Where’s “around here”. I know the owner of 11 Chinese restaurants. Not a single one of his 40+ kitchen employees is Asian. Not many Mexicans though. More Salvadoran, Nicaraguan and Honduran these days.
I would definitely argue that the term has no meaning–or whatever meaning it has is largely in the realm of tourism, and is self-defeating.
There’s good food, there’s bad food, but the only way food is inauthentic is if it’s literally made of plastic.
Some innovation and creativity seem necessary to distinguish one in the culinary world. A great chef would instinctively know what can be put together, without slavishly following any particular recipe rigorously.
Bad food is… bad; inauthentic is not sharply defined, especially in a cuisine which includes varied traditions and techniques and also blends them, but I can imagine an extreme case where a “random” Mexican might not recognize a given dish at all.
From what I’ve read, haggis tacos have recently become a thing in Scotland. I imagine that it has exactly as much right to call itself “authentic Mexican food” as does al pastor, Caesar salad, and Hawaiian torta.
From an actual Yelp review of a Mexican restaurant:
“On the outside, it looks likes a normal gas station. However on the inside, it’s actually the best authentic family owned Mexican resturant in Bismarck. On top of selling everything a normal gas station would, they also (sic) a lot of spices and have tables/chairs set up for dining.”
Wonder if they also sell authentic leaded gasoline.
Finding good “authentic” places to eat in gas stations I’ve found is not that strange. One of Kansas City’s best barbecue joints (Joe’s or Oklahoma Joe’s, or whatever it’s called now) is attached to a gas station, for example. Finding a restaurant in a gas station or strip mall or other low-rent places is actually a sure way to get me to poke my head in.
Yeah, “authentic” is a weird word and I’ve gotten to mostly stop using it. I might say something like “traditional” or say "it’s similar to what I grew up with and had in insert country/region of origin here. And that I use with food that I am somewhat intimately connected with, like Polish food, Hungarian food, and local Chicago food. I almost never will say something is “inauthentic,” just more like “I’m not familiar with this style of paprikash, but it’s country food and every village might have a different recipe” even if I pretty much know damn well nobody in Hungary eats paprikash that looks like that. Or “it’s not traditional to put ketchup on a Chicago style hot dog, but in these progressive and permissive times, some Chicagoans do it without abandon.” 
Better safe than sorry.
Authenticity means different things to different people, and so is sometimes a meaningless term. There are several regions within Mexico with distinct food, foods common to all of them, and variations found in Texas and other States and countries.
But real Mexican food might use Mexican cheese. Most of these are mild, many are excellent; fresh cheeses are much more common there than other places I have been.
Yeah, the problem is most of the time when I hear the word “authentic,” it’s used by someone who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about. Examples would be people claiming that only lamb gyros are authentic – uh, in Greece itself, pork is probably the most common gyros meat. Or somebody complaining about a quesadilla when it comes as a folded over corn tortilla with cheese (and perhaps other fillings) in it. (Plenty of places in my neighborhood do that.) That is what a quesadilla is, or at least one type of widely available one in Mexico. Or people bitching about something not being a “Chicago hot dog” because it doesn’t have a poppy seed bun and neon green relish and all that shit. This even comes from Chicagoans. Dude, there are more than one kind of Chicago dog. They’ve finally figured this out in the decade or so and gave another name to the minimalist type: the Depression dog. (Plain bun, hot dog, onions, relish, mustard.)
And then there’s dishes that have mutated: the vindaloo in Goa (traditionally made of pork per the Portuguese influence) is not the vindaloo you’ll get in the UK or elsewhere. If you’re eating Japanese curry and complaining it doesn’t taste like Indian or Southeast Asian curries, you’ve missed the point. There’s no point in chasing authenticity there, enjoy the dish for what it is and what the local culture’s interpretatoin of it is. Japanese curry is interesting because it’s a Japanese take on the British take on Indian cuisine. Is it authentic? Not if India is the benchmark. Not if the UK is the benchmark. But it is its own thing and perfectly at-home with new-ish local cuisine. (And I think it’s lovely, especially as katsu curry, and there we go again, with katsu being a take on European fried meat cutlets.)
I may not know ‘authentic’, but the worst Mexican food I’ve ever had was in deep Texas. The best? Topeka, Kansas.
I spent years working on Ansul fire suppression systems in restaurant kitchens. At least here in Omaha, I would estimate 80-90 percent of Chinese restaurant kitchen workers were Hispanic.
Like the article’s author, I grew up about 150 miles from the border and had some of the some of the same experiences. My tias made tamales the same way for Christmas, and my abuela made tortillas the same way the article’s author did, although we only used butter, not honey. When it came to the Dallas Cowboys games, however, my family tradition involved my father grilling fajitas on a charcoal grill and my mother making arroz and frijoles as well as guacamole. No Velveeta or any other kind of cheese dip was involved. I consider all those foods authentic Tex-Mex food.
