The Ethnic Restaurateur

Krishnendu Ray

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857858375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Academic discussions of ethnic food have tended to focus on the attitudes of consumers, rather than the creators and producers. In this ground-breaking new book, Krishnendu Ray reverses this trend by exploring the culinary world from the perspective of the ethnic restaurateur. Focusing on New York City, he examines the lived experience, work, memories, and aspirations of immigrants working in the food industry. He shows how migrants become established in new places, creating a taste of home and playing a key role in influencing food cultures as a result of transactions between producers, consumers and commentators. Based on extensive interviews with immigrant restaurateurs and students, chefs and alumni at the Culinary Institute of America, ethnographic observation at immigrant eateries and haute institutional kitchens as well as historical sources such as the US census, newspaper coverage of restaurants, reviews, menus, recipes, and guidebooks, Ray reveals changing tastes in a major American city between the late 19th and through the 20th century. Written by one of the most outstanding scholars in the field, The Ethnic Restaurateur is an essential read for students and academics in food studies, culinary arts, sociology, urban studies and indeed anyone interested in popular culture and cooking in the United States.

1

Taste, Toil, and Ethnicity

Although immigrants have a long and substantial presence in the United States food system, they appear to have left little trace on American conceptualizations of good taste. This book inserts immigrant bodies and conceptions into American discussions of taste and in doing so jeopardizes the consensus about aesthetics in popular and scholarly domains. An immigrant who enters the American national space, especially a visibly different immigrant, has been turned into an ethnic in the last half-century. An ethnic is a proximate but subordinate other, too close to be foreign, too different to be the self. According to the twentieth-century sensory regime of Americanism, an ethnic looks different, sounds different, and prefers different food. Among subcultural and avant garde groups, the term and the people so categorized are sometimes presumed to carry the promise of cultural authenticity. This book narrates that story about subordination and power in the domain of palatal taste that challenges standard theories of aesthetic taste and culture-making in an American city. The central paradox I address is that, although the foreign-born have numerically dominated the feeding occupations, such as greengrocer, baker, butcher, saloon-keeper, tavern-keeper, and restaurateur, especially in the large bi-coastal cities in the United States since the 1850s, we know relatively little about how the transaction in taste appears from their point of view. In contrast, there is a rich literature on the perspective of the native-born consumer, which, in this book, is held at the margin as a mirror to the migrant self.

This blindness about the ethnic provider can be attributed to a number of technical and conceptual reasons. Low prestige of care-work, the unheroic labor of micro entrepreneurship, the inability to articulate in language the taste of the tongue, the limited language skills of scholars working with the American material (especially in the languages of recent migrants), the over-worked migrant without the time to write, and the illiteracy of many immigrants, have compounded our access to that perspective. One example that brings together a number of these reasons should suffice here: although the Chinese have dominated the feeding and cleaning occupations from the middle of the nineteenth century, we do not get a book-length treatment of their perspective in establishing and running the quintessential American ethnic restaurant until the twenty-first century (Lee 2009; Cho 2010). That is an extraordinary deferral. The reason is both the theoretical problem with cooked food in the modern Western imagination, especially within academic scholarship, and the subordination of the cooking subject. Little else can explain such a notable and durable silence.

Food, long considered trivial, now condemned as fashionable in popular culture, has compounded its entry into the academy. Various reasons have been accorded for the absence of food in classrooms, libraries, and museums. Among them is the inordinate attention to mind and thinking in the liberal arts, over the body and other modes of doing things. As modern subjects we are trained to be pleased with our minds and surprisingly blind to our bodies, other than as an object of shallow concerns of vanity. There are a few exceptions. The primitive’s body and the diseased body have been allowed entry into the academy for over a century, but only as ontologically inferior things in anthropology and the health sciences. Such a containment of the body is crucial to Enlightenment dualisms.

Yet normative disembodiment is not only limited to the sphere of the West. Strands of Brahmanism—which is one of the points of my departure, as I show in the preface—also make a crucial argument against the abject materiality of the body, especially the socially inferior’s body and its lack of liaison with the divine. Perhaps that is because food and the body have long been considered the concerns and cares of the inferior, that is women, servants, slaves, and subject races and castes. Superior men have theorized away the body and its needs, especially for food and for sex (the latter was recovered in the twentieth century West by Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis), out of the domain of serious deliberation in the academy.

That concordat is disintegrating all around us, in particular in the Western academy, precisely because that is where it ruled the roost, as the importance of the mind and reason are dialed down, and subordinate classes containing women, inferior races, lower castes, and ethnic men have entered the academy and begun to violate its ontological assumptions of superior bodies and high-mindedness. They have reminded us of the necessity of bodies and the love of thinking, a fondness for doing as well as intellection, and the allure of doing and talking about it. New materialisms have refocused our attention on objects, especially the material and affective connections between objects and humans, and the resulting possibility of a paradoxical counterpoint, which is a deep-seated environmentalism. As a result, attention to our relationship to food, as with our relationship to other living and dead bodies, has become unavoidable. Yet we just didn’t think our way out of it. It took practice and pragmatism to exit the closed world of the self-assured and superior mind.

