The most exciting food across the country today combines elements from all sorts of cuisines. The problem: what to call it, and why a name matters. "New American" has become a de facto term, but what does it mean now? Welcome to The New American Problem, a mini-series exploring how we talk about contemporary American food.
Take a look at the sorts of restaurants that were celebrated on best-of lists this past year by The New York Times, Eater, and here at Bon Appétit, and you will see a mish-mash of cuisines. Rooster & Owl in DC features cornbread, banh mi, panzanella, and tabouleh. At Elvie’s in Jackson, Mississippi, the menu careens from “New Orleans-style baked oysters to pork tonkatsu, vegetable lumpia to redfish amandine, shrimp remoulade to cacio e pepe,” as the Times puts it. Bonnie’s in Brooklyn flirts with a new vision of Cantonese American food, its menu including salted duck egg-custard French toast, and cha siu done two ways: as a hash for brunch, or as a “McRib” at dinner.
The current moment in American food is pushing the boundaries of what “American” means—resolutely taking what was historically not considered American and making it so.
Yet amidst this burst of creativity and invention, a question has emerged: What do we call the kind of food that defines how Americans eat now? Instead of being neatly confined by geography or a single culture, the food of cutting-edge chefs pulls from varied cultural backgrounds, as well as the cities where they learned to cook. Such cooking, like the things that defined this year’s best-of lists, blends cuisines and cultures in a way that we don’t quite yet have a name for.
Or, rather, we do have names for it, but none of them quite work. In the past, chefs, food media, and diners called this food “fusion.” But the cooking that first garnered that label eventually fell out of fashion, because instead of innovation, it too often resulted in the sort of thing worth putting on mocking listicles (think: burritos filled with spaghetti). Fusion is now “a hydra of a slur” according to L.A. Times critic Bill Addison, a way of flattening difference, nuance, and history.
In restaurant reviews and think pieces, we instead started calling similar, more judicious forms of mixed cuisines “New American.” Writing in the LA Times in 1991, Ruth Reichl pointed to California as an epicenter of “the new” in American cooking, one that saw an emphasis on eclectic takes on regional or international ingredients. From the early eighties and on, New American grew to encompass nearly any kind of food that draws from global cuisines to adapt American staples—think a mac and cheese topped with lines of kewpie mayo, or slices of ribeye served with nuoc cham on the side.
But in the last few years, “New American” has fallen out of favor too, with numerous publications lodging complaints that aren’t too far off from the criticisms of fusion: that so-called “foreign” food is used as cheap marketing, something international thrown in to make the familiar seem exotic. Now, like fusion, New American is a label used for derision as much as description. Recently, when food writer Ashlie Danielle Stevens asked on Twitter what the term brings to mind, answers ranged from “gentrified soul food classics” and “mid roast chicken and carrots with the tops on” to, more pointedly, “unseasoned bullshit.”
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But if fusion’s become something of a dirty word, and New American is falling out of vogue, where does that leave us? Writers and chefs alike have been scrambling to come up with new ways to describe this distinctly modern, American form of cooking. Food writers have lately suggested New New American or, more interestingly, chaos cooking—a sort of devil-may-care approach that, as Avish Naran of Los Angeles restaurant Pijja Palace tells Eater, means chefs are “cooking our experiences, not our ethnicities.”
It’s an exercise that feels necessary. As silly as a label may feel, finding a name that encapsulates a restaurant’s menu can be helpful, too. Giving something a name makes it recognizable to us as diners or writers, but also influential forces including Google and Yelp. Words have currency, in more than one sense of the term.
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Whatever label we give it, though, it will describe a regular part of life in America today. So much of what’s deemed “fusion” or “New American” is just what happens when hungry third-culture kids get home from school and blend together things which, to them, aren’t novel or separate to begin with.
After all, when chef Suresh Sundas puts burrata in the middle of a plate of black daal at DC’s Daru, is that not both American and new—in the sense that it is a product of the time and place and country in which such a mixture occurs so fruitfully?
People are yearning for something, well, new: a label that food critics, chefs—and anyone who loves to eat—can give to what is, in equal measure, both new and distinctly American.
“New American” got its start in Berkeley, California, in the ’70s at Chez Panisse. At the time, the cuisine it described didn’t have much to do with pulling flavors from around the world. Chef Alice Waters and her peers drew from the same tenets that were informing French culinary movements around that period: simplicity, freshness, and an attention to sourcing local ingredients. Eventually, the New Yorker suggested that Waters had invented at least part of “New American” cuisine, one where the farmers market dictated the meal.
