THE REAL THING
As food evolves and becomes increasingly globalized, Peter Hum examines what makes food authentic — and what it looks like when cultural mashups get it right (and sometimes terribly wrong).
Par Chiturai was beaming.
On a Wednesday night in late July, the Ottawa businesswoman’s restaurant, Khao Thai on Murray Street, was throwing a milestone dinner. Thailand’s ambassador to Canada was there, as were staff from the Thai Trade Centre in Toronto and some guests from Global Affairs Canada. One table was filled with young, social-media-savvy foodies keen to propagate photos of green mango salad and chu chee prawns on Instagram.
The deluxe dinner was called, somewhat belatedly, to celebrate Khao Thai’s certification of authenticity from the Royal Thai government. Opened in 2004, Khao Thai last year received its Thai Select designation from Thailand’s Ministry of Commerce.
Khao Thai applied for the certification “to show that we are truly Thai,” Chiturai said that night in an interview.
The Thai Select program assesses cooking methods in restaurant kitchens and verifies their use of Thai ingredients and food products. “At least 60 per cent of dishes offered on the menu must be authentic Thai cuisine and the cooking methods must be the same or very similar to those in Thailand,” says the Thai Select website. “Head chefs may be either Thai or other nationalities. In case of non-Thai head chefs, the chefs must produce proof of at least a two-year experience in cooking Thai foods or possess a Thai cuisine training certificate from an accredited institution.”
The program also considers hospitality and atmosphere among its criteria, and Khao Thai certainly qualifies as one of Ottawa’s more posh Thai eateries when compared to more humble, mom-and-pop places. Also, according to the Thai Select website, an official from the Thai Trade Office would have visited Khao Thai unannounced and evaluated the dining experience.
Having met the Thai government’s standards, Khao Thai joins about 1,000 other Thai Select eateries around the world, of which 100 are in Canada. Three other Ottawa restaurants — Pookie’s Thai on Carling Avenue, Talay Thai in Centretown and Thai Lanna Cuisine in South Keys — are similarly designated. So too are Nakhon Thai in Kemptville and Thum’s Kitchen in Cornwall.
“To enjoy Thai dining, you don’t actually need to be in Thailand. But how can you ensure that you get the real experience? Simply look for the ‘Thai Select’ logo from (the) Royal Thai Government,” the Thai Select program’s website says.
“Receiving this prestigious award isn’t easy. The bar is set high and the guidelines are strict,” the website says. “Still, through training and inspections, high standard Thai restaurants worldwide have achieved this distinction.”
All that said, Chiturai said her restaurant makes concessions to Canadian palates: “Here we try to keep it authentic, but sometimes Canadians, they cannot take the real spice. We have to reduce the spiciness,” she said.
For many restaurateurs and restaurant-goers, the notion of authentic cuisine is prized, and even synonymous with quality. If you’ve had it with ketchup-y pad Thai, you know what I mean. If you recoil at Hawaiian pizza and think thin-crust Neapolitan pizza is the one true style by which all pizza should be judged, you concur.
In my reviews of restaurants, I’ve used the word “authentic” scores of times, and always with a positive intention. There are, I think, food traditions worth upholding, which in Canada have often been transported from the Old World to the New World and which speak to the preservation of not only what tastes good, but also of the culture from which the food came.
There’s something admirable about the Thai Select program, or the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, which translates to the True Neapolitan Pizza Association and counts among its members more than 800 pizzerias in Italy and beyond, none of which are in Ottawa.
I would also agree that some inauthentic food could only be considered flops. I’ve had pintxos, the gourmet-level bar snacks of Spain’s Basque region, that were heavenly in their homeland, while crude representations of that kind of cooking in the Ottawa area missed the point utterly. I’d rather skip refrigerated sushi that not only flouts the Japanese standard calling for sushi rice to be warm, at room temperature or even body temperature.
There have also been recent cases in which culinary authenticity, or the apparent lack thereof, became a cause célèbre, not simply because of ingredients or recipes, but in connection with who was doing the cooking or who owned the restaurant.
In more than a few cases, the same questions kept reverberating. What makes food authentic? And who gets to decide?
On June, when Shook, a Toronto restaurant that touted itself as serving “modern Israeli cuisine,” opened, some critics on Twitter contended that its fare was Palestinian rather than Israeli, and that the restaurant was guilty of culinary appropriation.
