Afterthoughts: American Cuisine: Questions Answered

Nearly three decades later (this being 2014), pundits, critics, food writers, and bloggers still debate the existence (don’t even mention, “emergence”) of a legitimate American cuisine.

This essay, the one that precedes it and the two that follow try to make some sense of the debate, asking questions, addressing concerns, analyzing proclamations, tracing haphazardly its evolution from trial and error to conviction and proof.

You can continue to ask the same questions I list in this essay (they still make sense and are still relevant today), but the answers will be worlds apart from the ones I heard in 1984.

Back then, some chefs, media-celebrated as “rising stars,” palmed off as original their watered-down versions of ethnically pure dishes. You are, went the argument, known by the company you keep; and, if in the keeping of it, you scrounge an ethnically-pure recipe or two from great restaurants and their chefs or their cookbooks and manipulate it so that the similarity and the scrounging fade, that’s OK: it was thought to be part of the learning process.

Today, no such deception. Today’s 21^st Century American chef blends ideas from a mixed bag filled with ethnic inspirations, intuitive discovery derived from cooking fundamentals, grandma’s kitchen, authentic not-to-be-messed-with regional cooking recipes, the encroachment of nouvelle, occasional flashes of brilliance bursting helter-skelter from what he or she learned at culinary school; and then fuses all of that ingeniously (indigenously?) into a cross-cultural cookery that has but a fleeting resemblance of or homage to ethnic foods, their roots and ingredients: American cuisine. Finally. 


Notable practitioners and guardians of this new strain of gastronomy (to name but a few) are Thomas Keller, Mark Peel, Alice Waters, Doug Katz, Jonathan Bennett, Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, Dante Boccuzzi, Michael Mina, David Burke, Rocco Whalen, Kenny Callahan, Larry Forgione, Stephen Pyles, Norm Van Aken, Bobby Flay, Jasper White, Linton Hopkins, Eric Ripert, Michael Symon (right), Matt Molina, Brad Ogden, Zack Bruell, Nancy Silverton, Jack Pickett, Bob Kinkead, Tom Calicchio, Dean Fearing, Lydia Shire, Gary Danko. 

There are dozens of others, of course. The list goes on and on—that, in itself, evidence of the omnipresence of an American cuisine; and, as practiced by their practitioners (see list above), as good as or better than the best of French, Chinese or Italian. Many restaurants, just opened or opened for, let’s say 15, 20 years, when asked to describe their menu, will tell you it’s American. They never would have had the guts to say that 21 years ago.