything American is inherently an adaptation of, or mash-up of various influences from numerous backgrounds. That's why American food is so hard to classify, there wasn't really an extended period of time where we were confined to one geographic area and let the land, the ingredients sculpt our cuisine. We took European food, applied it to the incredibly diverse American landscape, and then included African, Caribbean, Asian and South American influences and ran with it. Ran with it all over the fucking place in a relatively short amount of time. I mean, the French spent hundreds of years in the same place figuring out what tasted good in their own country. How could we expect to have such a strong identity when we were so spread out, so diverse in an even shorter amount of time? The answer is we can't. So what does that mean for our question, what is authentic?

Well, there isn't really anything that is authentically American. And since Asian-American identity is an even more ambiguous and undefined thing, how could we even claim anything authentic for that? I think what it comes down to is that authenticity is a combination of taste, respect and execution.

Taste not as in flavor but as in class. You don't hate-fuck two things together just because you think you can. You do it with some serious thought and introspection. You gotta put a lot of effort in to it, be able to defend your reasoning and explain why you think it works. Any "fusion" dish you lob up there might as well be a fucking dissertation. You have to have really thought it out and be able to defend it to show that you gave the idea some serious effort, some respect...

So I suppose that's what it's all for then is respect. As much as we hate on those pansy Frenchmen, they have established a culinary identity that has changed the world. The same can be said for the millenia-old Chinese food culture. I mean these are dishes that have passed the test of centuries, you can't be that asshole that throws it up whimsically because you think it's cute or because it fits your restaurant's personality. You do it with intimate knowledge, with great care and appreciation for what came before you. And we all know that when you cook something with great care, what you are really doing is practicing good...

Execution. That's what good cooking is, taking an ingredient that someone painstakingly raised, and treating it right. You don't overcook it and say "Whoops" and throw it in the garbage. You realize all the manpower, careers, sweat and tears that went in to that one fucking heirloom tomato, or that one acorn-grazed pork belly, and you cook it right. You showcase it, you put that pretty girl on stage and you tell her the whole time you love her and she's the most beautiful girl in the room.

Okay, my analogy is spiraling out of control again, but I suppose that's what sums it up for me.

Taste, respect, execution.

I don't call it fusion because that name has been besmirched. No matter how many good things the Nazis did for Germany, they'll forever be fucking villains in the discourse of human history. Well, I feel almost as vehemently about the word "fusion." Yes, I am comparing bad fusion cooking to Nazism, get over it. It's caused too much pain and suffering to ever be redeemed.

I'll just call it cooking. Doing something right, cooking good food that I grew up with and thought to present as a representation of myself. An Asian-American boy who likes fried food and sweet-and-sour sauce. I realize this post wasn't terribly conclusive, more a loose organization of fleeting thoughts. But I feel like we're gaining ground. We're slowly starting to understand a bit more about why we cook and how we should cook. If there's a should at all.

But while I daydream and get hazy-eyed over the menus I may write I must first remember. There's a shitload of dishes to wash. Hurricane Irene has increased our weekday business by three-fold, and the old white Long Islanders aren't going to feed themselves. Mother Nature has handed us a golden goose egg, we must take care to handle it properly.

Back to work, Cindarella. Dream about your prince another time.

EP6

PS- Why do I keep referencing myself as a female character?!