The term came at an ideal time. American food was expanding and evolving, and writers and diners alike were looking to mark a change from the meat and potatoes midcentury food that you might have seen in Leave it to Beaver or Mad Men. In 1984, Jeremiah Tower, who had worked as the chef of Chez Panisse, picked up what Waters was doing and ran with it. His cooking pulled from the canon of classic American cooking, then added something—like, say, a Cajun remoulade or a ginger cream. At Stars, Tower’s restaurant in San Francisco, he served dishes like local grilled lamb with ancho chile sauce, avocado salsa, and cotija cheese. The restaurant was a smash hit, and became a who’s who of A-List celebrities and fawning food critics. In 1986, Tower published his first cookbook, New American Classics.
In the early 1980s, other chef personalities such as Wolfgang Puck and Jonathan Waxman began using influences from various Asian cuisines in their cooking, and along with “fusion,” the term “New American” started popping up to describe it, according to the Chicago Tribune. The Austria-born Puck didn’t, say, put bulgogi inside a samosa, but he took something roughly familiar to white Americans like a chopped salad and added a few “Chinese” twists like soy sauce and sesame oil to make a “Chinois salad.”
In all of these early examples, New American meant the addition of an “exotic,” foreign, non-white flair. It’s a mentality in which food seen as “not from here” was looked at by entrepreneurial, mostly white restaurateurs as a kind of raw material to be mined and refined and, eventually, sold at some celebrity chef’s newest outing in Vegas.
It’s not a coincidence that most of the genre-defining New American cooking came from white restaurateurs, with the exception of notable chefs such as Roy Yamaguchi, a pioneer of Asian fusion fare. There’s the longstanding question of who has historically been allowed to call their food “American” and to whom it appeals when a certain kind of novelty emerges. Puck himself says that he knew his second restaurant Chinois had really become something when Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna, and Warren Beatty started eating there; if Hollywood stars are a barometer of anything, it’s the cultural appetite for what’s considered new.
But while white chefs were finding success cooking with “exotic” ingredients, chefs of color were (and sometimes still are) confined and type-cast. Many non-white chefs today bristle at the ways in which their cooking has been constrained, such as the old trope that an Asian chef is expected to only cook Asian food. Couple that with the ongoing frustration around cultural appropriation and the trend of white influencers profiting off exoticized “foreign” practices, and it’s easy to see why labels become such contested ground. I am reminded of Kentucky-based chef Edward Lee insisting in a 2014 episode of the television show Mind of a Chef that his cooking, even when it includes his Korean influences, is American. Like the other side of the coin, that assimilationist approach has its appeal for the reason specific labels do: They’re demands for an expanded definition of what it means to be American.
And it certainly has expanded. In the last half-decade, the landscape has developed. The makeup of award-winning restaurateurs has diversified, and at least in the last few years, it’s not just white chefs who have been celebrated for food that skips around the globe. And while plenty of chefs have found original ways to describe their cooking, Google, Yelp, and the other crowdsourced platforms often still clump these restaurants together under the New American umbrella.
At Kasama in Chicago, you can get a sandwich of “shaved pork adobo, longanisa sausage, and giardiniera” or a corned beef breakfast with garlic rice and fried egg. Yelp calls it Filipino and also “American (New),” a little parenthetical to let you know this isn’t just diner food. Chef Andrew Black’s Oklahoma City restaurant Grey Sweater defiantly says it has “no allegiance” in its menu, which might feature Norwegian scallops in a pool of Jamaican coconut milk sauce. Yelp also calls that restaurant “American (New).” New American cuisine can cross borders, too. In Toronto, swanky Vela also gets called New American despite only technically being one of those two things. But it, too, shares the tropes of the genre: scallops with Thai nam jim, octopus with tamari and togarashi. New American might be vague, but it is also recognizable.
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In the absence of other language, New American is, perhaps, the simplest (and sometimes, most reductive) description of what these chefs are doing: pulling from an array of contemporary resources to reflect something about dining in America.