Some responders defended the restaurant, including a writer for Forward.com, a news website for American Jewish readers, who wrote: “No Israelis work in the kitchen at Shook, whose name comes from the Hebrew for ‘market.’ And no Israelis were involved in creating its vegetarian menu, Chef Ben Heaton told the Forward. But a meal there, on a busy recent Wednesday, was all it took to overcome doubts about the cuisine or its authenticity.”
When the fast-food restaurant Wolf Down opened in Centretown in May, it raised some eyebrows when it branded its specialty — döner kebab sandwiches — as German street food. Wolf Down’s website does acknowledge that Turkish immigrants brought döner to Germany, but it places greater stress on the “German-ness” of döner. While it is true that döner are immensely popular in Germany, I confess that when an early PR campaign for Wolf Down said “German street food” was on the bill, I awaited sausages with great anticipation.
More problematically, in April, a non-Chinese New York restaurateur opened Lucky Lee’s, with the concept of serving Chinese food that is gluten-free, dairy-free, wheat-free, corn-free, MSG-free and nut-free. Arielle Haspel initially branded her food as “clean” Chinese cuisine, and she wrote on Instagram: “We heard you’re obsessed with lo mein but rarely eat it. You said it makes you feel bloated and icky the next day?” After being criticized for cultural appropriation and casting insensitive aspersions at the food she was basing her business on, Haspel took down the Instagram post and apologized at large.
Late last year, Andrew Zimmern, the U.S. food personality, celebrity chef and restaurateur, wound up scalding himself when he touted his new Chinese restaurant in Minneapolis, Lucky Cricket, and its “authentic” Chinese cooking by saying: “I think I’m saving the souls of all the people from having to dine at these horses--t restaurants masquerading as Chinese food that are in the Midwest.”
Zimmern subsequently apologized, but not before he endured a slamming from some chefs and pundits. In an opinion piece published in the Washington Post, Ruth Tam wrote that “the Midwest’s ‘horses--t restaurants’ are what paved the way for Zimmern’s venture and more broadly, Chinese cuisine in America.”
But for all that, I worry that the strictures of culinary authenticity run risks of becoming too limiting. How does a chef — or for that matter, a home cook — express himself or herself creatively, or satisfy his or her personal palate, beyond simply following the dictates of tradition? Why can’t fusion food be good? Why shouldn’t a Chinese chef cook top-notch Japanese food, or a white chef cook traditional Thai fare?
Indeed, if culinary authenticity casts back in time and to another place, to how grandma made her perogies or ragu or biryani or curry in the old country, then how do new dishes come to exist?
WHAT MAKES FOOD AUTHENTIC?
Whether they’re making South African sausages, Northern Vietnamese soups or Neapolitan pizzas, there’s no shortage of Ottawa chefs who proudly and straightforwardly affirm they’re cooking the genuine fare of their homelands.
At African Grill on Clyde Avenue, chef-owner Koele Khutlang cooks suya, the grilled meat of West Africa, and braai, the grilled meat of South Africa.
The 37-year-old is more closely connected to braai, as he’s from Lesotho, the tiny country encircled by South Africa. The son of a former diplomat at the Lesotho High Commission in Ottawa, Khutlang had planned to work as an electrical engineering technologist and studied at Algonquin College, but more recently he turned to cooking. African Grill, which Khutlang opened in December, is the first restaurant he’s owned by himself.
Khutlang says he’s been perfecting his braai for almost two decades. “For most people who like cooking like me, braai is something you play with,” he says.
At African Grill, Khutlang serves chicken and goat braai, with both meats boldly but not overpoweringly spiced, charbroiled and then glazed with a sweet-salty finish.
The West African suya that Khutlang offers is another preparation entirely, with bits of heavily spiced and then grilled beef, goat and offal, served with slices of onion and extra chili powder. His recipe is “90 per cent authentic. My suya is two countries mixed, Nigeria and Cameroon.”
Khutlang says the authenticity of his food stems from spices he imports from Africa. “What I’m targeting is Africans far away from home, to feel at home with the taste of my food,” he says.
Naturally, a restaurant named Authentic Vietnamese Pho House stands up for unadulterated pho and more.