As far as restaurants go, I divide the ones here in south Texas up into three groups. There’s the authentic Tex-Mex restaurants, which are typically named things like Taquereia Jalisco, El Jaliscience, and Taqueria Guadalajara. I’ve never been to Jalisco, and I have no idea if the cuisine there is similar, but that’s what they’re usually named. At these places you can expect to find tacos made with flour tortillas, fajitas, nachos, enchiladas, burritos, carne guisada, and menudo for breakfast. The beans are pinto beans. They all serve corn chips with salsa. Then there’s places that serve actual Mexican food like molé, black beans instead of refried beans, queso fresco instead of cheddar, and so on. These are also presumably authentic, just not authentic Tex-Mex. Then there’s places like Taco Bell, which are the places that I consider inauthentic Tex-Mex.
Right now, I’m reading a book called Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food, which I’m sure will talk about authenticity. It certainly talks about how while Mexican food (or more specifically Tex-Mex) has been a global business worth hundreds of millions of dollars, very little of which goes to Mexicans.
“Authentic” is a loaded term which I wouldn’t really use too often. However, while you might call deep-fried haggis and mushy peas with brown sauce served on a folded up roti a taco of sorts and I won’t be out of sorts unless to try to sell it to me as Mexican food.
If I was to use authentic as regard to a restaurant dish, I would say a) a native of the region would say something like “This is just like back home” and b) it doesn’t do shortcuts or substitutions as far as ingredients and traditional preparations (i.e. no store-bought salsa, guacamole or tortillas).
I’ve never heard of anyone complaining about Japanese curry or Katsu as being inauthentic. They’ve both been around for about a century. Same with German currywurtz. Tacos al pastor are one of the most recognized taco forms, but the idea was brought to Mexico by Lebanese and Syrian immigrants. No one would actually say al pastor are inauthentic tacos.
I have on the Japanese curry (and UK/British Indian Restaurant curry) more than once. I haven’t on katsu or al pastor (and I wasn’t trying to imply I have on the katsu. The al pastor I’m assuming is a reference to someone else as I never made that claim.) You do have to realize that Japanese curry is not particularly well known here in the US compared with other types of curry. Similarly, I have heard people bitch about say, the, bolognese, bechamel and spinach lasagna type of lasagna as not being “authentic” because it didn’t have the ricotta and various other ingredients the more southern-Italian influenced styles of Italian-American lasagna have.
The problem with the OP definition of authentic is that it is designed to be elitist. I get to decide what is authentic. If I say I am Canadian, so any food I cook - in any fashion - is Canadian… the goal is to make me the final arbiter of Canuckery regardless of the product or my cooking skills. That’s bullshyte.
I don’t think real Mexican food is made with cheese spread. You might disagree. Perhaps we can agree instead that good Mexican food uses one of the many delicious regional cheeses.
This made my laugh because one of the best (Americanized) Chinese food places in my area is in a gas station. It’s not like they had much competition but the food is actually great.
It reminds me whenever BuzzFeed or some other dumb site does a REAL MEXICANS TRY TACO BELL AND RATE ITS AUTHENTICITY and whoever they get for those videos seem to get genuinely angry at the idea of hard shell tacos. It has to all be an act.
I dunno. Sure, only the more emotive types will get put out and hand-selected for Youtube, but there are people – and not foodie snobs – who get passionate about this kind of stuff. I remember early in my days in Budapest making a pot of what I was thought chicken paprikash – I think it was from a Better Homes and Gardens or something similar cookbook – and a Hungarian friend/classmate of mine came over after class and was positively aghast at what this cookbook was telling me. She wasn’t so much angry as confused and horrified by the boneless, skinless chicken chunks and the assortment of vegetables in it. She was no food snob, but very much protective and proud of her culture. She would have done fine in one of those types of videos. People can get very emotional about their food and culture.
Sure, but they’re following a recipe that’s likely from a Chinese person. Just because I cook something, it doesn’t make it Mexican food, any more than if a Mexican guy cooks a chicken fried steak, it becomes Mexican food. You can’t look at the line cooks in a restaurant and draw any sort of conclusions about the authenticity of the food. In fact, a half tongue-in-cheek maxim I’ve heard is that as a restaurant owner you want your cooks to be a different ethnicity than the food, because they’re less likely to freestyle of their own accord because they “know how to cook it”.
The point I was trying to make is that if it’s part of the culinary tradition of a Mexican family, it’s Mexican food, and used the shorthand of “if your Abuela makes it” to mean that it was part of that tradition since she presumably is drawing on that tradition to make it.
And at any rate, the article was basically the same old “What we have in the US sucks because it’s bastardized versions of the countries it originally came from” argument. Which is absolute bullshit in the general case, and especially so in the specific case of Mexican food/Tex-Mex. It’s not the same as what they eat in Guadalajara, but neither is what they eat in Monterrey. And neither is like what they eat in Veracruz. And California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas were all part of Mexico longer than they’ve been part of the US and a set of distinct separate Mexican cuisines grew up there.
Like I was saying upthread, although maybe not so articulately, chili (con carne) is a perfect example. People probably think it’s some sort of American abomination modeled on Mexican food. Well, it’s not. It’s actually a dish developed over centuries in San Antonio based on stews that the original Canary Island settlers brought with them, and that were eaten by the Mexican community in San Antonio until the very end of the 19th century, at which point Anglos started eating it too, and it ended up becoming a foundational dish for Tex-Mex. But its genesis and development were wholly Mexican, even if said Mexicans happened to have US citizenship.
Same thing I suspect with something like NY style pizza and many other -American dishes.