This got a report for xenophobia and, to my mind, it is xenophobic. It could totally be interpreted a different way where it’s inviting you to consider the cross-cultural nature of cuisine that gets boiled down into a single name, but it seems like most people, myself included (having seen how some other “Yes, but” comics go), don’t.
I think it’s worthwhile to leave this post up because the comments surrounding it are worthwhile and actually transform this into something insightful.
I clearly didn’t interpret this comic the same way as everyone else has, and if you think it would be better to delete it, I will.
I’ve seen this joke in many forms before, and it’s usually more like “it’s a little humorous when this happens” rather than some sort of xenophobic criticism. Like the cowboy themed restaurant in Fresh off the Boat or Bobby’s Japanese/German restaurant in King of the Hill:
I don’t think it’s better to delete it. I like to interpret it as the Bobby Hill Japanese fusion restaurant thing too even if I don’t think that’s what was intended by it. All the discussion here is really nice.
You are nice.
I need to watch the new season(s?)
It’s different, but I really enjoyed the new season.
Appreciate this very thoughtful mod response. It’s easy to get too wrapped up on yes/no answers when reality is far more fuzzy and complicated than that.
As an AAPI, I didn’t see anything more to this than a funny little nod to the people who actually prepare ethnic cuisines in countries not of their origin.
I saw it for the humor too. As a joke, at steakhouses - my southeast Asian wife used to demand “authentic” Texan bbq from REAL Texans. She’d say things like, “He looks like he’s from Wisconsin. I can tell.”
Brutal rare insult
Yeah. We’re all called chef in the kitchen. It’s respect. Who cares where you’re from if you can cook it with love (or, as the occasion calls for, salt)
or it could be that the larger majority doesn’t see it that way and people are being overly sensitive and that can apply to both the person reading this, and the intentions of the og artist
People from anywhere can cook authentic food from anywhere else as long as they know what they are doing, so this is bs
It reminded me of this asshole, who happened to be Italian, claiming that a professionally trained chef could not cook proper Italian food because he was Mexican
Every good Greek restaurant I’ve ever been to had a kitchen full of Mexican cooks. Most of my favorite Chinese takeout places were run by Koreans. Folks cook food.
Many of the Greek-owned Italian restaurants and diners in my are being transferred to Albanians, but the language in the kitchens is invariably Spanish.
I mean, yeah, but the head chef and owner, she is still greek. Unfortunately for them I married someone who is not attached to the restaurant except emotionally, like me. or else I might try to get the restaurant Prussian monarchy style
Even the concept of food being “authentic” or “inauthentic” is pretty dumb. Pretty much every food short of raw foraged ingredients is the result of cultural exchange.
You could argue that an Italian cooking with chilis or tomatoes is inauthentic and that the resulting food is more Mexican than it is Italian.
Extending the concept from ingredients to techniques, you could argue that every food that relies on the cold chain (refrigerated/frozen storage and transportation) is an American food because the cold chain was created by an American.
its about expectations. I grew up in California and have some specific expectations about Mexican food. they are different than if I was raised in Jalisco. I went to a “Mexican” restaurant in Budapest and their interpretation of Mexican food is VERRY different.
Did you see there’s a national chain of Mexican restaurants that just shuttered their doors in the US after a failed expansion here? It was founded by two Australian men. I’m really curious what their interpretation is.
I went to a “Mexican” restaurant in Budapest and their interpretation of Mexican food is VERRY different.
Very different to what you experience in the USA? or very different to what you’d experience in Mexico?
Most Mexican food in the USA is TexMex which is inspired, but fairly different, from actual Mexican food… same with Chinese food
Tex-Mex is “actual” Mexican food, the cuisine formed from the Tejanos and is older than either Texas or Mexico. Mexico is a big place with lots of regional variation. Most Mexican food that Americans are familiar with is from or inspired by stuff near the border (which makes sense) with a mix from all over the country like mole, birria, and tequila.
Preach, Soggy. I was fortunate I had a good friend who was patient and taught me this shit. The internet is usually not that kind, but fuck being unkind.
Where are you basing that off and what regions? Like, I grew up working around the Statesian southwest. I had a good friend (a Mexican immigrant) when I lived in Austin, TX and I would gripe to her about not finding “real” Mexican food. She took me to a few places and then I cooked her tacos to show her what I meant. East Mexico and West Mexico (according to my friend) use entirely different salsas because of different availability of easy fresh ingredients. So I grew up eating baja style tacos, white people enchilada casserole (my mom made a good recipe what can I say. The salsa is tomato and The Duck), while she grew up with lots of butter and molé. So now our eating comprehension quiz: Q1) Which is better? A1) Fuck you they’re both delicious, I just prefer baja style tacos because it’s what I grew up with. I like Oaxaca style better than that. Imagine thinking Mexico was merely one region and one culture. Q2) Which is more authentic? A2) see A1.