“Being 100 per cent real is the best you can get,” says Peter Tran, who with his family owns three Authentic Vietnamese Pho House locations in Ottawa’s western suburbs.
A cook in a Somerset Street West soup shop for eight years before he opened his first location in 2010, Tran, 35, says his soups reflect the tastes of Northern Vietnam, where his family is from.
His Bun Rieu crab soup, a specialty little found in Ottawa, relies on flavours and details that his mother passed on to him, Tran says. His restaurants serve bo luc lac, also known as shaking beef, a Vietnamese specialty that wakes up taste buds with its highly seasoned, savoury dipping sauce. “We do it right, the way they do in Vietnam,” Tran says.
That said, Tran makes one allowance for Canadian tastes by offering vegetarian tweaks and options. “In Vietnam, it’s very hard to cook (vegetarian) food. The majority of people eat meat.”
The owners of Pizza All’Antica, the Manotick Main Street food trailer, say one reason for them selling Neapolitan-style pizzas is that they were tired of driving to Montreal for what they saw as authentic thin-crust pizzas.
“We’ve mastered the recipe of a true Neapolitan pizza,” says Anna Crupi, who co-owns the business — its name means Pizza the Antique Way — with her husband, Joe.
The seasonal business, run by the Barrhaven couple since 2013, values authenticity so much that Joe looked into securing a membership in the rigorously traditional Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana.
AVPN regulations call for pizza dough to be made just so, and they state a preference for ingredients to be from Italy’s Campania region, which includes Naples. AVPN-compliant pizza must be stretched by hand so that final diameters do not exceed 35 centimetres. The consistency of the pizza, which must be cooked in a wood-fired oven, should be “soft, easy to manipulate and fold.” The centre should be particularly soft and 0.25 cm in height, plus or minus 10 per cent.
At Pizza All’Antica, the pizzas certainly seem like models of authenticity. They are made with sauce and flour sourced from Naples and stretched by the hands of Tina, Anna’s mother, a Naples native.
Joe, who also works as a contractor, took nine days to build his oven and four days to tile the 2,800-pound behemoth, which is mounted in a former landscaping trailer. He went to Boulder, Colo., for a week of intense training in using a wood-fired oven in a mobile environment. Additional pizza-making advice came from Tina’s brother, Franco, a pizzaiolo in Italy for 40 years. Tina would reach out to him on Skype regarding the finer points of pizza.
Joe says he spoke years ago with an AVPN official who was impressed by his business and had never heard of a food truck or trailer that made authentic Neapolitan-style pizzas. But Joe didn’t pursue the matter of AVPN membership. “It didn’t end up being a priority,” he says. One day he might apply for membership, but mostly for the marketing buzz it could confer, he says.
Besides, for Joe, love, passion and family are the most vital ingredients of the pizzas he sells.
“That love, that passion, that bloodline — to become more authentic than what we are, it’s almost impossible.”
Joe admits to one fact that might ring alarms with the pizza police. Among the 20 pizzas on his menu is a Hawaiian Neapolitan pizza, complete with mozzarella, prosciutto cotto, fresh pineapple and tomato sauce.
“We need to serve our clients as well,” Joe says with a smile. “My thinking is you can put anything you want on a pizza.
“You’d be surprised how many people like Hawaiian pizza.”
During the past few years in Ottawa, a proliferation of Chinese restaurants opening from downtown to Kanata has driven up the authenticity quotient in Ottawa.
Among them are eateries such as Spicy House on Rideau Street or Delicious Sichuan Cuisine on Prince of Wales Drive, where dishes score much higher in terms of spiciness and pungency compared to the so-called “Szechuan” dishes that first appeared in Ottawa’s Chinese restaurants in the 1980s.
Other regional Chinese specialties have also arrived. At several La Noodle locations, hand-pulled noodles with their roots in the northwestern Chinese city of Lanzhou are the stars. “Crossing The Bridge” noodles like those made in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan show up at Fusion Yunnan in Vanier, Dagu Rice Noodle on Riverside Drive and Yunshang Rice Noodle in Centretown.
At these and other places, I’m always curious to see who is eating at the other tables. The old cliché — that it’s a good sign when a Chinese restaurant is packed with Chinese customers — seems to hold at many of the new Ottawa eateries, where much of the business can consist of Asian university students or young families.
