October 1990: The Ethnification of American Cuisine

Rex Hale, executive chef, The American Restaurant (Kansas City), got me to thinking. “The menu at The American,” according to Hale, “is American cuisine; a melting pot cuisine that has evolved from a host of ethnic influences. None of it originated here, but we kind of reworked it and made it our own.”

If anybody is still searching for a definition of American cuisine, stop: Hale’s is the best I’ve heard so far; furthermore, I agree with it. 

Find variations of this on menus of
nearly every restaurant everywhere.

Ethnic foods have insinuated themselves onto menus everywhere, even in those restaurants—thank you, Rex Hale—that fancy themselves custodians of American cuisine. Unlike Hale’s The American, most aren’t fancy insinuations, but they are insinuations, nonetheless—as basic as meatloaf and mashed potatoes: a taco here, an eggroll there, a plate of pasta everywhere. 

How come? Well, it’s sort of a tough call, but I’m going to give it a shot.

Foodservice demographers and statisticians tell us they understand what’s going on in foodservice today. They measure the heartbeat of the industry with pulse-quickening random samples and projectable percentages. With custom-made slides of graphs and tabular matter projected onto the screens of endless association-sponsored seminars, they trap us in a gridlock of data, convincing us that Americans eat ethnic because we’ve travelled all over the world and eaten everywhere; and, upon returning to the States—our palates having been re-invigorated, tantalized, and reeducated with tastes sampled and meals eaten in hundreds of bistros, cafes, Ginzas, and Kasbahs—demand similar tastes from our favorite restaurants.

I don’t think so.

I think, rather, that the proliferation of ethnic foods in this country resulted from the great diversity of cultures settling here. Enterprising entrepreneurs (themselves products of these cultures), having emigrated here and, upon discovering there were no restaurants that catered solely to and satisfied the culinary/dietary needs of their people, created some that did.

Along the way, as these restaurants gained cachet and notoriety for serving authentic Italian, Mexican, Greek, German, Oriental, or Whatever cuisines, the word got out about how great these foods were. Those of us weaned on slabs of prime rib and french fries, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, pork chops and applesauce, bored with the redundancy and dreariness of all of that and craving something different, ventured into these ethnic enclaves, tasted the food, liked it, and told our friends about it.

According to an article in the New York Times, “Immigrants from Southeast Asia who have flocked to the United States since the late 1970’s are providing once again the importance of food in maintaining a sense of identity. Like the Italians, Poles, Germans and other groups who preceded them, Southeast Asians are growing, selling, and serving the foods that mean home to them. The rest of us are becoming familiar with these dishes and learning how to prepare them.”

All of these ethnic restaurants have awakened our palates to a variety of tastes, and have influenced, as already noted, the menus of thousands of restaurants throughout the land.

I guess that’s another way of saying that if you’re concerned about your survival, you’d be smart to augment your menu with variations of certain dishes that once were prepared only in the kitchens of ethnic restaurants. 

Boris-B/Shuttershock.com                                                                                   

If you need to be convinced, look around you. Not at your restaurant competitor next door or down the block, but at the sudden proliferation of fast food chains capitalizing on the demand for ethnic foods by trotting out their soft-core versions of the trendiest; i.e., Chinese (left), Mexican, and Italian.

This explosion of tastes, all of this variety, has given rise to a consumer who, in the past, has always been fickle, but who now is also very picky—who now, from a list nearly endless, will choose to dine only at restaurants that appeal to his or her palate (provided, of course, the service is impeccable).

If dining out (as opposed to eating out, which is what most of us do during the week at breakfast and usually at lunch), is to continue to be a fashionably popular form of entertainment for the family, for business people, for Romantics cooing over champagne and caviar, then make sure you’re providing your customers a smorgasbord (speaking of ethnic influences) of tastes and taste sensations, balancing that mix with the expected basics that just happen to contain the right number of ethnic infusions. From the ordinary evolves the extraordinary.

If you aren’t prepared to deal with that sort of creative balance, then you’re not in the
restaurant business. You’re in the business of feeding people.

Tacos: koss13