j u n e

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In the wane of May it finally actually begins to feel like summer. There’s Memorial Day, yes, which is usually ribs and watermelon, potato salad and coleslaw. It’s a meter of marking time, a chalk mark on the door frame. Memorial Day weekend also means my father’s birthday, which, 30 years ago, meant grilling hotdogs next to my grandmother’s concrete pool. Us kids would do tricks off the diving board, demanding scores from the judges’ booth, which was my mother in her sarong, who’d holler out a steady stream of arbitrarily decimaled rankings while we ran the circuit splash after slapping splash. 

I am now the age my father turned in 1997. I was 15 then and learning to drive in a 1989 Ford Aerostar minivan the summer before starting high school. (Let’s be honest—I learned to drive much younger than that; this was south Georgia, after all.) That was also about the time I developed an unreasonable fear of having an undiagnosed appendicitis resulting in my sudden and unexpected death, a fear that was hardly assuaged by the tenuous reassurance that if you have one, you’ll know it.

It’s difficult to articulate—or comprehend, even—the wealth of lessons I’ve learned from my father, but I can think of a few. He taught me how to tie a windsor knot, which led to my wearing more ties in 5th grade than in all my adult years combined; he taught me how to shoot a bow and arrow—to steady my breath, to exhale and release—a skill which came more quickly than the wisdom not to shoot them inside the house (sorry); and perhaps the most meaningful of all, he taught me the importance of authenticity. Just be yourself, he must’ve said hundreds of times throughout my adolescence, whether to quell my nervousness before a date or dropping me off at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta to send me off for what would be the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Italy. (Don’t come back with any bambinos, he also advised.) It was always a way of re-centering, of stabilizing my inner self in reconciliation with the outside world. The practice of being authentic.

It’s a bit of a cumbersome term, this concept: authenticity. Especially when it comes to food (and food for thought). To speak of it as a modern preoccupation would be an understatement. People are obsessed with it. Fetishize it. It’s like a badge of one’s worldliness, to know and experience food that is authentic. 

“Never have we been more cosmopolitan about what we eat,” writes Anya Von Bremzen in National Dish, “and yet never more essentialist, locavore, and particularist. As the world becomes more liquid, we argue about culinary appropriation and cultural ownership, seeking anchor and comfort in the mantras of authenticity, terroir, heritage. We have a compulsion to tie food to place, to forage for the genius loci on our pilgrimages to the birthplace of ramen, the cradle of pizza, the bouillabaisse bastion” (5-6). It’s like a dish’s ur-text is the holy grail on our cosmopolitan culinary crusade. 

It seems the more mosaic our culinary accessibilities become, the more we yearn to unravel and find the origin of the thread. To suggest, as Von Bremzen does, that food perhaps even tastes different when we imagine it embodies a genius loci—quite literally, the spirit of a place—begs the question of whether there’s something quintessential about a place, a people, or history that is inextricable from the food (33). It’s the idea that eating bún chả hanoi in Hanoi grants some kind of transcendental access to the secrets of the universe—or at least the secrets of Vietnamese food. (I’m not saying it doesn’t; I can let you know next March:) 

I think we’d all agree that food indeed possesses this sort of preternatural capability to embody the spirit of a place and transcend the rudimentary precepts of spacetime. But the modes of determining a thing’s authenticity present something perhaps a bit more specious. 

In Culinary Tourism, a collection of essays curated and edited by Lucy Long, various critics tackle the question of authenticity through the lens of, as the title suggests, culinary tourism, which Long defines as “the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodway of an Other.” It’s important to note Long’s reference to the Hegelian coinage of the Other—rather than another—Hegel’s constituent part of the preoccupation with the Self—more specifically his notion that defining the subjective Self (or self awareness) presumes an Other as counterpart in order to do so. The implications here—specifically in the inherent violence of writing the Other—have been teased out by social theorists for the last century, so we can skip all that and take it for granted that this kind of Western epistemology (how we know what we know) is problematic, to say the least. 

Long puts it again, this time perhaps more brochure-friendly: “[c]ulinary tourism is about food as a subject and medium, destination and vehicle, for tourism. It is about individuals exploring foods new to them as well as using food to explore new cultures and ways of being.” Long leans on Dean MacCannell’s assertion that the touristic experience, specifically touristic consciousness, is motivated by a desire for authentic experience.