But what if what they’re eating is, for all its authenticity, just too daunting? If you didn’t grow up eating potently spicy food, or offal, do you really want to eat what other diners are having?
It’s encouraging that some of the Chinese business owners say authenticity sells not just to expats but to non-Asians who are food-curious or who have already had their tastebuds opened. The large and diverse crowds at last month’s Ottawa Asian Fest in Chinatown, and at similar events in recent years, suggests that more palates seem to be widening for grilled squid and octopus, spicy lamb skewers and stinky tofu.
Simon Huang, a co-owner of Chatime, the Taiwanese bubble tea franchise in Chinatown, told the Citizen in 2017 that these food-centred street parties prove that authentic Asian food has found a larger following in Ottawa.
“It showed there was a market for it,” said Huang, who has helped organize and sponsor Asian Fest events. “With the night market, and all the lineups, it wasn’t just Asian, it was multicultural.
“Before, people thought of Chinese food as just egg rolls and chicken balls,” Huang says.
‘IT HAS TO BE VIABLE BUSINESS-WISE’
And yet, one of Ottawa’s most successful chefs and restaurateurs says he’s only been able to flourish by tempering the authenticity of his food.
Joe Thottungal has been a culinary ambassador for Kerala, the southwestern Indian state, since he opened Coconut Lagoon on St Laurent Boulevard 15 years ago. That restaurant’s acclaim led to other achievements — including Thottungal’s participation in the 2017 Canadian Culinary Championships, the opening last year of a downtown restaurant, Thali, and this year’s publication of the Coconut Lagoon cookbook.
But Thottungal is candid about adjusting his dishes to reach a broader audience beyond fellow Indian expats. “If you go true authentic, the same thing that we serve in my home or the neighbour’s house in Kerala, people won’t take it here,” Thottungal says. “We are looking for foreigners to enjoy our food.”
For example, Thottungal questions whether yucca root, commonly served in Kerala, would have caught on at Coconut Lagoon, especially in its early days. “Yucca is very authentic. (But) if you try to serve it here, not much people will like it. They like potatoes,” Thottungal says.
Similarly, he serves salmon instead of smelts in his cuisine. “Not everybody here will enjoy the smelts. If you feed them salmon, it will be much better off. They are familiar with the taste. But we are giving the authentic sauce,” Thottungal says.
Typically in Kerala, beef can be cooked beyond well-done, until it’s crisp. The response from one customer, Thottungal says, was: “What is this — beef or cardboard?” Another customer said he should “never serve any more beef like this,” the chef recalls. He switched to serving striploin and keeping them juicy.
With chicken, Thottungal prefers bone-in and dark meat, but received pushback from customers who wanted boneless white meat.
“You have to go with what the majority of the population tells us,” Thottungal says. “You need to entice people to come. When you have a business, you need to be broad-minded. It has to be viable business-wise.”
He also speaks about more accessible dishes opening the door for customers to sample more authentic preparations.
“Now, people are trying a lot of things,” he says. “Now we can slowly give them one dish or two dishes more, people can enjoy it. People have the confidence.”
WHEN FUSION FOOD WORKS
“It’s kind of a funny trajectory,” says Ottawa chef Tarek Hassan, of his fascination with Cantonese food that goes back more than two decades.
The 40-year-old — who was born in the Middle East, has spent most of his life in Canada, and who makes Chinese steamed buns to die for at his Gongfu Bao shop on Bank Street — offers one of the most thoughtful takes on culinary authenticity I’ve come across.
“I distinctly remember the first time I went to a Chinese restaurant,” Hassan continues. “I was in my teens. In Egypt, there wasn’t really Chinese food. I was just blown away by the complexity of the flavour and just the whole experience.”
Hassan moved to Ottawa to attend Carleton University for computer systems engineering, but drifted over to cooking. Roughly a decade ago, he worked at Savana Cafe, the now-closed Centretown restaurant that was an early proponent of multicultural cooking — think Thai and Caribbean-influenced dishes on the menu — and fusion cooking. “A friend of mine let me know Savana Café was hiring and it’s a place that had a proper wok station. I was just like, ‘Yes please.’ I dropped whatever things I was doing and jumped into that.”
