This got a report for xenophobia and, to my mind, it is xenophobic. It could totally be interpreted a different way where it’s inviting you to consider the cross-cultural nature of cuisine that gets boiled down into a single name, but it seems like most people, myself included (having seen how some other “Yes, but” comics go), don’t.
I think it’s worthwhile to leave this post up because the comments surrounding it are worthwhile and actually transform this into something insightful.
I clearly didn’t interpret this comic the same way as everyone else has, and if you think it would be better to delete it, I will.
I’ve seen this joke in many forms before, and it’s usually more like “it’s a little humorous when this happens” rather than some sort of xenophobic criticism. Like the cowboy themed restaurant in Fresh off the Boat or Bobby’s Japanese/German restaurant in King of the Hill:
I don’t think it’s better to delete it. I like to interpret it as the Bobby Hill Japanese fusion restaurant thing too even if I don’t think that’s what was intended by it. All the discussion here is really nice.
Been a long time since I’ve watched King of the Hill - is the second picture Bobby?
Yeah, they started up again recently after many years, and there was a time skip. Bobby is an adult now, and this is his restaurant.
I need to watch the new season(s?)
It’s different, but I really enjoyed the new season.
I have a different take on this.
long answer:
Japanese cuisine uses certain methods and ingredients, even specific ratios and recipes, some of which are passed down generationally either within a family or in apprenticeships or in education and training programs that give official certifications, or even just OJT.
The thing is that Japanese culture places a lot of value in excellence and attention to detail. Traditional Japanese cooking is comparable to traditional French cooking in that regard (and yes, I’m aware that not all japanese cuisine is high-class traditional fare, but even a basic dashi stock or a ramen broth are things that people take pride in and pass on their recipes, complete with regional variants and a lot of subtlety and nuance).
Anyway, I lived in japan for a few years in my twenties and I traveled around and tried a lot of different regional specialties and variants on some of the classics. I also frequented a lot of chains like Sukiya, Yoshinoya, and all the different konbinis. So my description isn’t limited to fancy kaiseki-ryori in centuries-old ryokan villages. Japanese food, even the basic stuff, has a certain quality to it, which is hard for gaijin to imitate unless they train for years with a Japanese chef.
I preface this with all that so you don’t assume I’m speaking from ignorance. Since returning to the US, I’ve been disappointed with the quality of “Japanese restaurants” here. I’ve been to a couple in New York that were good. I could tell the owners and staff were Japanese by the quality of the food alone. Overhearing them speaking Japanese to each other only confirmed it.
But there isn’t much of a Japanese diaspora in my area, and the “Japanese restaurants” around me are all run by Chinese families. I’ve stopped expecting Japanese-quality Japanese food from these. Sometimes I still go just to get my fix. But it’s not the same. The ingredients are different. The ratios are off. The love and care, passion, pride, and everything else that goes into Japanese food just isn’t there, and it shows up as different tastes, different textures, different aromas, etc.
Not to mention it’s just hard to find some things here. Famima chicken just isn’t a thing here. Even Karaage is hard to find. Oden might as well not exist. All the different kinds of yakitori (quail egg, cartilage, horumon, etc.), matsuri specialties like okonomiyaki and takoyaki, taiyaki, and so much else; the little shops outside the train stations and all the smells and tastes that go along with them; so many regional dishes like motsunabe, okinawa soba, etc.; and just so much else (donburi, ebi furai, chawanmushi, onigiri, korokke, katsu curry, soba/udon shops and all their interesting toppings.). Ugh, I’m drooling just thinking about it all. But I digress.
Obviously no one shop could do all of that, but “Japanese food” outside of Japan is typically very limited in options. Some sushi, mostly westernized variants. It’s rare to find many options for nigiri, or any at all but I’ve never seen a kaitenzushi in the US. Occasionally a ramen shop (if you’re lucky, but even then the broth just isn’t right, the chashu and shoyu tamago just aren’t right; and good luck finding moyashi namuru!). Other than that, you’re probably limited to a few things listed as appetizers. Maybe gyoza, edamame, and a couple other things that are considered popular in the west.
It’s just not the same though. It’s not just the selection, it’s the quality. The ingredients, the recipe, everything is just off.
tl,dr: Japanese cuisine has a certain quality, which is a deeply cultural phenomenon, but the “Japanese” restaurants near me are all run by Chinese families, and as someone who spent years in Japan I can tell the difference in the quality of the food.
