Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  I can’t really blame my Dad—he was from “a different time”—but being gay has nothing to do with whether or not you will be a man drawn to cooking. Unfortunately, our American experience pretty much limited the black male cook to the sphere of professional/domestic servant unless it was something that had to do with poultry, meat, fish, or shellfish—in which case the idea of a “master cook” of an animal protein or a pot of stew was not uncommon. Go further back into our West and Central African homelands and men do just that—roast, fry, barbecue, boil en masse—but they did not by and large practice domestic cookery; this was the work of women. To be fair, I did inherit my barbecuing skills from my father, who got them from his father—something did come down the Southern masculinity pipeline after all. A love of barbecue, horse-racing, and making homemade liquor—that’s about all I got from the ones who came before.

  Fast-forward to now and I’ve made the cooking of enslaved people my niche, bringing to life the experiences, skill sets, and knowledge bases of enslaved cooks who prepared food for themselves and their slaveholders on rural farms, plantations, and in urban residences. At first glance, embracing my own gay identity seemed to be at odds with that niche: I often get asked how exactly queerness fits into my brand and the story I’m trying to tell about both the past and the present. There is a dialogue in the world of food about homophobia in the industry kitchen and little whispers about queerness and food—but what happens when you sit at the crossroads of gayness, Blackness, and faith and do this sort of work?

  A little history lesson: The kitchen has always been a great place for gay men, a place for them to use the things that made them unique to their advantage. Across cultures, it’s a place where we’ve often hidden ourselves in plain sight. We crossed the borders of genders determined by sexual identity; even in West Africa, there were men like the gor-digen (men-women) in Senegal who pre-dated Islamic culture and were known for their dancing, culinary skills, and aesthetic sense (sound familiar?). On the plantations of America—where Western European culture associated masculinity with superior mastery in the kitchen and femininity with domestic cookery—many enslaved cooks in gentry households were male. Most were likely heterosexual as we would understand it, and many proudly used this position of authority in the defense and protection of their wives and children. But even when we look back, there is evidence that people we might think of as gay were present.

  Combing through records left behind from slavery days, we see at least two Black male domestics from the Chesapeake region who sought their freedom by running away disguised in women’s clothes, and both were noted for their effeminate nature and excellent cooking. There are journal entries about “saucy and impudent” Black male cooks who would have been sold off had their cooking not been so superior. The voice of free Black caterers of color comes across in old books with a mixture of Little Richard, the disco icon Sylvester, and Anthony from “Designing Women.” The history of homosexuality in the enslaved community is complicated stuff, and I’m just scratching the surface—but I’ve found that a person like me, without a question, existed in multiple places across the long life of American chattel slavery.

  Bringing that visibility to life has always made me consider the clothes I wear for my cooking demonstrations—waistcoat to tights to brass-buckled shoes—as a sort of historic “drag.” Sometimes I’m scruffy and look the part of the beleaguered enslaved cook, but I prefer to be fierce in a historic kitchen and give that livery life. Most enslaved Black cooks commanded high prices as human chattel and they took this dehumanizing fact and turned it into a “read” of the society they lived in. Their attire alone inspired in them a feeling that they were a culinary aristocracy that was worthy of respect. I prance that energy every time I go into a kitchen—it’s the start of reversing the narratives of both historic gay invisibility and of unchallenged victimization.

  The contemporary push-pull of LGBT life in the United States, between greater acceptance and the backlash and recent hate crimes against the increasing of legal protections and social tolerance, has amplified what I’m doing in the kitchen. Over 150 years ago, more than one Black man wasn’t afraid to be himself; to use that power within him, a certain strength that comes from embracing your difference and uniqueness; to do the unthinkable; to challenge the wealthiest institution in the American democracy; and to turn everything on its head by leaving it with the sort of ferocity that would make Ru Paul blush? To quote the Diva, “Ms. Roj” from George C. Wolfe’s play The Colored Museum, “that’s power baby!” That’s my heritage staring me in the face, challenging me to stand up and represent—because I can.

  But it’s not just the social justice activism that comes into the kitchen with me: It’s a pride in how the food should taste, look, feel, and what it communicates. Gay men have been culturally written out of history because we are often branded as individuals who will not contribute to the reproductive flow of the generations and therefore have little or no investment in normative tradition. And yet, so many of my colleagues in living history, historic preservation, and food history are very dedicated gay men with a mission to honor our collective heritage. In the same spirit, I want to honor the food past and ensure it is part of the cultural inheritance of everyone who loves the food of the African Diaspora and the American South. I embrace the idea that honing certain gay sensibilities helps me to appreciate the aesthetics of the Southern meal. I take a special pride in golden shimmering custard pies and chicken fried to perfection, in okra soup that will restore your faith in okra. Our food is spicy, saucy, sensual, and gendered and I’m standing on the seesaw in the middle trying to play on those themes and keep things in balance.

  The African in both “Southern” and “Soul” is not just the colorful splash of the food but also its musical notes and spiritual force, hidden moral lessons and the commitment to making the food communal. I love that I was born into two very potent ways of experiencing and appreciating food. Intersectionality may be the buzzword of 21st-century identity-speak, but it’s nothing new. In my kitchen, from the toy stove to the wood-fired hearth, it has really always been my signature ingredient.

