Transcriber: Jessica Zhao Reviewer: Hoda Nada
Let's talk about food.
It's mid-January and it is bitterly cold outside.
I’m walking as fast as I can
to get into this restaurant and I can hear
crunching under my feet.
When I get to the restaurant, I can’t see inside;
it’s all steamed up. But as soon as I open that door,
I'm hit with this immediate warmth
and this unbelievable smell of steaming hot chicken broth.
I’ve come to this restaurant to try their only menu item:
Shanghai-style soup dumplings or Xiao Long Bao— “soupies”, as I call them.
And there are these amazing little parcels of of dough,
very thin dough,
that have been filled with ground pork or ground beef or crab,
as well as blistering hot, steaming aromatic broth.
They’re delicious.
I like to eat them by sort of nibbling off the little pleated
crown of dough that seals the dumpling shut.
And as soon as some of that steam evaporates,
I’ll pour in a little bit of chili oil or some black vinegar
and just pop the entire thing into my mouth.
In that moment, there is nothing but me and that bamboo steamer of dumplings.
I am now completely immersed in this one singular pleasure.
A few months later, I’m at a cocktail party
and a gentleman is engaging me in a conversation
about my piece, and it’s great!
He loves my piece. He thinks my descriptions are wonderful.
And he says, “You know, I think I’d really like these soup dumplings.
They sound sort of like the thing I go for.
I love Chinese food. I love ethnic food,
but I really only like to go to those places that are the real deal.”
And then he asks me. “So, those dumplings sound really good.”
“But are they authentic?”
Are they authentic?
He didn’t ask me, “are they orthodox?”
He didn’t ask me whether they were accurate.
He didn’t ask me were they executed well. He asked me “were they authentic?”
Let me make this profoundly clear.
Culinary authenticity is a lie.
There is no such thing as authentic food.
Historical food? Yes.
Traditional food?
Absolutely.
But the belief in culinary authenticity—
it’s a lie, and it’s a corrosive one.
I mean, it’s completely understandable why we would want to-
to eat food that we consider to be authentic.
When fusion cuisine came along in the 80s and the 90s—
do you remember that — we got really excited.
The idea of melding different cuisines into one dish
was novel and new and interesting,
and then it kind of saturated the market and it lost its shine.
We became tired of things like curry chicken salad and taco pizza.
And as delicious as it is,
dipping your McNuggets in sweet and sour sauce
just lost some of the excitement.
(Laughter)
So, the pendulum swung the other way.
And in an era where we are redefining the very concept of identity,
diners have sort of picked up this curious new behavior.
It seems that we are now attributing value to cuisine that seems concise,
Easily identifiable.
Simple.
And in doing that,
we’ve also decided what is and is not an authentic restaurant.
By projecting what we believe an authentic restaurant needs to be,
we’ve created a bit of a problem.
Because when we ascribe
this very subjective version of authenticity onto a cuisine,
we’re defining it as traditional.
Only foods that are traditional can be made.
Only foods using the ingredients of the region are allowed,
and it can only be made by a chef of matching ethnic identity.
But by this definition,
there is no such thing as food borne from nurture, not nature.
By this definition, there is no room to allow for passion born of curiosity.
By this definition,
I've never made an authentic meal in my life.
When I was around two years old,
I was found in a little basket on the stairs of
a police station in South Korea.
When the police came, they asked me if I knew my name and I couldn't tell them.
But I could tell them that when I went to sleep my Oma was there and when
I woke up, my Oma was gone.
I was put into an orphanage with a ton of other Korean kids just like myself.
And these were kids and babies whose parents had given them up in hopes that
their sacrifice would give their children better opportunity.
I was adopted by this really nice, very white family in the Midwest.
As white as they can be— a mix of German, Irish and Dutch.
And I moved into this beautiful new home in Saint Louis.
Even after I began speaking English and even after my sister took me to show
and tell as the show and tell.
(Laughter)
And even after my brother taught me how to play Wiffle ball in the backyard,
I could not shake those early feelings of hunger and memories of being without.
I picked up a kind of an odd habit.