I don’t see how it isn’t considered cultural appropriation. If a white guy tries opening a Japanese restaurant people will say it’s cultural appropriation (and probably call him a weeb). So how is it any different when a Chinese family opens a Japanese restaurant? I don’t see any way you can reconcile those two things without implying that Asian people are all the same, which is racist.
about the other nationalities:
I don’t know why the picture in the OP shows the Filipino, Korean, and Thai flags. The Korean and Thai places near me are all run by Chinese people too. And there might be a couple Filipino grocery stores but I don’t know of any Filipino restaurants in my area.
Korean, Thai, and Filipino food are all amazing, by the way. I’ve been to all three of those countries too. And just like with Japanese cuisine, each one has so much variety that just gets lost in the US. They substitute a lot of local ingredients which just aren’t the same, they don’t offer dishes that seems too strange to the western palette, they tweak a lot of dishes to make them more suitable to the average westerner, etc. I’ve never had a pad kra pao in the US that even came close to measuring up to how it is in Thailand.
For what it’s worth, Chinese food is good in its own way. I don’t have anything against the Chinese diaspora. I just don’t see how it isn’t cultural appropriation for Chinese families to run Japanese or Thai restaurants.
Its the execution that determines if its appropriation, or appreciation. Appropriation of Japanese is something I’m closely familiar with because my interest in Japanese craftsmanship, knives and blacksmithing
If someone is using the culture to sell a mediocre, tangentially related product, disrespecting the original culture, is appropriation. If the product itself is executed faithfully, with dignity and respect to the culture it comes from, or is inspired from, then it’s appreciation.
There are a lot of Japanese knife scams that poorly attempt to imitate somebody the features of Japanese knives, made out of junk steel, mass produced in China. These are appropriation.
There are some western blacksmiths who are genuinely as skilled as their Japanese counterparts, who make excellent Japanese style knives, faithfully recreating all of the details, features and quality as authentic examples. This is appreciation.
Thank you. I hate seeing people say that if a black woman from Queens opens a Mexican bread shop that it is appropriation.
It depends on how much they care. If the chinese people running the restaurant are just half-assing japanese food and using japanese culture for the name and clout, its disrespectful. Effectively just trying to profit off the culture. Whereas if those chinese people are trying their best to understand and replicate the culture, it’s fine.
Hot take: a japanese person can “appropriate” their own culture. If they just take advantage of their name and ethnicity, without actually learning about the culture. This is just really rare in practice because people of any ethnicity are usually forced to learn about their own culture when growing up
Personal experience:
Right now I live in an extremely multi-cultural city, and generally wildly multi-cultural country. The best Japanese restaurant I’ve been to was a Ramen restaurant stationed in another city that is ran by an actual Japanese chef that (presumably) does not speak any other languages.
In the town I am stationed right now all Japanese restaurants I’ve been to were okay. But nothing even close to that Ramen place. Day and night. Fact is, many Japanese, Thai and Korean Restaurants are ran by Chinese business people and mostly staff. Not all, but I’ve been to few.
To add, Kepab is common back in my homeland, but 99% of the time it was never made by Turkish cook cause we don’t get many foreigners back there. Kepab in the city I live right now is almost always made by Turkish or middle-east-descent person. AND IT IS DELICIOUS! I’ve tried many different joints at different prices and none of them was even remotely as bad as the ones I’ve used to eat back at home.
I’ve learned to prefer cultural food cooked by the person relating to that culture. Chinese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Slavic (Polish, Ukraine, Czech, etc.) is always tastes better if it was made by someone who is from that country. It just how it is.
One of the best sushi meals I ever had was in Japan, and prepared by a Chinese chef. If he opens a restaurant in the US, is that cultural appropriation? I don’t think so. I think it’s perfectly fine for anyone to learn and embody the culinary technique of another culture. Just don’t claim that sushi was invented in China.
Food is one of those things that doesn’t have cultural appropriation. Food has sharing.
I mean the best Japanese restaurant around for a while was run by a Vietnamese couple. Just, when people wanted “oriental food” (love how language changes due to bad faith arguments around the word occident?) their options were Japanese and Chinese for the longest time. Like, the county u grew up in (of then 500kish people) had exactly one Indian/Pakistani restaurant (which is Asian but not Oriental fight me) until like fifteen years ago. I’m not sure all y’all yoots understand how good we have it now. Hell, said county didn’t get a Greek/med restaurant until 30 years ago. I would have to wait until the annual Greek festival to get gyro. What kind of life is that.
or it could be that the larger majority doesn’t see it that way and people are being overly sensitive and that can apply to both the person reading this, and the intentions of the og artist
People from anywhere can cook authentic food from anywhere else as long as they know what they are doing, so this is bs
It reminded me of this asshole, who happened to be Italian, claiming that a professionally trained chef could not cook proper Italian food because he was Mexican
Even the concept of food being “authentic” or “inauthentic” is pretty dumb. Pretty much every food short of raw foraged ingredients is the result of cultural exchange.