But just because “New American” is the best we’ve got doesn’t mean it’s good enough, or that it isn’t obscuring something by being so generic. We can—and should—do a better job of acknowledging the individuality that actually makes food culture in America so striking right now. Using a label at all suggests the existence of a cohesive American cuisine, when what really defines American food right now is how far-reaching and all-encompassing it can be. This is not the French-inspired cooking of the ’80s and ’90s. New bids into the canon like “New New American” or “chaos cooking” are encouraging attempts to describe what’s happening in American food culture right now, but much like the term they intend to replace, don’t quite describe all that American cooking has to offer at this moment. How quickly will we find those labels to be outdated, too?
When food media went through a racial reckoning in 2020, part of the fallout was precisely a call for more specificity. The complaint about Alison Roman and “the stew”—a chickpea dish heavy on turmeric that was close enough to many South Asian dishes to raise more than a few eyebrows—the objection was less about who owns what, or who has a right to use which ingredient, than simply a desire to call something by its right name.
It’s why “New American” as a term simply doesn’t work anymore—if it did at all. It once claimed to look forward, but now in fact looks back: to a time when it was simply assumed that the default in America was whiteness, and what was new about New American was new to most in the country—when Wolfgang Puck adding Asian ingredients to his menus still seemed “daring.” But that isn’t the case anymore. Kimchi, sumac, curry spices, lemongrass, fish sauce—these are ingredients now so ordinary you’ll find them on mass-market cooking programs such as America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Country on PBS.
Today, part of what is driving novelty in American cooking, and landing restaurants on best-of lists, is a more purposeful, specific mindset. Chefs are finding their own ways to describe their cooking—and perhaps providing useful keys for how to read this culinary landscape.
When Eric Brooks and Jacob Armando put their own twist on red sauce Italian at Gigi’s in Atlanta, the results—beef carpaccio with rice crackers, polenta with caviar, fettuccine alfredo with fermented chili breadcrumbs—might well be called “New Italian American” (They call themselves, quite simply, an Italian kitchen). At L.A.’s Anajak Thai, Justin Pichetrungsi took over his parents’ decades-old establishment and the results are almost a too-on-the-nose expression of what second-gen, third-culture American cooking looks like: Thai Taco Tuesdays, Southern Thai-style fried chicken, Kampachi sashimi with a Hainanese ponzu. It describes itself as Thai—but with the very American addendum that “Anajak is one big f*cking party.” And at Nami Kaze in Honolulu, chef-owner Jason Peel takes the already multicultural cuisine of Hawaii and adds in not just Japanese touches, but also Levantine labneh and za’atar, Southeast Asian satay sauce with summer rolls, and beets with gochujang.
Eater described Peel’s approach as “grounded in the Islands and exposed to the world.” It’s not a bad way to think of American food right now: rooted somewhere, but also reflecting the fact that the Americans cooking and eating it come from places where the food cultures are far different from what’s historically been considered American.
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Yet on Nami Kaze’s website, rather than New American or Japanese American, what it says in large sans serif is “Japanese + American.” The hyphen is gone, replaced by a plus sign. If you were to squint a bit and read it symbolically, you have the “yes and” of labels. It’s a good way to capture what is actually going on: There isn’t a single thing emerging in American food culture at this moment, but a constant process of addition that is taking the American and making something, well, new.
Sure, that interpretation is probably a little optimistic; nothing in the mess of national and ethnic identity is actually that easy. So much of how we define ourselves comes down to the subjective practice of what feels right. Chefs like Edward Lee may prefer the simple, declarative “American.” Others seek a combination, like Taiwanese American, Korean American, Neo-Italian American—and yes, hyphenation can be imprecise and clunky in its own way. But each attempts to avoid the ambiguity in obscuring an intentionally made cuisine. And more precision does perhaps get us closer to clarity. In general, when it comes to thinking about the miasma of appropriation, history, race, and the hundred other things currently troubling the food world, even a little more specificity seems like a good thing.
American food is constantly evolving and, in turn, evading labels. We can follow some general ethos: Say where its various influences are from. Take descriptors from places like Google and Yelp with a grain of salt (good advice for any topic). But also: Use a hyphen or a plus sign or whatever else to suggest that where something is from doesn’t wholly determine where it’s going.
The nearly impossible challenge here is describing the way the present is constantly giving way to the future. Then again, that’s part of the challenge, charm, and beauty of eating in the United States in the first place. It’s constantly pushing forward, blending and creating and inventing until something radically new—even cuisine-defining—emerges. It’s not just new and American, it’s “American, and.” Filling in that blank is exactly where the promise lies.