From The Atlantic With Love: Reinvention Of Asian American Food + Pictures Of People In The Mud

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Mud Stuff



The above photo is from the "In Focus" feature which shows 32 pics from various countries with people interacting with mud - like in SK at the 15th annual mud festival on Daecheon Beach in Boryeong.

Stinky, Spicy, and Delicious: The Radical Reinvention of Asian American Food

Here's a snippet from another feature they have on the redefinition of Asian American food and the chefs that are helping to redefine it.

Choi is part of a tsunami of rule-breaking Asian American chefs who have created a new genre of cooking in America: a robust and astonishingly creative blend that draws on Asian, Latin, and Southern foods. Its growing ranks of practitioners bring sterling chef credentials and modernist cooking techniques to bear on the foods of their forebears.

What they're making is not just "modernist" Asian cuisine. It's a type of cooking that has filtered through the multiethnic influences of their upbringings: taco stands, fast food joints, barbecue shacks, hip hop, and graffiti. Theirs is not the "fusion" cooking of the late '70s and '80's, effete creations of European-trained masters who melded cultures with delicacy and nuance. Nor is it the cooking of Nobu Matsuhisa or Martin Yan, talented newcomers who tutored America in Asian ingredients and flavor combinations. This new wave of chefs is dishing up what I call Asian Soul Food: a gutsy, high-low mash up of street food and haute cuisine, old country flavors and new-fangled cooking techniques.

Read it in full here.