Thịt kho tàu (Vietnamese braised pork belly) at Sắp Sửa. Photo by Casey Wilson

Third culture cuisine is more than a trend

29 Aug 2023

Look around. Go online, scroll through any Best Restaurant list in America, stroll through the supermarket. There is a veritable tsunami of third culture, Asian-American concepts, from remixed dried noodles to xiao long bao, shedding most adherences to authenticity, peering out from between shelves on the ‘ethnic’ aisles. There’s sinigang and larb, but they’re bursting through neon pink packets, inviting you to tear them open and remix them into your own dishes.

Best of lists are dominated by chefs and restaurateurs loosening their grips on their own cultural traditions, even if they’re still categorised as ‘Korean,’ ‘Chinese’ or ‘Thai’. Concepts like Chicago’s Kasama and San Francisco’s Mister Jiu’s sweep up every major restaurant award. On TikTok, a brooding Jon Kung shows you how to slurp cold soba noodles on a paddleboard. In New York, Southeast quietly showcases both ingredients from Asia and locally made Djablo (Filipino-American hot sauce), Pika Pika (vegan kaya), and Kusi (Filipino seasonings).

Third culture cuisine (the food of people raised outside of their parents’ cultures), and the unabashed, bold celebration of it, isn’t a trend, it’s a tidal wave sweeping through restaurants, social media and the frozen aisle at your local market.

Bắp cải luộc (charred cabbage) at Sắp Sửa, Denver.

_{Bắp cải luộc (charred cabbage) at Sắp Sửa. Photo by Casey Wilson}

Thirst traps

Not too long ago, I was scrolling through TikTok when a familiar face peered back at me. Familiar but for being attached to a muscular shirtless torso, eyebrows furrowed and an authoritative voice elucidating the nuances of a Chinese master stock.

Comparing this to the Asian American cooking content of just a few years ago, I asked my editor, “Can you imagine Martin Yan or David Chang posting thirst traps [social media content designed to sexually entice] on the internet? You cannot.”

But here we are, with a shirtless Jon Kung walking me and nearly two million other followers through remixed recipes. Kung’s forthcoming cookbook, Kung Food: Chinese American Recipes from a Third-Culture Kitchen, includes recipes like Spaghetti and Lion’s Head Meatballs and jollof rice made in a Chinese clay pot.

A new generation of third-culture chefs simultaneously embraces the nuances of their identities (from cultural to sexual) and sheds strict adherence to traditional flavours. These types of openness have progressed in unison.

My own story is similar – I come from an extremely traditional Chinese family that would disapprove of lion’s head meatballs on spaghetti. I went to high school with Kung in Hong Kong. 20 years ago, behind the bar at a Lan Kwai Fong institution frequented by teenagers that is no longer, Kung slid me my first ever (illegal) electric green Midori sour. Over the next few years, my girlfriends and I were drawn like glittery flies to the long-gone Hubbub, where Kung blended up frozen pineapple and vodka for us to sip into the hazy purple Hong Kong night.

Kung’s storytelling approach to food is unfamiliar to our relatives who still live in Hong Kong and requires explication (like an entire cookbook) for both sides. “Even back when I was strongly asserting that my food was Chinese, I was still explaining what it was to my parents, aunties, and uncles back home. They would say ‘Oh it’s fusion,’” writes Kung. “This book is a reintroduction to Chinese American cuisine if we had been allowed to partake in the globalization of American cuisine.”

Kung Food is a cookbook about a hypothetical cuisine, foreshadowing the Chinese-American food of the future, through lived experience. “Our diasporic culture is going to branch off into so many forms. You’re going to see more mixed race and mixed culture households. This book is a celebration of that and an encouragement,” continues Kung.

_{Vanessa and Kim Pham of Omsom. Photo by Deanie Chen}

What’s authenticity anyway?

“Every time I hear the word ‘authentic’ a little part of my soul dies. Doesn’t it stunt our creativity if we have to do things exactly the same way our parents did?” asks Palita Sriratana, chef and founder of Chicago’s Pink Salt (“unfettered, not too serious, born in tradition but not limited by it”), as we meet up over for matcha lattes at New York City’s Davelle.

Sriratana often combats ingrained perceptions of Thai cuisine in America. “Running Pink Salt can be tedious. People cling to the Thai dishes they know – takeout classics like pad see ewe and green curry.”

Sriratana has found a new vehicle to get her point across, it comes in a thoughtfully designed jar and resembles no sauce of yesteryear: she has just launched her first sauce, a nam prik pao, a Thai-style roasted chilli jam.