  Cooking Other People’s Food

  BY LUKE TSAI

  From East Bay Express

  Now writing for San Francisco Magazine, Bay Area food writer Luke Tsai skillfully navigates the multiethnic landscape of this foodie metropolis, where who cooks what carries a loaded message. So when does “authentic” trump “tastes amazing”—and vice versa?

  The small, unassuming building on the corner of Market and 42nd streets—a mostly residential, working-class stretch of North Oakland—is an unlikely location for one of the most highly anticipated dining establishments in the East Bay.

  Years ago, the building was home to a hair salon, and more recently a restaurant serving high-end “New Baja”–style small plates. Now, Russell Moore and Allison Hopelain, the husband-and-wife owners of Camino and two of the more prominent restaurateurs in the East Bay, have taken over the space and plan to reinvent it as The Kebabery. Yes, it’s a restaurant specializing in grilled-meats-on-a-stick, but prepared in the quintessential California style, with lots of organic vegetables and other locally sourced, seasonal ingredients.

  This is great news for fans of Moore’s wood-fire-driven California cuisine—and also for those who don’t have the budget to dine at Camino on the regular. But it’s also the latest example of a rather curious phenomenon in the food world: Seemingly overnight, and even though the restaurant is still months away from opening, The Kebabery might already be the most talked about kebab restaurant in the entire East Bay.

  That’s despite the fact that the region is home to a wealth of more traditional Middle Eastern restaurants: Kamdesh, with its deliciously savory rice; Aria Grill, with its assortment of excellent grilled meats; and both Oasis Food Market and its sister restaurant, Oasis Kitchen, with their spit-roasted shawarma and habit-forming garlicky red-pepper sauce.

  All aro
und the country, many of the most famous purveyors of global and immigrant cuisines—the so-called “ethnic” foods—are actually chefs without family ties to those particular cultures. As food writer Francis Lam documented in a 2012 New York Times article entitled “Cuisines Mastered as Acquired Tastes,” many of these prominent “ethnic” restaurants are helmed by white fine-dining chefs, who later in their careers decide to dedicate themselves to a particular cuisine for which they’ve developed a passion.

  In New York City, a white former high-end pastry chef named Alex Stupak runs what is probably the city’s most highly acclaimed Mexican taqueria, Empellon. In Portland, Oregon—and, arguably in the whole country—Andy Ricker, another white male chef, is the king of regional Thai cuisine.

  Here in the East Bay, often it’s chefs with Chez Panisse pedigrees who own and operate some of the most-heralded restaurants, from Japanese ramen spots to upscale Mexican eateries. And when food reporters write about these places, there’s a tendency to talk about how the chefs have “elevated” the traditional versions of the cuisine, whether it be through farm-to-table sourcing or fine-dining cooking techniques.

  No one is making a serious argument that chefs should only ever cook foods to which they have a direct ancestral connection. But why is it that these mostly white, “pedigreed” chefs attain such incredible fame and success when equally talented immigrant cooks might labor in obscurity for years? And what does it mean that food pundits are so quick to hail these chefs as authorities on their adopted cuisines?

  We need to have a talk, then, about this matter of cooking other people’s foods and whether it’s possible for chefs to do so in a respectful manner. Otherwise, the restaurant industry will always be rigged in favor of what Preeti Mistry, the chef-owner of Temescal’s Juhu Beach Club, calls the “Iggy Azaleas” of the ethnic-dining scene: overhyped, culturally appropriative restaurants whose stories dominate the blogosphere and prominent food magazines, even as their white owners and chefs wonder why everyone always has to make a big deal about race.

  Non-Denominational Kebabs

  Moore, for his part, seems keenly aware of the tricky cultural terrain that he’s navigating as he prepares to open The Kebabery. The chef, who is half-Korean—though he said that he looks mostly white, so many people don’t realize that he’s bi-racial—said he’s sensitive to the typical narrative of a successful chef picking up a new cuisine and trying to improve on it.

  “I’m not saying, ‘I’m going to be like Oasis but better,’” he said. “That’s never been my goal.”

  On the one hand, Moore feels good about the type of business he plans to run—one that will support small farmers, provide jobs for people who live in the neighborhood, and offer high wages and health insurance to everyone on staff. Although he hasn’t set exact prices yet, he said he’s committed to making the restaurant affordable enough that people who live in that part of North Oakland will actually be able to eat there regularly. And Moore stressed that, of all the things he hopes The Kebabery will be, a traditional kebab restaurant isn’t one of them.

  “This is going to be non-denominational,” Moore said, explaining that he and Hopelain wouldn’t have even put the word “kebab” in the name of the restaurant if there was an easier way to encapsulate the type of food they plan to cook—i.e., a small, rotating selection of grilled meats, served with flatbread and a variety of little salads. It was an affinity for that style of cooking and eating that drew Moore to making kebabs in the first place, more so than any particular transformational experience eating at some traditional kebab shop in Israel or Iran.

