KORE E Magazine – August 2019

COLUMN

food

for

thought

TEXT BY OLIVER WANG

Con Fusion

It’s only natural that food ways mingle and merge in a diverse society, but the

term “fusion” is dated. Can we come up with a more relevant label?

There are few food terms that have turned more rancid
than “fusion.” When fusion cuisine first gained currency
in the 1980s, it was supposed to communicate a kind
of inventive, worldly sophistication, where European
fine-dining techniques embraced primarily Asian influ-
ences. In Los Angeles, the most prominent example was
Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois on Main, opened in 1983, where
the famed Austrian chef served everything from curried
oysters with salmon roe to papaya with frozen Zinfandel
to a signature Chinese chicken salad that popularized the
dish nationally.
However, like most food fads, bad examples of fusion
soon followed. In many cases, dishes felt simultaneously
pretentious and lazy, as if chefs were just choosing items
from Column A and then splicing them with something
from Column B. Think wasabi mashed potatoes or duck
confit egg rolls. As Night + Market’s Kris Yenbamroong
writes in his restaurant’s self-titled cookbook, by the
nadir of the trend in the 1980s, “the only chefs doing
‘Asian fusion’ were white guys who put lemongrass in their
beurre blanc.”
As a result, by the end of the 1990s, fusion cuisine’s
associations became unavoidably uncool. Today, it’s hard
to find any chefs who openly embrace the term. Instead,
you’ll hear them use less tainted codewords such as

“mash-up” or “global,” but it’s still the same idea at heart:

the blending of different food cultures. Fusion, as market-

ing-speak, may be passé, but the fusing of foodways is as

omnipresent as ever, from hipster food trucks to Miche-

lin-starred restaurants. Don’t call it a comeback, fusion

has been here for years.

For thousands of years, forces such as trade, migration

and imperialism moved people, ingredients and cooking

practices into contact across continents. For example, the

Scoville heat bombs in Indian cooking wouldn’t be possi-

ble if not for chili peppers that came to the subcontinent

from Central and South America, via Portuguese traders.

Likewise, poached-chicken rice may have originated on

Hainan Island, but it was Singapore, 2,100 miles away, that

eventually adopted it as a national dish.

Asian Pacific Islander American cuisine, especially, is

a product of adaptation and blending. For example, when

the first Chinese restaurants appeared in Gold Rush-era

California, cooks didn’t have access to fresh, traditional

ingredients, nor were waves of experienced Chinese chefs

braving the boat journey across the Pacific. Instead, the

dishes that emerged—think chop suey or chow mein—