East Meets West Cuisine

[SteveW]

Ed, any opinions on East Meets West Cuisine? Chefs Ming Tsai in Boston, & Susur Lee in Toronto are the current best known practitioners, in this cuisine. Any comments about their food? As you know, your good friend Ken Hom is credited with creating this fusion cooking.

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Steve

[eatingwitheddie]

Ed, any opinions on East Meets West Cuisine? Chefs Ming Tsai in Boston, & Susur Lee in Toronto are the current best known practitioners, in this cuisine. Any comments about their food? As you know, your good friend Ken Hom is credited with creating this fusion cooking.

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Steve

I have heard great things about Susur Lee's food and little about Ming's. Personally I have tried neither. I'd like to.

As for fusion food, I like it when it is good and not when it isn't. More often than not, I find it silly. My prototypical negative reaction comes when I encounter a Peking Duck variation served with pancakes that don't function for wrapping up the duck, but just kind of sit there waiting for the diner to figure out what they're about. This is annoying. I recently facetiously suggested to a chef friend that he had forgotten the maple syrup!

Take me to Susanah Foo's in Philadelphia and I'd be quite excited.

By the way it's nice to attribute this trend to Ken Hom, but in fact, fusion cooking was a part of the scene in HK for many years before the current trend.

By the way, I have a way of thinking about fusion food that you may find interesting. I tend to put it into two categories. The first is a chef who essentially cooks with western methods, using reductions, wine, saute pans, butter etc. and introduces Asian ingredients into his recipes. I have found Wolfgang's Chinoise on Main to be this kind of restauarant. The second category is the one where the food is prepared in a more typical Asian way, in woks, with vegetable oil, etc., but adding in some Western ingredients. Of course none of this is black and white, there is considerable crossover, but I find this a helpful and valid way to think about it.

Ed