I get it. When we travel, whether to Sardinia or rural Thailand or the suburbs of Chicago, I want to know—and experience—how the locals eat. Because it does feel like a window into another’s world. A way of learning, of sharing, and perhaps even expanding our capacity for empathy through the awareness afforded by exposure to diurnal life outside your own. “Our preoccupation with […] authenticity,” explains  Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in the book’s intro, “goes to the heart of the concept of culinary tourism [...]: namely, how self-consciousness arises from encounters with the unfamiliar and challenges what we know–or think we know–about what is before us” (xii).

But it’s hard to ignore the paradox here: that we rely for our own self-awareness on the degree to which a thing outside ourselves is what it ought to be (to use Arjun Appadurai’s abbreviated definition of authenticity). Like, is this burrito burrito-ing in a way that affirms my preconceived notion of self and Other? It sounds ridiculous, I know. But if you go to Saigon and can’t find the dish you saw Anthony Bourdain eat on a long boat bobbing in the reeds of the Mekong Delta, then you somehow feel like you’re not getting your tour’s worth.

I’ll be the first to admit to stubbornly seeking out street stalls with no English translations—or no menu altogether—where the only feasible way of ordering is to politely gesture to the bowl of noodles and indiscernible meat parts on the table next to me, because yes, I want to eat—to feel like I’m eating—how the locals eat. But what about the locals who eat ham sandwiches and Pringles from 7-11? Why do we get to decide which parts of authenticity we like and simply disregard the rest—which parts align with our carefully curated perception of the authentic experience?

In National Dish, Von Bremzen touches on the notion of the ‘inverted pizza effect’, “whereby a cultural phenomenon becomes not just revived in such a way back home, but is reconfigured to satisfy the new expectations of foreign visitors—for authenticity, for tradition—forming a continuous loop of projections, expectations, and appropriations” (74). This is not unlike what I sometimes refer to as the accordion phenomenon. You can't make two turns through the labyrinthine corridors of Venice without bumping into an accordion player, elbows en wave as the corrugated box wheezes its romantic arpeggios. And so you have to wonder, is it that since there are accordion players in Venice, the tourists expect them? Or are there accordion players in Venice because the tourists expect them? In short: both. It’s a positive feedback loop. 

There’s a Sporkful episode from earlier this year that delves into the complicated history of hibachi restaurants. How all the gimmicks and decor are meant to reinforce the exoticism expected by the guests. You know what I’m talking about: the hanging red velvet curtains, paper lanterns, little golden Buddha figurines, maybe even a fist-bobbing maneki-neko cat. Host Dan Pashman speaks with Perry Salito, a Myrtle Beach-born Japanese American who gets a job as a hibachi chef but struggles with the feigned performance of it all. Other chefs, he says, would sometimes even use fake Asian accents to play into the stereotype for better tips.

While only some might think of hibachi or teppanyaki restaurants as “ethnic,” these tourist-centric food businesses do have an important place in the discussion of the relationship between authenticity and ethnicity. When it comes to what most may think of as ethnic food, Jennie Germann Molz focuses on the ethnic restaurant as a site for examining concepts of authenticity and identity formation. “The ethnic restaurant,” she writes, “is a symbolic stage upon which the exploration of the exotic, facilitated through the concept of authenticity, becomes an expression of identity” (54). So we’re triangulating our coordinates through the dialectical opposition of the exotic, the foreign, the outside. Molz cites Arjun Appadurai’s examination of the basic debate over authenticity—“where is it located and by what authority is it judged?”—with a full passage from Appadurai:

Authenticity measures the degree to which something is more or less what it ought to be. It is thus a norm of some sort. But is it an immanent norm, emerging somehow from the cuisine itself? Or is it an external norm, reflecting some imposed gastronomic standard? If it is an immanent norm, who is its authoritative voice: The professional cook? The average consumer? The gourmand? The housewife? If it is an imposed norm, who is its privileged voice: the connoisseur of exotic food? The tourist? The ordinary participants in a neighboring cuisine? The cultivated eater from a distant one? 