She’s hardly alone. Third culture retail brands are using their products to intentionally evolve the traditions their founders remember. Jennifer Liao, the co-founder of MìLà, launched frozen soup dumplings in 2020 and says: “We can potentially play a role in shaping this evolving Chinese food landscape. Chinese foods in the US continue to face a vicious circle, with prejudice that it should still be cheap.” Liao sees a path forward with vegan soup dumplings. “Sales of frozen Asian entrees and appetisers in the US grew by 14% in the last year. At MìLà, we intend to meet this demand.”

On the buyer side, Ron Capistrano is invigorated by homegrown third culture retail concepts. His company, Southeast, specialises in Asian ingredients from Asia and Asian products produced Stateside. “Being Filipino, I’m very familiar with flavours [of new creators like Pika Pika] and I wanted to share them with people and be the first one to carry their product. It’s a privilege to be part of their growth.”

At the forefront of third culture flavours, is Kim Pham, co-founder of Omsom. “I started the business with my sister as a reflection of my lived identity as a first-generation Vietnamese American. We grew up in a town that was 98% white and had lots of feelings of shame and ‘other’ as they relate to our identities,” Pham tells me. “Post the 2016 election, we both felt personal moral emergencies about the reclamation of Asian flavours and stories. We were overdue for a brand that would centre Asian Americans first. Very much of what we had seen in the ethnic aisle growing up was bastardised, largely made for a Western audience, without Asian Americans in mind and without even Asian Americans in the room.

“As we became adults, we were excited about non-Asian Asian-American food and chefs pushing forward their own cuisines, without being burdened by calls for hyper authenticity.” In this atmosphere, with a healthy dose of inspiration from the brand FUBU and what it represented to black Americans, a retail food company was born. “We never use the word ‘authentic’ in describing Omsom. We are trying to break open the box that Asian-American cuisine has been given,” says Pham. “What’s authentic to one person isn’t to another. Authenticity sets chefs up to fail.”

As with Kung, TikTok played a role. “There are so many restaurateurs, chefs, paying homage to our roots but doing something new – TikTok poured gasoline on that,” says Pham. Social media is also a venue for Pham to thoughtfully explore, equally loudly and proudly, power dynamics in the BDSM world. This journey came with developing Omsom, itself a “deeply transformative journey” for Pham. “As I was creating space for us and my team to own our identities, that’s when I came out. I was like oh, I’m queer. I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to realise it.”

Survivor’s guilt

Tradition remains at the core of third culture food. Chef Ni Nguyen of Denver’s three-month-old Sắp Sửa says: “We push the limits and see how far we can go from tradition without losing the integrity of the dish. Every dish has a personal tie to my first-generation experience, whether it be the boiled cabbage dish my mom made after long days of work or popcorn chicken from my neighbourhood boba shop.”

As dishes evolve and mature, so do the people who craft them. “First generation Asian Americans are stepping into this ‘oldest child’ role, going through it to inspire others that a restaurant that represents your culture can be done,” says Nguyen.

“It’s a magical time right now, exploring our identities as Asian Americans and how that has shaped our food to be different from our parents’,” says Jesse Ito of Philadelphia’s Royal Izakaya. Ito’s partner is his father, so these words carry no insignificant weight. Ito describes a childhood where he “never felt like I really fit in anywhere. I grew up in New Jersey. My father is Japanese, from Oita. My mother is Korean from Seoul. They owned an iconic Japanese restaurant for 37 years. Every time I messed up cutting fish when I was learning, customers at my dad’s restaurant would lowkey shame me for being half Korean and therefore not ‘authentic.’”

But Royal is Ito’s own. “It’s a reflection of me and who I am today. It’s important to retain our heritage through our cooking. But it’s also important to be able to stay creative and integrate other influences into our food and restaurants.”

Most of the third culture kids mentioned in this article (author included) are in their 30s. This decade is an enormous factor in us evolving our flavours and identities.

“I spent my late 20s breaking away from the model minority myth. Those years were laced with survivor’s guilt. My parents immigrated here so I could have a better life. Did I fail them?” asks Sriratana. “It wasn’t until my 30s that I felt comfortable in my own skin.”

“I love being a multicultural American,” says Ito. “I love being in my 30s and not caring about what people think of me.”

“We used to have to overexplain ourselves,” says Pham, who finds the loud and proud sides of her sexuality and food complimentary. “If you like proud loud Asian flavours, you can’t be surprised that they come from a proud, loud Asian woman. They couldn’t exist without one another.”

29 Aug 2023

Food Trends