  So, according to Moore, even though The Kebabery will prominently feature Middle Eastern flavors and spices when it opens later this year, the idea isn’t to duplicate or improve upon someone’s Persian grandmother’s recipes. Lead chef Traci Matsumoto-Esteban is of Japanese descent and cooked mostly Asian food prior to working at Camino. Her carrot salad might taste just like something you’d find at a Moroccan or Tunisian restaurant, but the strictly non-traditional sauerkraut salad that might accompany another kebab plate certainly would not. And over the past few years, Moore has developed a flatbread recipe—inspired by the one at Oasis—that uses whole-wheat flour and a slow leavening process, so that in the end it resembles a Chad Robertson (of Tartine Bakery fame) bread as much as it does a traditional flatbread.

  But Moore also acknowledges that, because of Camino’s great success, and because he too is a Chez Panisse alumnus, the fact of the matter is that The Kebabery is going to garner a ton of local and national press, much of it before he’s even served a single kebab.

  “That’s privilege that a chef that came from Afghanistan isn’t going to get automatically,” he said.

  And even if Moore is consciously trying to avoid being, as he put it, “the white guy who says [he’s] going to make the best kebabs in the world,” it’s easy to imagine that some of the publications that write about The Kebabery will come at it with that angle—maybe not the part about the white guy, but they’ll praise the restaurant’s elevated versions of Middle Eastern–inspired dishes. They’ll perhaps talk about how much nicer the setting is compared to your typical kebab shop.

  “I’m aware of the cultural privilege that we have going into it. We’re going to try to not make that into a marketing thing,” Moore said.

  Whitewashed Media

  If you’re a chef in Oakland or Berkeley, where even fine dining tends to be fairly casual, a stint at Chez Panisse—the mother ship of California cuisine—might be the best way to raise your stature in the public eye. So, when Ramen Shop opened in Rockridge in 2012, with its uniquely Californian interpretation of ramen, almost every article about the restaurant led with some discussion of the Chez Panisse pedigree of the three non-Japanese owners: Jerry Jaksich and Sam White, who are white, and Rayneil De Guzman, who is of Filipino descent. Peruse any roundup of best Bay Area ramen joints, and you’ll find Ramen Shop at or near the top of the list.

  Meanwhile, until recently, Berkeley’s Comal was practically the only game in town when it came to high-end, regional Mexican cuisine. The chef, Matt Gandin, is a self-described fourth-generation Jewish American who has loved Mexican food since he was a kid.

  Ramen Shop and Comal are both very good restaurants in their own right, and it’s important to note that their chefs have been nothing if not respectful when discussing their passion for Japanese and Mexican cooking.

  But this fact remains: You’d be hard-pressed to find a Japanese or Mexican eatery in the East Bay that got even a fraction of the pre-opening media hype both restaurants received, and both are often included when national publications do roundups of where to eat in Oakland or Berkeley—often to the exclusion of equally worthy immigrant-run spots.

  Much has been written in recent months about the unbearable whiteness of the food-writing community. (I take no satisfaction in being, to my knowledge, the only food writer of color who has a full-time gig with a major Bay Area publication.)

  One of the most egregious examples of the kind of tunnel vision this can cause was a recent article about a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn, on the food blog TheInfatuation.com. Blog co-founder Andrew Steinthal opened his review of Kings County Imperial, a restaurant helmed by “a pair of non-Chinese Chinese food enthusiasts,” by invoking just about every existing stereotype that Americans have about Chinese food: that it’s “gross,” that it leaves diners with “meat sweats,” and that it primarily exists in the form of cheap, dive-y takeout joints. Kings County Imperial co-owners Josh Grinker and Tracy Jane Young might not explicitly be hailed as the white saviors of dirty, gross Chinese cuisine. But when the review opens as it does, and then Kings County Imperial gets praised as effusively for its artisanal soy sauce and “modern, clean” approach to Chinese cooking—well, it’s not too hard to infer the subtext.

  Here in the Bay Area, the dynamic tends to play out in more subtle ways, both in terms of what restaurants even get press coverage and what the c
hefs themselves say. You’ll hear a lot of talk about how chefs were inspired by the flavors that they encountered in a certain village that they visited, and how they wanted to apply certain fine-dining techniques or sourcing principles in order to create their own version.

  This being Alice Waters country, what you’ll hear about more than anything is a restaurant’s farm-to-table credentials: its use of local and sustainable ingredients, i.e., the amazing pasture-raised pork that the mom-and-pop takeout joint around the corner most certainly isn’t using, or the locally sourced cabbage that’s going to add a whole new dimension to a fancified Burmese tea leaf salad.

  There is, of course, nothing wrong with any of this on its face. It’s great to support local farmers who are doing things the right way. And no one expects a restaurateur to say, “We’re serving a slightly less awesome version of this dish that we just learned how to make, but we’re going to charge 30 percent more. Cool?”

  But, as Taiwanese-American chef Eddie Huang pointed out in an interview with the Express this past June, a lot of times this business about a chef putting his or her own creative twist on a dish—or, in this case, using “higher-quality ingredients”—is code: “This is a better, safer version of this immigrant food.”