I would sneak out of my room in the middle of the night
as quietly as I could, and I would go down to the kitchen,
into the pantry.
I’d open it up and I’d grab whatever I could.
It really didn’t matter what it was—
A can of vegetables in one hand, a jar of mayonnaise in the other.
And I would scramble back up to my room as quietly as I could,
not to wake anyone up.
The times when I felt the most loved;
the times when I felt the most comforted;
the times when I felt most like part of a family
was when I was having dinner with my family around the dining room table.
We would laugh. We would eat something amazing that my mom made us.
We would argue a lot, but most of all, we just were creating memories.
And that became really important to me
because I started to associate food with connection and happiness
instead of with loss.
My mom would always find the food
and she would walk with me down to the kitchen to put it away.
And if I was hungry, she would ask me if I wanted my favorite eggs in a basket.
Also known by the elegant name of ‘Toad in a Hole’.
(Laughter)
And those sort of dying experiences, and those sort of food experiences,
Meant a lot to me.
They ultimately led me to become a chef.
I got my culinary training at a place in upstate New York called
the Culinary Institute of America— at the CIA, as we called it.
Their purpose was to drill classical French technique into every student’s head
And here I am in upstate New York,
this Korean woman who was raised by these Midwestern white folks.
And suddenly I'm becoming proficient at making stocks and sauces.
I could cut vegetables into these perfect one eighth inch cubes or brunoise.
And at night I would have French food dreams.
I would dream about croquembouche, and potatoes stuffed in waze,
and bechamel and hollandaise.
And it all seemed totally natural to me.
It all seemed exactly like what I should be doing.
No one told me at that time that I was cooking someone else's cuisine.
No one told me that by making coq au vin, I was doing what I shouldn’t be doing.
No one told me I should be fermenting kimchi.
Had they, I think I would have—
In the colorful language of the chef—
explained to them what I thought they could do with their opinion.
(Laughter)
So what do we do now?
How do we move forward?
How do we, as diners, make sure we’re going forwards and not backwards?
Well, one of the things we can do is decide who we don’t want to be.
Right?
So listen to this exchange and tell me what you feel is off.
What feels wrong to you?
The places that we have been told are authentic
sort of all fit within a certain category.
So imagine this: you’re at that same cocktail party that I was at,
but you run into someone who wants to share their latest gastronomic conquests.
And they say something that sounds like this:
So I found this place that’s supposed to have the best birria tacos in the city,
and I went looking for it and I got lost. And I was stuck in this neighborhood.
And I’m like, “Where am I? This is not safe. I don’t know what’s going on here.”
And then I find it.
It’s this total dump, man. It’s this hole in the wall.
Nobody knows about it. It’s totally authentic.
When we went in, there was no one who spoke English.
We were the only white people.
It was awesome.
And my tacos were only about 50.
Ethnic food is so cheap. This is great.
Don't be that guy.
(Laughter)
The other thing we can do is we can just chuck that word ‘ethnic’
in relation to cuisine.
Replace it with the region you’re speaking of
or just leave it out altogether. It’s perfectly fine.
The other thing you can do is a little work
and I am asking you to do your due diligence here.
If you're interested in the traditional cuisines of a region,
take a little bit of time to research it.
Find out the influences, and the people,
and the immigration,
and the effects of the country that have changed that cuisine
and influenced what you are about to put into your mouth.
I'm not asking you to become experts,
but I am asking you to put forth some effort.
Lastly, we can believe in the food that we are being served.
We can believe in its intention.
We can believe in the chef that used their cumulative knowledge
and skill to make that dish for you because they thought you would enjoy it.
By doing that, you hear the chef’s story of their experiences,
not just their ethnicity.
So, what did I tell the cocktail guy?
Did I tell him that those Xiao Long Bao were authentic?
I did.
I told him they were very authentic.
As real and as genuine, as authentic, as he was
or as I am—a Korean woman who was trained as a French chef
and whose comfort food craving is German roulade and toasted ravioli.
(Laughter)
Plus those soup dumplings—
they taste really good and they make people really happy.
And is there anything more authentic than sharing food made with care
and skill to give others joy?
Thank you.
(Applause)