Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Shared Tables
has been openly enriched by
pork with pickled cabbage in whole-wheat wrappers. The next night, at Vanipha
Lanna, I savored food from Thailand’s Lanna region, where many Laotians have
settled: sweet sticky rice and laab gai of minced grilled chicken flavored with herbs
and a chili-lime dressing. At the Middle Eastern Tabule I indulged in labni several
ways: as an appetizer mixed with garlic, za’atar, and olive oil, served with tender
loaves of fresh pita, and as a shimmering custard for dessert, mixed with sugar
and a little cornstarch, then flavored with rose water and sprinkled with pistachios.
South Indian, Hong Kong Chinese, and New Canadian meals rounded out my
stay. In spite of all the work, I returned from my trip energized by the vigor of the
restaurant scene.
It’s a commonplace that food keeps traditions alive. What we perhaps think
about less often is the way in which food also communicates outward, beyond one’s
home and community, to bring others in. Much has been written (not least in
these pages) about the dangers of culinary tourism, in which well-heeled diners
move from food culture to food culture in a sort of culinary competition, boasting
about their latest great food finds but missing the essence of the culture that
underlies the food. We need to guard against this attitude even as we make sure to
patronize these restaurants and recognize how much they contribute to our lives.
Even without a perfect understanding of a nation’s culture, we come a step closer to
it by visiting its restaurants. The best of them cause us to reflect beyond our habits
and enable us to partake in a shared table that transcends the boundaries of our
own comfortable (and comforting) foods. And even the worst of them expands us.
It’s no surprise that the us cities best known for their food (New York, San
Francisco, Chicago) are all cities of immigrants. Along with new ingredients,
immigrants bring new sensibilities, which eventually percolate onto the larger
American palate. Unfamiliar food habits become part of the ongoing revolution
in American eating as they’re put to new and exciting use by innovative chefs.
This is one of the important ways in which cuisine evolves.
So in our debates about immigration, let’s not forget that the immigrants con-
tribute more than just labor to our national economy. Their presence both literally
and figuratively enriches our lives. We would be much poorer without them.g