I dont think most Mexican food in the US is tex-mex. Fast food like taco bell isnt tex-mex, and most taco trucks and takeout places aren’t. The main category of restaurant that seems to be largely tex-mex are sit-down places with names like “El Mariachi” that cater to non-hispanic people and advertise the cheapness of their margaritas.
It is wild how much local cultural food is am invention of the past couple hundred years.
I have a family recipe that goes back hundreds of years, it doesnt look anything like people would consider a cultural food from western Europe and even then it uses tomatoes so it literally can’t be truly old.
Heck look at how the world makes pancakes. They are all the same just somehow mixed up based on loose info or available ingredients.
Cooking a nice meal is a modern invention. Before it was just food to not kill you.
It’s less the who and more the branding. It’s funny that one has to have the right “look” to sell you the food of a nation, or customers will reject it. The sorts of comments you hear while working in a Chinese run Japanese restaurant in the US…
Like, they have this sushi bar at the HEB I used to shop at. Right next to the tortillary. The folk working the sushi counter are as Latino as I am weird. But you can get an 8 pack of nigiri or a 12 of maki for cheap and made right in front of you.
I have nearly every other gastro disease, but those never made me sick and tasted about what they cost, which was nice when I was broke and still needed sushi to properly maintain a healthy gut macrobiome
My absolute favorite sushi place for ages was a conveyor belt shop run by a family of jovial Mexican sushi chefs and one very stern Korean woman. Cheap, tasty, consistent, fresh. They profited through volume, but doing so was murder on their joints, so swapped to typical prices and seating. I’m just glad that food bigots are the minority in my new area.
People from anywhere can cook authentic food from anywhere else as long as they know what they are doing, so this is bs
It is a bit surreal to suggest your nation of birth or genetic lineage somehow influences your capacity to slap a piece of fish on some rice.
Also… if you want to get really anal about the history of the dish, narezushi originated in modern day Cambodia/Thailand, and first documented in ancient China around the 4th century. Meanwhile, the more modern techniques for preparing and serving sushi did originate in Tokyo in the 19th century, but spread like wildfire. Sushi restaurants were popping up in Los Angeles as early as 1906.
It reminded me of this asshole, who happened to be Italian, claiming that a professionally trained chef could not cook proper Italian food because he was Mexican
A professionally trained chief should be able to faithfully reproduce a litany of dishes from around the world.
Of course, there’s a lot of regional variation and conditions. I might suggest that you cannot reliably produce a Genovese sauce outside of Genova, simply because you don’t have the locally raised veal, for instance. But that’s not a problem unique to chefs of a particular national origin.
I don’t know that you’d even want to serve truely authentic food since you want to appeal to local tastes. See: Chinese Food in the USA.
Yeah i was just thinking specifically Chinese food. Authentic Chinese food is like chicken feet and scorpions on a stick and stuff.
Both of those specifically are also found in Mexico, funnily enough.
Eh. Chicken feet aren’t so bad. It’s kind of like pork trotters or whatever those jarred, pickled hooves are called.
What was bad when I got chicken feet was the sauce. Fucking awful.
I love maki sushi, but I think uramaki sushi is pretty shit. It just so happens that uramaki sushi was invented by a Japanese chef trying to trick Americans into eating seaweed, which they thought was gross. But I love seaweed and I think uramaki ruins it by hiding it behind the rice. So I prefer authentic sushi.
I’m just happy when they don’t add a ton of sugar to sushi. seriously, what the hell is that?
For some reason, I took this comic to mean a Japanese restaurant that serves food from other East Asian cultures.
“Yeah, we’d love to hire you for the cook role here at Taco Time, unfortunately you’re not authentic Mexican so we can’t.” - something never said before by a hiring manager.
Well, that would be WILDLY illegal but I get your point
“authentic” in terms of food and restaurant culture is just a dog whistle for “racist.”
Like please. I’m not in Italy, it’s not “authentic” it’s just Italian food. Food is a universal language and words added like “authentic” are just plain bigoted.
Most people take ‘authentic’ to mean ‘similar to what you’d find in the country of origin’. There’s nothing racist about it, it’s about expectations.
except when people criticize “authenticity” based upon who is in the kitchen. as in op.
There is a difference between criticism and jokes.
I thankfully don’t know anyone who goes to a japanese restaurant to stare at the people working there. It’s got its name from the food they make there, not from the ethnicity of the people inside the building.
In my teenage years I embarrassed myself by trying to order in Japanese… The server was Korean.
It’s okay, happens to the best of us. I’m half Korean, half Czech, but I look like a big Polynesian dude. Not too long ago I went to a “Korean BBQ” place in the Midwest where the server greeted me in Korean. Which I thought was strange because he looked Chinese, but hey who am I to judge, I look Polynesian.
So I started to speak to him in Korean, and the dude panicked and ran away to get the manger who was Korean. Seems as if the manager/owners were Koreans hiring Chinese immigrants and having them pretend to be Korean to non Korean people.