Seven years ago, when the City of Ottawa put out a call for street food vendors, “steamed buns were a no-brainer,” Hassan says. Years before, he had eaten closed buns from Chinese supermarkets. The game-changing success of New York chef David Chang, who built his Momofuku empire in the 2000s on selling pork belly-filled steamed buns, “inflamed a curiosity,” Hassan adds.
His Gongfu Bao cart debuted in the spring of 2013 near Confederation Park and later won fans at the Westboro Summer Market on Byron Avenue. A year ago, he opened his bricks-and-mortar shop in Centretown.
Hassan says he’s faced skeptics who immediately doubted he could make good Chinese food. Selling buns outside Confederation Park, he met a lot of Chinese tourists — “people who came to Ottawa from China and walked past this cart with this brown guy with a beard serving steamed buns that he’s saying he made,” he says.
Their reaction? “I got anything from, on one extreme, people literally pointing and laughing and continuing to walk, to on the other extreme, people stopping, being curious, asking questions,” Hassan says.
“I’ve had people specifically say, ‘You could sell this in China.’ Those are the compliments that made my day.
“I don’t feel entitled to this cuisine,” Hassan continues. “I’ve put a lot of work into developing the craft behind working with it, but I always invite conversations and questions or concerns regarding appropriation because I feel the most important thing is to not be causing any harm. That’s something I take very seriously.”
To some degree, for any chef experimenting with food that he or she didn’t grow up with, appropriation may well be baked-in, Hassan suggests.
I recall Jordan Holley, chef de cuisine of Datsun, the modern, pan-Asian restaurant on Elgin Street, addressing his interest in Asian food after I praised his restaurant in a 2015 review: “We respect and appreciate authenticity. But it will always be our interpretation of food,” he said.
Holley also offered an anecdote reminiscent of Hassan’s run-ins with Chinese tourists: “We have to admit, we always get nervous when people from strong cultural culinary backgrounds visit Datsun. I think with our culinary training and experience we can feel confident in delivering a flavour that is familiar. For example, we had a friend bring her parents (oldschool Chinese), and they were very skeptical to see a young, white, tattooed chef preparing their dinner. They ordered the congee, curry buns, etc. … and were extremely impressed. She even told me she never eats congee anywhere other than her mother’s kitchen, not in Hong Kong even, but says ours is an exception.”
For his part, Hassan steeped himself in the tradition of what he’s cooking, using a rolling pin and bamboo baskets to craft and cook his food because after experimenting with more modern measures, he determined that “traditional methods and traditional tools trumped everything.”
Furthermore, he continues to delve deep into Cantonese cooking. He visited Hong Kong in 2017 with culinary training in mind, and has “set something in motion” for a return trip there. He is looking for a mentor in Ottawa’s Chinatown who will help him hone his skills at barbecuing pork — a filling for his buns that he prepares even if his parents, for religious reasons, don’t eat pork.
“That’s a little bit of a friction, but I don’t have a problem with it,” Hassan says.
Hassan feels he can respect authenticity and tradition but also put a personal, Canadian spin on his food.
You have to go with what the majority of the population tells us. You need to entice people to come. When you have a business, you need to be broad-minded.
“I was letting all the authenticity happen in the buns and the dough, but then I took creative freedom with the fillings,” he says of some experiments during his food-cart days. “For street food, mash-ups and fusiony things like that were kind of the norm. People are expecting kind of zany mash-up things to happen.”
Once, after he ran out of barbecue pork, he made things like bao with halloumi, the brined Cypriot cheese that takes well to grilling. While customers liked the improvised cross-cultural food, Hassan had misgivings.
“I realized there’s a big responsibility toward the cuisine I’m working with to, at the very least, represent it in a way that doesn’t confuse people about what it is.
“If I’m going to do playful, wacky things, those need to be secondary to me showing someone who’s not familiar with this cuisine what it’s all about.”
He calls trendy Asian fusion cooking “dangerous,” explaining that “all these narrative trajectories are going into this melting pot and terminating. And people are losing track of what’s what.”
A chef might make a reasonable dish from a hodgepodge of Asian ingredients, but it could still be culturally problematic.
“Here’s some pickled ginger and here’s some gochujang (a spicy, Korean fermented bean paste) and here’s some rice, some sesame oil. Balance it with salt, that’s balanced, I made something new. But that’s pretty dangerous in terms of the responsibility to the food culture you’re working with.”
He says he allows himself to tinker with authentic recipes if the new creations point to Canadian and Québécois comfort food. Hence, there’s his tourtière egg rolls, or barbecue pork that’s glazed with maple syrup rather than the usual honey.
“To me, authenticity isn’t just about accurate replication,” Hassan says. “It’s about honouring that food trajectory and understanding it. Someone can take something and evolve it, whether it’s to adapt to locally available foods or to local palate preferences, and still be mindful of where it’s coming from and make sure people can see where it’s coming from and where it’s going.”
Earlier this year, when I spoke to the Ottawa-born, Toronto-raised celebrity chef Amanda Cohen, she spoke excitedly about the food scene in Canada.
While Cohen cooks principally at her renowned New York restaurant, a mecca for vegetable lovers called Dirt Candy, she returns to Canada for cooking events, and is a titular competitor on the Iron Chef: Canada TV series. What strikes her most about food in Canada is the cultural mingling it involves.
“When I was growing up in Toronto, you’d have all of these different kinds of stores next to each other or within walking distance. That’s what Canada does so well ... these amazing ingredients that don’t seem exotic. They seem like they should be used in the food.
“That’s Canadian cuisine. It’s a little bit of everything.”
There is, of course, the danger that Hassan points out, in which a chef ’s whims can run roughshod over culinary traditions. Recently, I had another Ottawa chef’s pork belly bao buns. That non-Chinese chef thought it would a good idea to dust his buns with spicy creole seasoning, and put the sweetsavoury hoisin sauce on the side, rather than directly on the pork. He was wrong. The dish was a flop, and furthermore, its pork belly was overcooked.
But if you consult your food history, the long view of different cuisines suggests they are not as monolithic as they might appear.
Where cultures met, food crossed borders. With the food of Macau, the former Portuguese territory on the south coast of China near Hong Kong, the food of the colonized mixed with dishes of the colonizers. From Latin America to the U.S. South, the food of former slaves has influenced what the descendants of slave owners eat.
Gumbo in Louisiana dates back 300 years to almost a century before Napoleon sold the territory to the U.S., but it’s believed to blend the influences and ingredients of French, Spanish, African, Native American and Caribbean cuisines.
On the other side of the world, in Japan, yōshoku refers to Japanized versions of western dishes, from spaghetti topped with fish roe and seaweed to various breaded cutlets to the Japanese adaptation of British curries that themselves were adaptations of Indian curries. And lest we think that yōshoku is a recent development, just know that tempura dishes were influenced by the fritter-cooking techniques of the Portuguese residing in Nagasaki in the 16th century.
Of course, the equivalent of yōshoku in North America is the supersized sushi roll, with eschews the minimalist esthetic of Japanese sushi in favour of heavy sauces, avocado, mango, cream cheese and more. At the vanguard of this evolution was the California roll, which author Trevor Corson writes in his book The Zen of Fish was invented in the late 1960s at the pioneering Los Angeles eatery Tokyo Kaitan.
“The California roll has come to be seen as a stroke of genius,” Corson writes. In fact, Corson continues, the California roll was born out of more practical concerns — avocado was substituted after chefs had difficulty obtaining fresh fatty tuna belly.
Regardless of how they came to be, those dishes were fusion dishes. It may have taken generations of evolution, but they have become traditional.
These days, cultures continue to collide, only much more quickly and haphazardly.
As chefs, both haute and homey, tweak the food they grew up with or immerse themselves meaningfully in another culture’s food, dishes can progress and adapt, and new dishes can be born. The results aren’t always for the better, but they aren’t necessarily bad.
It’s the instances when these new culinary mash-ups are deep and delicious that make my mouth water.
I can vouch that the Viet-Cajun food that has emerged in the recent years in Houston, Texas is not just a thing, it’s a delicious thing. And if you texted me: “Let’s get some turducken siu mai from Gongfu Bao,” I’d be at that Centretown shop in a minute.
If turducken siu mai or tourtière egg rolls one day came to be authentic Canadian dishes, I would be just fine with that. phum@postmedia.com twitter.com/peterhum