The underlying questions here (as Long suggests) are what does food mean to people/culture? and how is this meaning arrived at? It’s quite obvious that across cultural boundaries, food functions as both symbol and commodity. But to what degree is a food’s value posteriori knowledge—a social construct determined only through experience and not by an inherent assumption?

Appadurai pretty much outright dismisses the idea of an objective authenticity, calling out the term’s inadequacy when applied to culinary systems at all, since “it cannot account for the inevitable evolution that occurs in cultures and their cuisines'' (Molz, 54). Molz furthers the idea, noting that many scholars view authenticity as “a subjective or emergent quality that is constructed and negotiated within a social context” (55).

I can’t help but think of the emergent strategy of adrienne maree brown (which I’ve mentioned before), and the notion that both consciousness and crises are phenomena which require negotiation and re/calibration, both singularly and collectively, as new contexts enter the chat. What this means is that food—and how we understand it in a historical context—is always changing. Because the conversation is always being added to. 

Back in October I mentioned a small but mighty little book on hospitality, Be My Guest by Priya Basil, and there’s a particular line that seems apt here: “The quest for authenticity is more often more a crusade for authority, and attempt to exclude, single out and thus narrow things down—the very opposite of hospitality” (23). What Basil is getting at, I believe, is that the prerogative to name something as authentic is to wedge one’s place of authority. Claims to authorship, lineage, and preservation, while on the one hand seem like innocuous efforts at celebrating heritage and history, risk the dismissal of non-dominant narratives and practices—and by extension, peoples—from contributing to and expanding the conversation, on the other. 

And it’s difficult to ignore the capitalist underpinnings, too, when it comes to naming something as authentic. For Americans, most conversations about authentic cooking usually hinge on ethnic food. The idea presumes, as hinted by Long, the authentic Hegelian other, something outside of ‘ourselves,’ another term riddled with epistemological assumptions. And one of the most common expectations of authentic ethnic food is that it’s cheap. The cheaper it is, the more authentic it must be. Right? Because if market costs have impacted the redistribution of goods (and the people who supply the labor), then the authenticity has been compromised. Or at least that’s the thinking. That authentic somehow means discrete and static, fixed, impervious to change. 

At risk of horrifying culinary traditionalists, I’m inclined to propose that a food’s cultural value (its authenticity) is malleable. It’s dialogic. It’s a dynamic process whereby resonances shift, whether gradually or abruptly, and redefine contextual parameters and thus, value.

To help explain what I mean by dialogic, I’ll refer to Palestinian thinker Edward Said (pronounced “saa-EED”) who writes how “[p]ast and present inform each other, each implies the other and, in the totally ideal sense intended by Eliot, each co-exists with the other.” Said here is referring to the process of dialogism and TS Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’—which I concede is expressly more about art and tradition than it is food and authenticity—where Eliot basically claims that any time a new work of art is created and introduced into pool of history, it sends reverberations through the pool, and something simultaneously happens to all of the works that came before it. And then that whoever might approve of this take on the order of things “will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” Rarely does one’s authenticity—one’s mind, one’s being, one’s food—exist as a single fixed point on the matrix but rather as a fluid and dynamic series of tensions within the web. 

In this kind of phenomenon, no particular component has a reality independent of the collective entirety, including both the doer and the observer (or host and tourist, cook and consumer, respectively). For me—and I can only speak for myself here—the idea of authenticity as something petrified and unchanging, fixed and immutable, seems egregiously limiting. I’m not suggesting that someone should get away with claiming ketchup on pizza as authentic because that’s what was on hand—that’s just bananas—but that authenticity is more than a tradition or recipe. It’s about being real—actually existing and being alive. A way of being. Authenticity is about paying attention, about being present. It’s about listening and engaging with the world around you, of receiving and transmitting cultural code. Of responding to all the resonances and frequencies that are generated by real life-living energies, whether in tandem with, or in resistance to, those of one’s own. It means responding to ingredients rather than forcing them. It’s getting dialed in. Of honoring tradition while being receptive to change. 

If I’d asked my father to describe me in 1997, and then again today, I’m fairly certain the words he’d choose now wouldn’t be too far from what they would’ve been then. Words like stubborn and sensitive, selfish and generous, but they would’ve taken on entirely new meanings. Because that’s 27 years in-between to define and redefine the meanings of those ideas. Both on my part and on his. Not to mention it’s taken me decades to learn that these seemingly opposing traits are actually characteristics that inform each other. 