Are you me? I would do this because I didn’t have anywhere else to practice Japanese outside of class. The first Japanese restaurant I went to the experience was great; the waitress was first or second gen and seemed tickled that this random white girl was trying to communicate with her in broken Japanese. The second place I went the waitress replied with embarrassment that she was Korean. I didn’t try again after that.
Oh man, my family is Okinawan, and when we were visiting Aomori, this touristy market had an Okinawa fair going on and my kids went to go get a traditional Okinawan donut snack (we had been travelling for two weeks and they missed the taste of home), and when my kids thanked the staff in Okinawan, they looked really puzzled because I think they were just mainlanders selling Okinawan goods. I’m not even sure if they were even aware that we have a different language here. My kids looked really bummed.
Haha this brought back a memory! I also tried to speak Japanese that I learned from anime to a Asian person in a sushi restaurant! They looked at me and said, “Ill go get the manager”
We doing passport checks on the staff before eating at a restaurant now?
I go to a Japanese restaurant to eat Japanese food. Not to eat a Japanese waiter or chef.
Where would I go if I wanted to eat a… the other thing you said…
Probably Japan
That was my next question too
Not enough Latinos/Hispanics.
Came here to say this, as someone with first hand experience there should be at least a Mexican either doing the dishes or running the prep and maybe another hurrying stuff around or running the floor
Found the American
An army travels on its stomach. – Napoleon
Americans can sit still because from farm to table Hispanics/Latinos are how food travels to American stomachs. Even the best pizza shop I ever lived next to (run by Pakistanis) still depended on central and south American labor to get everything into their Italian kitchen.
Most Hawaiian Barbecue restaurants around here aren’t run by Hawaiians.
Most donut shops around here aren’t run by people from… wherever donuts came from.
More than 80% of donut shops in Los Angeles are run by Cambodians, because of
Huh, that’s unexpected and interesting.
The culturally appropriate term is Donutlandia.
“Most donut shops aren’t run by Hollywood cops”
Surprisingly a lot of Jamaican jerk huts are run by Jamaicans.
I expect girl guide cookies to be made with real girl guides
Preferably organically raised.
I am Turkish.
I go to Turkish restaurants.
Lots of Arabs working there.
Same food has become part of their culture too over last few centuries living side by side.
Some of our food is straight up borrowed from them, in fact.
Pretty sure one used to live/work in Turkey.
They cook it well.
I like it.I assume similar?
I have to share this: I have learned that Türkiye has a culture of cats. Cats, tea, coffee, and delicious gyro. It was on the internet therefore it must be true. If it weren’t for the government I’d be looking at a music fellowship there.
There was a slight empire situation there. You have no basis to complain about cultural appropriation as a Turk. But yes, many of the pilaf dishes in Asia have ottoman roots.
Even when an actual Japanese restaurant franchise opens a place here, they are usually run by local people. I don’t think that has much to do with how authentic the food is.
Like I don’t care if my baguette was technically made by a guy born in Clermont-Ferrand. Flour, salt, water, baker’s yeast. Nothing else. Do it right, and congratulations, that’s a baguette.
If I’m gonna buy an authentic baguette, the baker could at least have the decency to wear a beret and a twirly moustache, regardless of their ethnicity.
My favorite sushi spot is run exclusively by Koreans
Not supporting this meme, but isn’t Sushi a Korean thing as well?
it’s as “korean” thing as it is “american” thing, or anywhere else people eat it.
but it originated in japan
i don’t care if my sushi chef is japanese or korean or mexican or anything else. if it’s fresh and doesn’t fall apart when i pick it up, then it’s sushi
My sushi chef is named James. I haven’t seen him in over a decade, but I claimed him he’s mine he won awards
Korea developed kimbap during Japan’s colonial rule in the early 1900s although had previous analogues during the Chosŏn period. Still, I could imagine that Japanese sushi with raw fish is enjoyed in Korea like it is in America.
There isn’t a bunch of sushi places in Korea, at least not unless it’s a recent trend. Typically Koreans eat Saengseon-hoe which is more like sashimi, or if they’re doing rice it would be Hoe-deopbap. Which is like bibimbop with sashimi.
Japan and Korea have a colonial and post-colonial relationship, so ethnic Koreans who have lived for generations in Japan knowing how to make authentic sushi isn’t that much of a surprise.
And Japanese culture is one of its great exports throughout the world in recent decades, so people throughout the world how to make good sushi.
Benihana has training centers throughout the world. Most Benihana performative cooks around here in California are Latino. Some have even opened their own independent teppanyaki restaurants.
I never thought that benihana would have training centers but duh. I wonder what you have to do to get in. I like eating is all.
Apply for the job “Teppan Chef” https://harri.com/bh-1023/job/2735637-teppan-chef
Then pass the 5 week training course.
Wow. Imagine getting offended by “xenophobia” for the most banal of observations.
So… Are ya Chinese or Japanese?
The ocean?
Laotian
From Laos
A person doesn’t have to be from a particular country to know how to cook their cuisine.
True, but at the same time, especially with Japanese restaurants, there’s usually a correlation
