Home and Away: when a male chef longs for Thanksgiving

I was engrossed in an episode of Ugly Delicious, an eight-part Netflix series produced by, and starring Momofuku founder David Chang when the news of Anthony Bourdain’s death by suicide appeared on my phone. Not only were my plans to critique the maverick persona of male celebrity chefs for an upcoming conference paper thrown askew, but I also felt sad for so many food explorers and writers, of any gender. This sadness wasn’t a mere homage to Bourdain’s culinary career; it came from a place of studying food media and the performance of masculine adventure for several years, and realising that the lettuce always seemed crisper on the more mobile plate.

What I mean is that as a woman, I long to explore cities and cultures with the same lack of reservation as the likes of Bourdain, Chang, and Rick Stein. Perhaps I also want to aid the decentring of whiteness in multicultural scholarship (and in food and travel writing) in the process. Yet, re-watching Chang’s episode on ‘Home Cooking’ for the purposes of my paper was an exercise in exploratory ambivalence. His chosen narrative is one of dissociating himself from Korean food at the beginning of his career, going on to bend all the rules through a globe-spanning noodle bar, and then declaring towards middle age that he wanted simpler, more home-style food in his restaurants. This could be read as an over-romanticisation of roots, and as essentialising the feminine (he declares at one point that his grandmother and mother only knew to express their love through food).  Moreover, research on chefs of colour seems to indicate that they are more likely to use tropes of family and ethnicity in their business and self-presentation. Chang, however, treads a fine balance between home and away in this series as a whole by being equally comfortable cooking shrimp toast in his mother’s kitchen before Thanksgiving dinner, and tasting tortellini in a Michelin-star restaurant in Modena, Italy.

Also notable about this series is its exposition of male sociality around food. There is no death of the meat and building a barbecue in the backyard narrative, as well as forays to exotic places to sample strange creatures. However, what is distinctive is that the friendship between Chang and food critic Peter Meehan also has a cozy domestic dimension. Meehan joins him for the preparation of the above-mentioned Thanksgiving meal, and Chang declares that he is practically family. While it is common to see men cooking alongside each other in food television (such as in the Australian-based Surfing the Menu, which I examined in my book), this is rarely done in a home space. Let's hope this is the beginning many different kinds of culinary convivialities which are less invested in gendered performativity, both on and off the screen.

Will this series also encourage other male chefs, white or not, to make more than a passing reference to their nonnas? Will they be happily seen in their home kitchen teaching their daughters as well as their sons how to fold a dumpling? Will they valorise aspects of the culinary past, but also see the unfair division or domestic labour that was unwelcome for many women? Will they value the emotional labour of their partners who come to terms with their long working hours and prolonged absences? Will they recognise that wanting to be more grounded at times doesn’t make them less of a man, and might even be good for their well-being?

And for the women who want to cook, explore, and write about food, perhaps we need not emulate the model of relentless road tripping. We could also acknowledge the recipes and rituals passed down to use from our mostly female relatives, but help redefine foodwork as everyone’s work, and leisure. Media personalities like Nigella Lawson have done some pioneering re-jigging of cooking as self-pleasure in this regard. However, we have a while to go before this becomes a widespread domestic reality, especially for women who are not born with middle class capital.

From Student Laksa to Pho with Free-range Chicken

A few days ago, I cooked laksa for some friends at my new apartment in Marrickville, in Sydney’s inner west. This was the 8th time I had moved house since arriving in Australia as an international student in 2003. For reasons both economic and emotional, it was probably also the most worry-free of all my previous changes of residence. I recall the more troublesome of these as being uprootings that took a while to turn into everyday rituals around a home and a neigbourhood.

The first time I tasted laska at a stall in Chinatown in Adelaide, I was hooked. As someone of Indian heritage who could not digest chili, this was a soup that packed a range of tangy and deep flavours without the need to up the ante on heat. My forays into the foods of south-east Asia at the time had less to do with trying to be a cosmopolitan foodie, and were more about the migration history of inner city Adelaide, the composition of its international student body in the early 2000s, and my enrolment in courses where I socialised with ‘internationals’ from ethnicities other than my own.

I recall saving money from my causal hospitality jobs to go out for lunch with my friend Kasumi about once a week, right after our comparative politics class. We would pass notes to decide where we were going to eat, and what. I looked forward to these outings, which later became a more regular phenomenon as life became easier. If it wasn’t a catch up with a friend at Penang Hawker’s Corner in Renaissance Arcade just before I took my next tutorial as a PhD student, it would be a pit stop at K-Noodle on Pulteney Street so I could write in my office until sundown. These foodscapes of Asian food in Adelaide became so familiar and nourishing as to entirely replace my original diasporic craving for Indian roti. But I still wasn’t doing the adventurous cosmopolitan thing. Perhaps I wasn’t in the correct tax bracket to be a connoisseur of the world.

Researching these affective food geographies now, as a more sure-footed scholar, I realise that laksa is an inherently hybrid Pernakan (or amalgamation of Chinese and Malay elements) dish. In its Adelaide context, it is also the perfect food metaphor for migrant journeying that occurs outside of the traditional paradigms of ‘host’ and ‘home’ nation. As Adelaide-based cultural studies academic Jean Duruz writes, ‘While I am not an “authentic” member of the Singaporean/Malaysian community in Adelaide, this dish is, though differently, “embedded” here in my own culinary history. “Do you remember your first taste of laksa?”, Adelaide people ritually ask’ (2011: 62).

In Sydney though, I think the question might be, “Do you remember your first taste of pho?”, with most pronouncing the name of this ubiquitous Vietnamese broth phonetically. So while I cook laksa for my friends at home, I realise that I tend to gravitate towards pho when eating out in Marrickville. This is largely because it once had a large Vietnamese migrant community, and now has both hole-in-wall places as well as fancier establishments selling somewhat traditional pho (including, as I discovered recently with a friend, pho with free-range chicken).

It is perhaps this newly-acquired enchantment with Vietnamese flavours, and coffee that led me to plan one of the few non-work, non-family trips of my adult life. While on a city tour of Ho Chi Minh City that took us to an air-conditioned establishment selling pho, with fresh basil and bean sprouts on the side to boot, I was surprised to discover that my fellow Australian tour mates from Canberra had never tried it before. I was reminded of a young Anglo-Australian friend in Adelaide who was similarly well-travelled, but not acquainted with the Adelaidean love affair with laksa.

On a street food tour in Hanoi, Vietnam

While I am thus tempted to jump to a conclusion about white, middle class travellers who are culinary adventurers looking for difference, I will refrain from doing so. Referring to seminal work on culinary tourism by Lucy M Long and Lisa Heldke, Molz comes to the conclusion that those of non-white backgrounds can also engage in practices of culinary tourism, both in their cities of residence, and overseas. However, she also cautions us to consider food practices within a ‘power-geometry’, and ask the following questions: ‘Whose foods and foodways are able to travel and under what conditions? Whose food encounters count as cosmopolitan, and whose culinary practices are denied such status?’ (2007: 82).

So, how can those of us with one or another kind of privilege be engaged in culinary practices that acknowledge similarities and differences, are mobilized locally as well as globally, and stretch to allow cultural openness? The answer may lie in opening conversations with those serving us pho, as well as those eating laksa on a budget.