no. 49: cynical hometown flavor

Hullo to readers old and new!

I’m doing another kueh pop-up at Elmendorf Baking next Sunday - you can pre-order Chinese New Year cookies online now, or come on the day for kow teng kueh, onde onde, bua da’art, and serikaya. If you’re in or around Boston, I hope you’ll stop by and say hi!

---

This is a story about why the conversation around cultural appropriation, and more broadly around the intersection of identity and culinary ownership, bothers me. It’s also about laksa, which the New York Times thinks might be one of America's food trends of 2022. 

One cold day last summer, after the tourists had largely cleared out for the year, I found myself sitting at a roadside table in Maine, eating Katong laksa. In twenty-some years in the United States, I’d never seen it on a restaurant menu, except at those mediocre Malaysian places that pockmark the Chinatowns of the East Coast, providing gastronomic first aid to homesick Southeast Asians. 

This restaurant billed itself as a “non-denominational noodle bar,” with khao soi, banh mi, mee goreng, mapo tofu, and ramen on the menu. And laksa. I suppose the restaurant group, which was owned entirely by white men, was trying to avoid calling the place “pan-Asian.” Our server pitched the laksa as “a noodle soup from Southeast Asia, with these warm, rich, curry flavors,” a description which didn’t instill confidence. Leaving aside the problems with using “curry” as a descriptor, curry powder isn’t used in most versions of laksa (curry laksa exists, but is its own creature). 

This being a tourist town in Maine, the laksa was made with lobster. The broth was warm and welcoming, sienna with chili and sweet with coconut milk, and the vermicelli had bounce. There was no sign of curry powder, but there were housemade fishcakes, so good they would’ve caused a minor sensation back home. Instead of laksa leaf there was a snowdrift of basil and cilantro. The substitution would make purists combust, but it had the right effect, giving the bowl the herbaceous lift laksa needs. It was, in other words, a pretty decent and entirely recognizable bowl, which wouldn’t have been out of place back home. You actually see lobster laksa in upscale hotel restaurants in Singapore – usually made with Maine lobster.

After that meal, I started to write about the minefield restaurants navigate when they recreate dishes from the far side of the world. I thought I’d be writing about how solid production (the laksa was actually good!) can be undermined by poor representation (the dish was accompanied by a bunch of half-facts); and why we flatten intricate lattices of regional identity in the service of consumption (calling a dish “laksa” is like putting “spaghetti” on a menu). 

And then a few weeks later I found myself sitting down to another bowl of laksa. This time, I was in a plain dining room in Manhattan on a warm autumn day. A young Singaporean had just opened a Singaporean restaurant, and I wanted to cheer them on. 

This laksa had been reengineered for the “pick a protein pick a starch” school of fast-casual service. A tangle of thick rice noodles beneath a ladleful of mud, with piles of cucumber, bean sprouts, tofu, and blanched shrimp. Apologetic sprinklings of scallions, fried shallots, and laksa leaf. It tasted nothing like laksa. It tasted of cynicism, a dish designed to be cooked by de-skilled labor for an audience with no point of reference. It was so bad I considered going back to make sure I hadn’t caught the kitchen during some spectacular one-off implosion. 

In the usual framing of the conversation around food, culture, and cultural appropriation, this bowl would be considered less problematic than the one I ate in Maine, because the restaurant is owned by someone from Singapore, who presumably grew up eating laksa.¹ Identity accords the right to represent the dish in public, and to profit by selling it. Implicit in this framing is the idea that dishes, cuisines, and ultimately cultures are best treated as intellectual property, because these rights are fundamentally property rights, and the conversation proceeds in terms of rights and ownership.

Of course, it matters who’s making the food and who’s making the money (and it matters most of all that they’re the same people, although they almost never are). The idea that some people have the right to present particular foods in public carries a tacit recognition that traditional dishes were codified, preserved, and developed by particular groups of people in particular circumstances, and that we owe them some sort of remembrance. Even if we’ll never know their names, we can guess at who their descendants are and what they look like, and the least we can do is offer them the royalties on the intellectual property. 

But if we believe that culinary cultures are living, emergent phenomena, growing from both our praxis (the laksa we make today) and our intangible heritage (the laksa we grew up eating), maybe ownership is the wrong framing altogether, and we should speak of the duty we owe living things instead. Not to preserve them, necessarily, but to respect them. Not by freezing traditions in carbonite, but by knowing them well enough that we can work with real understanding of intent, context, and aesthetic. Stewardship seems too absent from today’s conversation, and it’s the least our heritage should expect of us. 

1. I find it telling that there’s no positive way to frame this – I can’t say it’s more correct, or more authentic, or more anything – only that it’s less problematic.