https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-02/fusion-is-a-dirty-word-in-restaurants-but-the-impulse-behind-it-is-good


When is a restaurant like a handbag? A private dining room reservation — drink pairing included — for 12 people at the coming Kyoto residency of Danish chef Rene Redzepi’s Noma costs around $16,000. You can spend that much on a single pink Birkin bag from Hermes on the secondary market. Yes, used.

Despite the disparity in per-unit cost, restaurants have something to learn from the current state of the luxury industry. LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE — which has made Chief Executive Officer Bernard Arnault one of the richest people in the world — last month suffered "the biggest bling bust" in a decade, according to my colleague Andrea Felsted. She’d been seeing signs of it months before. In April, she offered the big luxury houses some advice: Democratize or be prepared lose aspirational consumers to companies that know how to sell more affordable opulence.

The restaurant scene may ripe for a plebeian upheaval, too. Word of, ahem, mouth in New York, Copenhagen, London and other foodie capitals has diners choking over almost-extortionate tabs. The industry recovered dramatically after Covid, but in the pursuit of growth, it’s passed along tons of the cost to diners. The strategy has been to cater to ever-richer customers. But there aren’t enough plutocrats out there to eat all those caviar-bloated tasting menus.

There’s a lot to be done, but perhaps cooks and investors can head toward forbidden territory. Judging from movies, books and social media, chefs aren’t afraid of spouting the F word — unless the initial leads to the sequence U, S, I, O and N. I can barely say it myself because of all the bad multi-culti cooking that has been served to us under the name. Some of the excess persists — say, the Yorkshire burrito, an all-in-one Sunday roast wrapped in a Yorkshire pudding roll, or the chicken katsu from the UK’s chain bakery Gregg’s — though no one dares utter the word fusion.

There, I said it.

But all cuisines are to a large extent the product of historic fusions. Creative kitchens never really have borders and good chefs always looking to be inspired by unfamiliar flavors and products. For example, Portuguese seafarers kindled culinary innovation from India to China to Japan. Tempura originates from a cooking technique (and possibly word) used by the first Western European traders to visit Japan. India, Indonesia and the Philippines have a dessert that sounds like bebinca — though the preparation varies from country to country. The egg custard staple of Cantonese bakeries, dan tat, is a Macanese version of Lisbon’s famous pasteis de nata. These cross-cultural innovations were the results of natural culinary impulses — to create delightful food, something shared with the fad for fusion in the 20th century. The better word, I think, is diffusion — the spread of ideas, condiments, techniques from one culture to another.

It’s still going on today. I was at a pop-up in north London and I asked the young French-trained British chef what made his dishes so refreshingly different. He smiled and said, a touch of Vietnamese fish sauce. Tempura cooking technique has also become ubiquitous in all kitchens, further popularized by Nobu, the global chain co-owned by Robert De Niro.

Rambutan, a Sri Lankan restaurant in London where I’m a regular, has begun a series of collaborations called "Cousins," bringing together chefs to meld and shape their cuisine with the styles and produce of the South Asian nation. The first guest chef in the series was Rahel Stephanie, the Indonesian cook with a cult following in the city. One of her contributions, a marvelous dip made of silken tofu and andaliman peppers — which are similar to mouth-numbing Sichuan pepper corns but with a distinctly brighter flavor. Andaliman are from Stephanie’s home region in Sumatra. It was a revelation — and piquantly delicious not just with the gundu dosas of Rambutan but with everything else on the menu. The influences are self-perpetuating. Chef-owner Cynthia Shanmugalingam noted that the fruit from which her restaurant takes its name was originally brought to Sri Lanka by traders from Java, which is part of Indonesia. She’s looking for future guest chefs who will find culinary congruences with her country’s cooking. Together, they’d collaborate to enhance each other’s traditions. No more the culinary chimeras of the unforgiving past.

That kind of creativity — melding, not grafting, influences — could make fusion respectable again; or, at the very least, make the impulses behind it more pervasive. There’s also a business application. Many cuisines from Asia, Latin America and Africa are unjustly relegated to the cheap eats category, even when they require more prep work, kitchen technique and culinary knowledge than goes into many middle-of-the road Western menus. This is an opportunity for them to raise their profiles and market value by collaborating with established restaurant developers looking for a way out of the beggar-your-customer race.
I tend to be unrealistic about these things, but I see hope. Wagamama, the fusion-y noodle chain now owned by Apollo Global Management Inc.’s Restaurant Group, was once a relatively good choice for travelers stuck in airports or wandering aimlessly through global tourist hubs. The food — Japanese-inspired but with infusions of Chinese influence — has lost its culinary way since Alan Yau, its Hong Kong-born founder, sold it in 2018. The good news: Wagamama announced in June that its experimental noodle lab is partnering with a young chef to help revitalize its fare. That chef’s name: Rahel Stephanie.

I’m going to have to eat there again.