San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Once scorned, fusion cuisine is back from the ’90s and better than ever
Bay Area chefs are re-creating a very personal vision of food that blends cultures
The warm embrace of a rice pudding convinced me that there was love coursing through Movida, a restaurant that unexpectedly marries Persian and Mexican cuisines in San Francisco. A liquid bouquet of rosewater and saffron gave the arroz con leche floral notes, while cinnamon brought warmth and crushed pistachios supplied nuttiness.
Some of the Bay Area’s best places to eat are blending disparate influences on the plate. At San Francisco bar Stoa, a bowl of charred mochi paired with smoky adobo sauce integrates Mexican and Japanese cultures with seamless stitchwork. Burger pop-up Smish Smash cleverly utilizes the herbaceous, beefy flavors of Vietnamese pho as a seasoning in the exquisite dac biet burger. High-end Korean restaurant San Ho Won serves a pozole-like kimchi stew featuring chewy hominy.
This style of cooking used to have another name: fusion, a category that chefs and food professionals tend to avoid.
To some, fusion is a dirty word. Critics of the genre dubbed it “confusion” cuisine, which poorly mashed together elements from separate cultures. Examples like wasabi mashed potatoes — seen as one of fusion’s worst offenders — have receded into the annals of culinary history. But the fusion I see today is more exciting, and there’s nothing contrived about it. Often, it comes from the lived experiences of chefs from mixed race or third culture backgrounds. Whereas in the past, fusion could feel like using other cultures as a garnish, the current wave is a natural extension of reality.
Most delicious things under the sun are byproducts of fusion — imagine Italian or Indian cooking without New World ingredients like tomatoes and chiles. In an American dining context, the cuisine dates back to the late 1980s and 1990s. Chefs like Norman Van Aken in Florida, with his so-called “New World Cuisine,” and Wolfgang Puck in Los Angeles, with “Asian fusion,” were the leading figures who popularized the style.
By the turn of the century, the style had gone out of fashion, but it never fully went away. In the 2010s, fusion made a casual return with food trucks — seen with the successes of FilipinoMexican empire Señor Sisig locally and Korean taco outfit Kogi in Southern California. These days “modern,” “contemporary” or “New American” restaurants, which routinely combine French technique with Vietnamese or Japanese flavors, for example, have become fusion by another title.
If nothing else, the language of fusion still has utility. “I don’t see it as a bad word,” said Dean Ramirez, owner of the Lone Crow in Union City. It might not capture all of the intention behind his sisig chopped cheese sandwich, but it’s a shortcut to meaning for guests.
Ramirez draws from a personal place: his summers spent with Hawaiian family; his time in professional kitchens picking up Japanese and Haitian techniques; his visits with friends in New York. The chopped cheese merges the taste of New York bodegas with Filipino flavors like calamansi and soy-vinegar. The spicy mochiko fried chicken sandwich points to Hawaii, with a guava hot sauce and burnt Thai chile oil.
For Tony Huang, owner of KaoKao Grill in Berkeley, the classification of his restaurant as “fusion” started as an accident: A Yelp representative, who was helping Huang set up a page, described the restaurant’s concept as fusion. After all, KaoKao presented a middle ground between American barbecue and Chinese cuisine. By using the term, customers exclusively seeking smoked brisket or traditional char siu would understand that KaoKao does things differently.
In actuality, KaoKao’s sticky, wood-smoked char siu is an expression of Huang’s upbringing. Inspired by the intoxicating scents of the neighbor’s charcoalburning grills, Huang’s father matched American barbecue technique with Chinese flavor.
Similarly, Reka and Fik Saleh, owners of Alameda’s Fikscue, synthesized a new type of barbecue at their home dinner table. One fateful night, Fik had brisket leftovers after a Texas-style barbecue pop-up, so Reka used it to make balado (Indonesian stirfried meat with sambal). The pairing fit swimmingly, creating a strong basis for their restaurant’s most enticing dishes, like melty, wood-flavored cubes of brisket cooked with coconut-flavored rendang paste.
Despite chefs’ newfound embrace of fusion flavors, there’s still some hesitation around the word. “Sometimes the term (can) be used to be really freaking lazy,” Huang said. Ramirez of Lone Crow, for example, resists outright calling his food “fusion,” feeling like it places a box on creativity.
That’s why Sincere Justice of the hard-to-categorize pop-up Tacos Sincero avoids such labels, too. His biggest sources of inspirations are ethnic enclaves, like the Mexican and Asian neighborhood he grew up in, and street food, like that of Vietnam, Japan and India. “You’re going to naturally think about some intersections between the reality you’re experiencing and a possible new reality,” he said.
The way he blends ingredients can be seen in small but crucial details, like simulating smokiness in Indian butter chicken through Mexican morita chiles. Or he might top tostadas with zesty Japanese egg salad.
The main thing is that it has to work. Whereas fusion used to sound like a global, vague song, it’s now highly specific. Consider the process of a hip-hop sample, using a collage of influences to create something original. What we hear from this recent crop of cooking talent are fresh, personal arrangements — a full emulsion of flavors and cultures.
“You can fuse however you want,” said Justice. “If we’re using a music reference, I want the s— to sound good.”