Authenticity might best be described as “the capacity of food to hold time, place, and memory […] valued all the more in an era of hypermobility, when it can seem as if everything is available everywhere, all the time” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, xiii). Not despite those reverberations of hyper-accessibility, but rather to hold them, too, as history continues to be informed by the present. 

I suppose the only way I can really describe my thoughts on authenticity is that it’s like being in love—or having appendicitis, apparently—that when you experience it, you know it. And in that moment you can feel what has been, and what is about to be. Because food—and the sharing of it—creates for us a space in time in which to exist. One in which, perhaps, we can all exist together. 

yours,

dsp + liz

comin’ up

v i s - à - v i s

6 — 9PM

CHALK MARKS

/ / / TUESDAY 07 - 16 - 24

a very special dinner collaboration @ the TXA TXA studio w/ Sam Mui of THIRSTY DUMPLING

Chalk marks, a way of record keeping, charting growth. A reflection on life-defining moments, whether momentous or miniscule, revisited through food. It’s a way of storytelling, of connecting the universal through the particular, an unfolding of personal narrative situated within a collective understanding of growth, coming of age, shades of enlightenment. 

This is a collaborative dinner between TXA TXA Club and Sam of Thirsty Dumpling. We’ll be taking dishes that serve as personal milestones and re-envisioning them for vis-à-vis format to connect through stories of love and learning, heartbreak and hangovers. Like how a black rice arancino with quail egg and fermented pineapple sets the stage for romance, or how the intuitive cooking of a 5-year old anticipated a social media food trend years ahead. 

We’re especially thrilled to be sharing the pass with Sam, who’s no stranger to dinner parties. Thirsty Dumpling is Sam’s ingenious effort to get people cooking together through DIY dumpling kits. Take a peak to learn more of Sam’s live-streaming party hacks Food Network appearances.

GRAB TIX

(just a few left here, y’all)

JUNE SUPPER CLUB

vol. 35 — — - - - RHIZOSPHERE

We are so very thrilled to announce a return to the lush and idyllic urban sanctuary of @nuluum —Logan Square’s garden and gathering space providing community, connection, and growth with a sense of meaning and purpose.

For this Supper Club, we’ll be exploring the concept of how the RHIZOSPHERE—the soil region where the dynamic interplay of root matter, soil composition, and metabolites (the stuff that’s made when enzymes break down organic tissue) creates some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, and the social implications of sustainability and nourishment through communal gathering and, you guessed it, the sharing of food.

You can expect some fresh summer produce with a spin on midwestern classics—a TXA TXA riff on a beer cheese sauce, anyone?—hot off the grill under the stringlit canopy of trees, as we’ll be dining al fresco.

friday JUNE 28th 6-9PM

@ NULUUM

2720 N California Ave, Chicago, IL 60647

GRAB TIX

summer collabs ///

summer is here…

recipes

PURPLE CAULIFLOWER SOUP

w/ grape, lemongrass, coconut, pistachio

June is a delightful time at the farmer’s market. Rows upon rows of green fiber pint baskets dangerously meniscus’d with tiny nugget strawberries and sugar snap peas; bundles of pink and green transition-lensed ribs of rhubarb; little green lassos of rubber bound garlic scapes; and perhaps my favorite, those deep lilac bouquets of purple cauliflower. It’s almost unreal, the purple. So royal, so great, so Grimace. 

And seeing them again today—as Liz and I walked through the Logan Square Farmers Market, arm in sticky arm, on this 92-degree day—I was reminded of a cool and refreshing chilled purple cauliflower soup we made a couple summers back for an all-out brassicas dinner. (I think we had something like 16 different brassicas incorporated in the menu.) The soup was a smooth and silky cauliflower puree blended with grapes and garlic and lemongrass, topped with a coconut-lavender creme fraiche and a little crumbled pistachio. 

The soup is easy to make, no frills, super refreshing, and absolutely shocking in its monochromatic mauve. 

some more things

let’s do some things together this summer —> PRIVATE

wedding season 2024&2025…—> CATERING

bring a supper club to your space —> COLLAB