Cuisine is cultural touchstone in ‘Always Be My Maybe.’
Asian America’s existential crises captured in telling culinary references
Sometimes a kimchi stew is just a kimchi stew, but not in the movies.
In “Always Be My Maybe,” the classic Korean home cooking dish joins the ranks of the luscious raw egg yolk in “Tampopo,” the dolled-up Chinese takeout in “Mrs. Doubtfire” and that final plate of arroz con pollo in “Moonlight” in capturing the entire point of the film in a single meal. A tall vat of bubbling, orange-red soup appears in key points of the movie, a character in its own right: fiery, unapologetic, intense and complex, just like the flawed humans that dish it up.
The Netflix romantic comedy written by comedians Ali Wong, Michael Golamco and Randall Park begins with the stew, kimchi jjigae, when a young Sasha Tran (Miya Cech), a latchkey kid living in San Francisco’s Richmond District, joins her neighbor, young Marcus Kim (Emerson Min), for dinner with his family. While Marcus moans about the horror of having to bring leftovers to school in a thermos, Sasha is thrilled to learn how to cook at the elbow of his mom, Judy (Susan Park).
“We Koreans use scissors for everything,” June tells her with a wink as she cuts green onion tops. (This is where the Asians in the audience will cheer — oh, what a wonder it is to be seen!) Then the film pulls a move akin to the introduction to “Up,” fastforwarding until Judy dies, leaving the characters reeling. Marcus’ dad can’t find the coffee filters in his own kitchen. Nothing is on the stove.
Sometimes a kimchi stew is just a kimchi stew, but other times it’s a handy stand-in for your sense of home, your internal compass or your loneliness.
As the characters grow up and grow distant, the kimchi stew becomes a far-off memory, a symbol of realness and sentimentality that eludes adult Sasha (Ali Wong), now a high-flying celebrity chef who dons chef ’s whites over designer gowns. At Knives + Mercy, her sleek Los Angeles restaurant, a troop of line cooks execute hay-smoked fish loin, fried spot prawns on skewers and trays of pleated lemongrass dumplings. Her food, designed by Los Angeles kaiseki chef Niki Nakayama, tells a new story: The dishes are tightly plated and showy, less for eating than for
being seen eaten. But of course people love it, and Sasha is already on her way to open a new restaurant back on her home turf, San Francisco.
But back home, the character collides with adult Marcus (Randall Park), now an indie rapper and HVAC technician working for his dad, Harry ( James Saito), when their company is contracted to fix Sasha’s rental home’s air conditioning system. Things have been awkward between them ever since Judy died.
Marcus and Sasha’s odd-couple dynamic plays out in a hilarious scene where he overhears her hashing out her restaurant concept with some hoity-toity word salad that’ll be familiar to restaurant folks: The L.A. restaurant is “nondenominational Vietnamese,” while the new spot, Saintly Fare, is going to be, ahem, “transdenominational.”
While reviewing the first draft of her menu, she tells the designer to print it on rice paper, because “white people will eat that up.” Sasha is a caricature of the chef who “elevates” food; the film argues that her public engagement with Vietnamese cuisine is shallow, inflated by a whole lot of hot air and not much else.
The writers, who previously alluded to this film’s script as their take on “When Harry Met Sally,” make the most of restaurant scenes, using them to stretch out and play with their characters’ shifting relationship. In an old-school dim sum place in the Richmond (by way of Vancouver, British Columbia), Marcus impresses Sasha by charming the servers into giving him extra siu mai with a bit of situational Cantonese — the ideal Californian. The character is most at home in places like this, the dive bars and mom-and-pops of San Francisco.
In the film’s supremely funny centerpiece, Sasha and Marcus go on a double date at a hip, conceptual restaurant with their respective significant others, played by Keanu Reeves and Vivian Bang. The angular restaurant, called Maximal and filmed in Vancouver’s Contemporary Jewish Museum, is a brilliant parody of a certain class of modern establishments that eschew pleasure for some vague artistic experience: The walls are lit with blue and pink neon light, the music is some throbbing runway Muzak, and the servers’ uniforms are dark denim nightmares. “Rich people are done with fancy clothes,” Sasha informs Marcus as he, garbed in the tuxedo he wore to prom, marvels at the young diners in beanies and $1,000 T-shirts.
Their tasting menu, designed with tongue firmly in cheek by Nakayama, looks like something pulled from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Futurist Cookbook,” whose recipes include milk illuminated by a green light and “simultaneous ice cream.” Sasha and company partake in edible centerpieces: “the flavor of Caesar,” clear asparagus soup in fishbowls, “the black course” and a dish that “plays with the concept of time.” Tensions flare as Marcus’ working-class skepticism toward the food — and Sasha’s new fling — build up to a boiling point. After the expensive meal, he’s still hungry. Frustrated, he channels the humor of many workingclass comedians before him and yells, “Can I get a monochrome burrito to go?”
The push-and-pull between Sasha’s aspirations and Marcus’ sentimentality surfaces frequently in the plot, spilling over into a revealing argument that’s about food — except that it’s not. Who needs “elevated” Asian cuisine, he asks her. Real Asian food is “authentic,” something served in a “big-ass bowl” rather than in modernist bits and bobs on gray slates for “rich white people.” It seems like a philosophical argument, much like ones I’ve had over dinner with friends and fellow cooks, but here it’s as much about Sasha’s own artifice and camerareadiness than it is about deconstructed pho. The specter of Judy Kim’s kimchi jjigae, which was sure as hell served in “big-ass bowls,” looms over their heads.
If this were another film, it would end with an elderly Sasha, alone and on her death bed, muttering, “Kimchi ... . ” But luckily, this is a romantic comedy, and the film brings back the pot to round out the plot and bring the two together again.
As the latest data point in the current Asian American media boom, “Always Be My Maybe” is surely going to electrify an audience that is voracious for works that reflect their own experiences. With its casual centering of Asian American perspectives and faces — there’s no insincere white audience surrogate, no explanatory comma in human form here, a la “The Last Samurai” or “Ghost in the Shell”— the film reads as a work that is most definitely informed by “Fresh Off the Boat,” “Crazy Rich Asians” and “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.”
But what makes the movie even more captivating is its fluency with food as a metaphor, even outside of the major set pieces. (A dragonfruit makes a cameo in Sasha’s fruit bowl at home, quietly asserting this point.) In this way, “Always Be My Maybe” isn’t necessarily revolutionary. What is unique is how well writers Wong, Golamco and Park have maturely applied culinary metaphors to the existential crises of Asian America — and, all the while, crafted a film that will be easy to eat along with, as long as you have a jar of kimchi in the fridge.
Soleil Ho’s tenure as The Chronicle’s Restaurant Critic began in 2019. She was previously a freelance food and pop culture writer, a podcast maker, and restaurant chef. Her seminal work, the Racist Sandwich podcast, covered the myriad ways in which food intersects with race, class and gender.