Scholarly work such as Marcy Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures (2008) has successfully recovered the inadvertent adaptation of Mesoamerican aesthetics in European taste for chocolate and tobacco, transported from the outer reaches of the empire, against the weight of the colonial ideology that good taste only flowed from the direction of the conqueror. In Norton’s case, the Spanish taste for chocolate, instead of bolstering established hierarchies of race, class, and roots, spotlighted the internal contradictions of the imperial project and “affected, rather than reflected, discourse” (2008: 691). This book is an analogous inversion of established norms, in which an alternative aesthetics is recovered from the interior of cities, deep at home, rather than from abroad, brought by relatively less powerful people from elsewhere. Surprisingly, in answering her question “When and how do societies assimilate foreign things?” Norton completely misses the role of immigrants and the whole body of literature on it, while acknowledging the historiography of colonialism, consumerism, and food (2008: 661).

These are some of the contexts and conditions that have made possible this project of paying attention to literal taste in talking about aesthetic taste while violating principles of eighteenth-century Western philosophy. They allow us to attend to migrant materialities, which is a result of the cultural democratization wrought by the Civil Rights Movement. That is what connects taste, toil, and ethnicity in this book. The inferior talk back here, and force us to see American cities from the perspective of migrant bodies. The virtue of that is not only a newer, fresher view but also the way it challenges us to transform establishment-style theorizing and sociologizing, by interjecting subordinate practices and theories of the world we live in, forcing us to experience life outside theory qua theory.

The ethnic

Ashis Nandy, the venerable post-colonial theorist, writes bombastically:

[E]thnic cuisine becomes more and more like a museum or a stage on which culture writes its name … for the sake of appeasing our moral conscience and declaring its survival. The Los Angeles Museum of Holocaust displays some artifacts of Jewish culture, thoughtfully collected by the Nazis for the projected museum on an extinct race after the Final Solution. Those were not the days of ethnic cuisine. Otherwise the Nazis would have surely added a wing to their museum where one could include a well-appointed restaurant serving traditional Jewish fare from all over Europe (2003: 251).

Nandy’s posture is a provocation, crafted to elicit a retort rather than a considered discussion. Let me first concede some legitimacy to Nandy’s ill-tempered diatribe. At one level Nandy’s irritability with the collective category of the “ethnic” as a flattening and meaningless pen to hold all non-White, non-Anglophone others is understandable. Nandy was partly reacting to the disrepute that had attached to the term “ethnic” after the break-up of Yugoslavia and mass murder in Rwanda, when it came to be associated with “cleansing.” In other post-colonial locations, such as India, the term is polluted with the stench of pogroms in the name of illegitimate group claims against the nation-state (see Calhoun 2007).

In the US the term ethnicity has other lineages. It came into play almost simultaneously in the fields of American journalism and social sciences in the late 1950s in what appeared then to be a relatively neutral way of constructing difference (Glazer and Moynihan 1975; Sollors 1997; Guibernau and Rex 1999). “Ethnic food” led this trend in the emerging sub-field of food journalism (as I will show below). Subsequently, theorists of representation—especially Stuart Hall in his 1989 essay “New Ethnicities”—challenged us to re-read the poetics and politics of the term (Hall 1989). By the late 1980s and the early 1990s ethnicity was seen as a benign claim of cultural coherence by any group, previously excluded from the centers of power, now staked below the level of the nation-state. Ethnicity became the dominant mode of framing difference without falling into the problem of race. Among theoretical sophisticates “the ethnic,” within scare quotes, is an unutterable referent to color and inferiority, which is mostly covered over in pragmatic silence. In this book I interrogate that precise intersection of dominance and agency to narrate a story of urban culture-making. The time has come to abandon the term for current use, but it remains quite useful in weaving the history of the relationship between the presumed normative non-ethnic center and its radiating, multiple, ethnic others, which belongs as much to the realm of fantasy as to fact. The term itself is one of the signs of unequal relationship between the self-proclaimed normative center of the Euro-American imagination, its dominating institutions, and numerous categories of others such as the foreigner, the tourist, the exile, the stranger, the immigrant, etc., in a rich semiotic universe of slippery, relational selfhoods and Otherness.