You could argue that an Italian cooking with chilis or tomatoes is inauthentic and that the resulting food is more Mexican than it is Italian.
Extending the concept from ingredients to techniques, you could argue that every food that relies on the cold chain (refrigerated/frozen storage and transportation) is an American food because the cold chain was created by an American.
It’s less the who and more the branding. It’s funny that one has to have the right “look” to sell you the food of a nation, or customers will reject it. The sorts of comments you hear while working in a Chinese run Japanese restaurant in the US…
Like, they have this sushi bar at the HEB I used to shop at. Right next to the tortillary. The folk working the sushi counter are as Latino as I am weird. But you can get an 8 pack of nigiri or a 12 of maki for cheap and made right in front of you.
I have nearly every other gastro disease, but those never made me sick and tasted about what they cost, which was nice when I was broke and still needed sushi to properly maintain a healthy gut macrobiome
My absolute favorite sushi place for ages was a conveyor belt shop run by a family of jovial Mexican sushi chefs and one very stern Korean woman. Cheap, tasty, consistent, fresh. They profited through volume, but doing so was murder on their joints, so swapped to typical prices and seating. I’m just glad that food bigots are the minority in my new area.
People from anywhere can cook authentic food from anywhere else as long as they know what they are doing, so this is bs
It is a bit surreal to suggest your nation of birth or genetic lineage somehow influences your capacity to slap a piece of fish on some rice.
Also… if you want to get really anal about the history of the dish, narezushi originated in modern day Cambodia/Thailand, and first documented in ancient China around the 4th century. Meanwhile, the more modern techniques for preparing and serving sushi did originate in Tokyo in the 19th century, but spread like wildfire. Sushi restaurants were popping up in Los Angeles as early as 1906.
It reminded me of this asshole, who happened to be Italian, claiming that a professionally trained chef could not cook proper Italian food because he was Mexican
A professionally trained chief should be able to faithfully reproduce a litany of dishes from around the world.
Of course, there’s a lot of regional variation and conditions. I might suggest that you cannot reliably produce a Genovese sauce outside of Genova, simply because you don’t have the locally raised veal, for instance. But that’s not a problem unique to chefs of a particular national origin.
I don’t know that you’d even want to serve truely authentic food since you want to appeal to local tastes. See: Chinese Food in the USA.
Yeah i was just thinking specifically Chinese food. Authentic Chinese food is like chicken feet and scorpions on a stick and stuff.
Both of those specifically are also found in Mexico, funnily enough.
Eh. Chicken feet aren’t so bad. It’s kind of like pork trotters or whatever those jarred, pickled hooves are called.
What was bad when I got chicken feet was the sauce. Fucking awful.
“Yeah, we’d love to hire you for the cook role here at Taco Time, unfortunately you’re not authentic Mexican so we can’t.” - something never said before by a hiring manager.
Well, that would be WILDLY illegal but I get your point
For some reason, I took this comic to mean a Japanese restaurant that serves food from other East Asian cultures.
Yeah, food is food.
As a white guy I like to make Indian or Thai from scratch. Sometimes I have asked an Indian friend what spices they would start with in dishX and he’s said “you’re doing it from scratch? I just buy the premix packets at the grocery store”
So who is making the authentic Indian food?
“authentic” in terms of food and restaurant culture is just a dog whistle for “racist.”
Like please. I’m not in Italy, it’s not “authentic” it’s just Italian food. Food is a universal language and words added like “authentic” are just plain bigoted.
Most people take ‘authentic’ to mean ‘similar to what you’d find in the country of origin’. There’s nothing racist about it, it’s about expectations.
except when people criticize “authenticity” based upon who is in the kitchen. as in op.
There is a difference between criticism and jokes.
I thankfully don’t know anyone who goes to a japanese restaurant to stare at the people working there. It’s got its name from the food they make there, not from the ethnicity of the people inside the building.
In my teenage years I embarrassed myself by trying to order in Japanese… The server was Korean.
Are you me? I would do this because I didn’t have anywhere else to practice Japanese outside of class. The first Japanese restaurant I went to the experience was great; the waitress was first or second gen and seemed tickled that this random white girl was trying to communicate with her in broken Japanese. The second place I went the waitress replied with embarrassment that she was Korean. I didn’t try again after that.
Oh man, my family is Okinawan, and when we were visiting Aomori, this touristy market had an Okinawa fair going on and my kids went to go get a traditional Okinawan donut snack (we had been travelling for two weeks and they missed the taste of home), and when my kids thanked the staff in Okinawan, they looked really puzzled because I think they were just mainlanders selling Okinawan goods. I’m not even sure if they were even aware that we have a different language here. My kids looked really bummed.
Not enough Latinos/Hispanics.
We doing passport checks on the staff before eating at a restaurant now?
I am Turkish.
I go to Turkish restaurants.
Lots of Arabs working there.
Same food has become part of their culture too over last few centuries living side by side.
Some of our food is straight up borrowed from them, in fact.
Pretty sure one used to live/work in Turkey.
They cook it well.
I like it.I assume similar?
I have to share this: I have learned that Türkiye has a culture of cats. Cats, tea, coffee, and delicious gyro. It was on the internet therefore it must be true. If it weren’t for the government I’d be looking at a music fellowship there.
There was a slight empire situation there. You have no basis to complain about cultural appropriation as a Turk. But yes, many of the pilaf dishes in Asia have ottoman roots.
I expect girl guide cookies to be made with real girl guides
Wow. Imagine getting offended by “xenophobia” for the most banal of observations.
A person doesn’t have to be from a particular country to know how to cook their cuisine.
True dat - I’m proud of my thai food, haole that I am.
What’s your secret? I make larb but that’s not Thai so much as it is SEAn. I quite desperately want up make a good gra pao veggies/pork, but all I have l figured out so far is to grow Thai basil.
No particular secret, I get a lot of recipes from youtube channels. Yeung Man Cooking makes pretty good panang curry and khao soi. My favorite pad thai recipe is from the Vegan Black Metal Chef’s first video way back in 2011 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeZlih4DDNg
I’m not vegan so I usually add chicken breast. Never tried making larb at home but I love it. I just buy the ingredients. The one year I tried to grow basil at home it all died lol.
larb is so easy. i will take a photo of the spice pack later and update this, if i have still forgetten in four hours bug me. you use that, fish sauce, and lime. add it to your meat (ground beef because poverty is fun!), cook it on med-high to high on your cast iron if you don’t have a wok (if you have a wok idk i don’t have a wok) then add some cilantro and scallion greens as a garnish. sometimes we’ll do larb lettucewraptacos with rice, sometimes just chop up some lettuce and make a rice bowl. it is very complicated.
i don’t know if there’s a specific region this style ties to, but i learned it from some Lao clients.
The only larb I’ve had in restaurants is ground chicken, which isn’t common at regular grocery stores. That’s why I haven’t tried making it. But I’ll try using ground beef, which I happen to have.
SPICE PACKET THANK YOU Okay give me a minute it’s not uploading and I’m not taking another photo
THERE. a little of this goes a long way. It’s both kinds of spicy (very flavorful and kinda hot) so enjoy. I use it on ground beef and ground pork, but also we got this great asada cut from the carneceria I want to try it with
Thanks! I can look for this at the local Asian store.
My favorite sushi spot is run exclusively by Koreans
I only ever see Hispanic people in the buffets.
For the Japanese hibachi grills our cook was from Venezuela and everyone else but one cook was white LOL. The one guy was not Japanese.
In the Filipino restaurant the cashier was Chinese. But her husband was Filipino. Both were amazing and the food was amazing.
Every single Mexican restaurant though is mostly if not all Hispanic.
And the bars and diners and other shit is just everyone.
Who gives a shit. What food you get from there depends more on the locals’ existing culinary preferences, anyway.
Once was in a very white boomer town with a Chinese food place. It was like buttered rice and soy sauce and ketchup and chicken and peas. I couldn’t believe how popular they were or that they’d been in business for years.
You’re making me want to go back to the old Sam Wo (I walked by and I think it’s a cult now)
I have a Japanese restaurant nearby that I don’t like. Hibachi place, only one for miles, really wanted hibachi. The chef was very… something. He declared himself as Mexican but went on a rant about how when he goes to a Chinese place, he expects Chinese to work there. You can’t complain about a problem in which you are actively participating. I personally don’t care as long as it’s good and at least somewhat authentic.
I’m Korean, and I get where this is coming from. You do things right, and it’s all good. But if you use teriyaki sauce in bibimbap, I’ll fucking burn the place down.
Or it could be like where I live, and every ethnicity of restaurant, especially the good ones, where the second panel is just 🇲🇽 🇲🇽 🇲🇽.
