One of the questions that customers often ask me is, “Is Your
Chef Italian?” This question used to annoy one of my chefs. He felt that the
implication was that if the chef wasn’t European, it meant that the food was
probably not good.
I understand where he’s coming from. However, I also worked
on the reverse. Would I be able to accept a European behind the kitchen in a
Chinese restaurant? The answer would be that it would be a struggle to do so. We
all have, as they say, preconceived notions of who can do what and when it
comes to food, we all have a certain sense of nationalism.
For the native eating his or her cuisine, it’s about the
taste of home. For the outsider, eating a different cuisine is about having a
flavour of another culture. When I lived in England, going to a Chinese restaurant
was about being with “MY” people. Going to a Chinese restaurant was inevitably
about introducing my English friends to “MY” flavours in “My” environment (I
use the word “MY” sparingly. The language that is part of me, is in fact
English. My spoken Cantonese is horrible and I am Chinese illiterate. However,
other than my physical appearance, being able to communicate in something other
than English marked me as different from my peers, which give me a sense of purpose.)
So, when you look at this question from the perspective of a
dining experience being a nationalistic one, the question “Is your chef from…s,”
is in fact a compliment and now that I have started a part-time gig in a
Vietnamese restaurant, I get the same question with a twist – “Is your chef from
Vietnam?”
The answer to both questions is no. The owner and main chef
of the Bistrot is French and the team in the kitchen for the better part of the
last few years is Tamil and Filipino. At the Vietnamese restaurant the guy
doing the cooking is Filipino. I believe that this is a sign of progress and
part of the way that the world should be. Food is one of the most treasured
parts of culture. When someone from a different culture can recreate food of a
particular culture to an extent where people don’t realise that the person
preparing the food isn’t a native, it’s a sign that culture can be celebrated
and enjoyed by any and everyone.
If there’s anything that unites human beings, it is the need
to sit down for a good meal and good food is one of the things that helps break
the ice between people from different worlds. In Singapore and Malaysia, one of
the nicest sights is watching local Tamil’s tuck into Bar-Chor mee or local
Chinese tuck into Roti Prata or Roti Cannai as they call it in Malaysia. The
experience of having and enjoying a cuisine is an act of taking in another
culture.
So, it goes without saying that the next step in cultural
participation is going in and learning how to prepare the cuisine of another
culture to a level where the “natives” of that culture enjoy your efforts.
It’s not who prepares the food but who enjoys it that matters.
Which brings me back to my experience of living in England
as a Chinese boy. I remember English people telling me that one of the best
ways of judging a Chinese restaurant was by the number of Chinese people who
ate there.
They were right. The best Chinese food in the UK was
inevitably in London’s China town because it served food that people who knew
Chinese food would eat. In the small towns where the owner of the only Chinese
take away was inevitably the only Chinese person, the food was inevitably what
English people imagined Chinese food to be (I remember my mother asking a
waiter at Chinese restaurant in Hamburg what was good on the menu – the answer
was “nothing – it’s served to cheat the Whites. In another incident, I remember
being in the Thai restaurant in Petersfield, the small English town where I
grew up. Mentioned that my stepdad was going to Bangkok the next day –
whereupon the waitress said “Oh, you’ll get real Thai food.”).
Now, I apply this experience to the restaurants that have
been my home. The Pizzeria & Grill and the Bistrot had regular customers
from Italy. The Vietnamese restaurant where I’ve been working at has more than
it’s share of Vietnamese customers (including my 21-year-old).
So, if you want to figure out if a restaurant of a
particular cuisine serves, don’t focus on culture of the chef but on who the
customers are. That would give you an idea of the “authenticity” of the food.
Celebrate that chefs can produce cuisine from all over the world.
I go back to my earlier point on whether I would accept a
Westerner cooking in a Chinese restaurant. Yes, I would struggle if I saw a blond-haired
blue-eyed chap behind a wok. However, if I noticed lots of Chinese people eating
there it would signal to me that he was producing good Chinese food. My respect
for this person would grow because it would mean he was passionate enough to
learn Chinese food as a Chinese tasting it.
Many of us forget that the product is not the person doing
the work but on the work that is produced.
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