What Nandy proposes dramatically in the quotation above is also suggested by bell hooks. She posits that the totalizing perspective of “eating the other” is a posture “from the standpoint of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” where “the hope is that desires for the ‘primitive’ or fantasies about the Other can be continually exploited, and that such exploitation will occur in a manner that reinscribes and maintains the status quo” (hooks 1992: 22; also see Hage 1997). Although most of her essay “Eating the Other” is written in the outraged mode of a critic who cannot find any hope in the commodification of the culture of racial and ethnic others, especially their desires and their bodies, hooks provides two instances of alternative ways of reading such an encounter. She concedes that the “desire for contact with the Other, for connection rooted in the longing for pleasure, can act as a critical intervention challenging and subverting racist domination, inviting and enabling critical resistance,” but it remains “an unrealized political possibility” (1992: 22). She cites Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen’s critique of consumption in Channels of Desire as politically limiting where “communities of resistance are replaced by communities of consumption” (1992: 33). She recommends engaging with the particular form of desire for the Other as the place to begin the interrogation of what exactly is going on. She identifies John Waters’s Hairspray and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover as exemplary instances where desire across the color-line is deployed not merely to conquer and reassert white domination, but to recognize the “particular pleasures and sorrows black folks experience,” which refreshingly “does not lead to cultural appropriation but to an appreciation that extends into the realm of the political” (1992: 37). She concludes, “Acknowledging ways the desire for pleasure, and that includes erotic longings, informs our politics, our understanding of difference, we may know better how desire disrupts, subverts, and makes resistance possible. We cannot, however, accept these new images uncritically” (1992: 39). One can live with this assertion a little better than Nandy’s exaggerated opening claim, yet there are a number of problems here too.

For one, hooks connects food and sex too closely. They are both forms of literal incorporation, but they are different. It is true that eating together often leads to sleeping together, which is why race and caste purists have always panicked about cross-category commensality, even fleetingly at water fountains or more elaborately at lunch counters and restaurants. Yet, the table is different from the bed. “The table is a social machinery as complicated as it is effective: it makes one talk, one ‘lays everything on the table’ to confess what one wanted to keep quiet, one gets ‘grilled’ by a skillful neighbor, one yields to a momentary excitement, to a fit of vanity, to the velvet smoothness of a red wine, and one hears oneself tell all about what one had sworn the day before to hide from everyone” (de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998: 197). Michel de Certeau and Lucy Giard, who are attuned to the specificity of place and space, slow down our move from the table to the bed. Eating together allows one to hold the other at some distance with the table in between, so the relationship can be subject to mutual discussion and negotiation. Eating allows intimacy but not too much of it, which is why we can afford to feed every guest, while it is hardly advisable to sleep with them. That ratio of intimacy and estrangement is an important distinction to be made between the pleasures (and hence the problems) of the table and the bed. hooks’ analysis moves too quickly and too easily from food to sex and back again, and I think her argument holds more for eating the other, than eating with the other.

The problem is that both Nandy’s and hooks’ critiques, although targeting the colonizing white view, nevertheless appropriate that imperial viewpoint in surveying colored bodies and ethnic foods. Neither of them asks any of the ethnics (or relevant others under discussion) what they think of all this. That is partly a function of academic discipline. It seems one can say a lot in philosophy and in cultural studies without asking anyone else what they think about the matter under full speculative elaboration. Thus Nandy and hooks appear as perverse inversions of Gustav Flaubert’s classic Orientalist appropriation of Kuchuk Hanem, the Egyptian courtesan salvaged by Edward Said, who never spoke of herself, never “represented her emotions, presence, or history.” Instead Flaubert “spoke for and represented her” (Said 1979: 6). Thus, in this book I am insistent that the ethnic talk back and tell us what they think.

It would be inaccurate to lay the charge of Orientalism at the door of the philosopher who has written the book on this matter titled Exotic Appetites (Heldke 2003). Born of the methodological discipline of philosophy, Heldke cannot ask the migrant purveyor of food what he makes of his experience, without fracturing the bounds of her discipline. She begins with a trenchant critique of her own “easy acquisitiveness” towards ethnic food, which she eventually comes to see as culinary colonialism, which in turn is the window through which she comes to recognize the disturbing attitudes of “contemporary Euroamerican food adventurers” with their “obsessive interest in and appetite for the new, the obscure and the exotic,” their grasping of ethnic food to serve their own interests, linked together by “the adventurer’s intense desire for authentic experiences of authentic cultures” (2003: 7). But Heldke confines herself to a theoretical critique of the acquisitive attitude because, in her words, “Philosophers’ methods are not those of ethnographers, for example, who may at times find themselves scandalized by philosophers’ tendency toward abstract generalization, our tendency to see the development of a point as necessitating more theory rather than more examination of concrete circumstance” (2003: xxv). Uma Narayan gently chides Heldke, which also happens to be my position:

I am not unsympathetic to [the] critique of “culinary imperialism” or to Heldke’s critique of “food colonialism.” However, I hope to complicate this discussion of “food colonialism” by thinking about ethnic foods from the point of view of immigrants to Western contexts, rather than from that of mainstream Western citizens. While eating “ethnic foods” in restaurants might result only in shallow, commodified, and consumer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: As the Grains You Eat, So Will Be the Mind
• 1 Taste, Toil, and Ethnicity
• 2 Dreams of Pakistani Grill and Vada Pao in Manhattan: Immigrant Restaurateurs in a Global City
• 3 Hierarchy of Taste and Ethnic Difference: American Gustatory Imagination in a Globalizing World
• 4 Extending Expertise: Men in White at the Culinary Institute of America
• 5 Ethnicity and Expertise: Immigrant Cooks with Haute Aspirations
• 6 In Closing
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright