Monday, April 19, 2021

Is Your Chef from ……

 

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.

 


 Does it matter if this Pizza is prepared by someone from Naples?

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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Maira Gall