I’ve done stir-fry with bratwurst – is that German/Asian fusion?
Brian
American - a fusion of every cuisine on the planet.
Otherwise my vote goes to the classic mashup of Korean and Mexican. Kimchi on a taco is amazing!
Oh, yeah? Tell me where the nearest Tokelauan restaurant is to me. I know that there is such a thing as Tokelauan food, but I haven’t been able to find a restaurant that serves it yet:
This.* Oh my god, this.
*Korean/Southern Barbecue (BBQ).
As of 2012 there was a restaurant in Phoenix that offered mostly Chinse dishes served in a burrito. Although some of fillings were decidedly non-Chinese, such as Jamaican jerk chicken.
Probably Chino Bandito, if I’m remembering the name correctly.
This place in San Francisco does a similar Korean-Mexican fusion, such as burritos filled with kimchee and bulgogi beef.
The HRD Coffee Shop in San Fransisco is famous for their extremely tasty burritos filled with kimchee, pickled veggies and choice of grilled meats or tofu.
I’m jealous of that. Yum!
Not particularly. An American might well eat tacos one day and spaghetti the next, and call those both “American foods”, but that doesn’t mean that we eat spaghetti tacos.
Besides which, in that sense, every modern industrialized culture has a cuisine which is “a fusion of every cuisine on the planet”.
About ten or twelve years ago, Roy Choi was getting a lot of attention for the Korean taco truck he was operating in Los Angeles.
I fail to see how that negates my point. But you have to admit that being a nation of immigrants has given the United States a big leg up on fusing cuisines. When a Jewish kid from the Bronx marries a Vietnamese girl whose parents got out before the fall and settled in SoCal, the food they serve at home is going to be fusion of the highest order.
As for spaghetti tacos…speak for yourself.
A lot of countries are ethnically diverse:
The question is what you mean by this. Many countries were packed with a variety of ethnic groups before they were formed. Other countries got immigrants from elsewhere after they formed. Do the various groups have to like each other to count? I think Americans have images of many other countries as being more homogenous than those countries really are.
In the episode of Parts Unknown where Bourdain visited Koreatown in Los Angeles, they went to Sizzler (because I guess if your parents cook Korean food every day, going to Sizzler is kind of a treat). The interviewee demonstrated how to make a meatball taco with items from the Sizzler buffet. I would consider that pretty darn close to a spaghetti taco.
Just about everything in Hawaii, exemplified by the bento, which varies from drive-inn to drive-inn, but usually has fried chicken, battered fried fish and teriyaki beef on a bed of rice. The Hawaiian bento grew out of the plantation days when the various immigrant workers would share their food with each other.
Another Hawaii staple is saimin. Japanese style soup with Chinese style noodles, which is typically heavier on eggs and either thicker or thinner than Japanese ramen noodles. Add kamaboko (Japanese fishcake), char siu (sweet Chinese roast pork), won ton which is sometimes closer to Korean mandu and Spam you have a mix of flavors and textures that’s unique to Hawaii!
Probably 90% of what we eat here is fusion because of the large influence of the plantation days and intermixing of cultures.
I had a co-worker who had a very, very limited food palate. I took him to a Korean restaurant and he ordered the only thing he could barely recognize, shoyu chicken which is similar to teriyaki. He liked it and announced that he likes Korean food. I laughed and explained that shoyu chicken (soy sauce, sugar, ginger and/or garlic) isn’t Korean, but Japanese in origin, and the fact that the restaurant served it showed that despite their being known for good (Hawaiian style) Korean food, they were local style, a mix of cultures and tastes.
Yesterday I got lunch from a food truck serving Indian fusion cuisine. I got something they called an “Indian beef taco” (you know it’s fusion cuisine when the “Indian” food contains beef"). It consisted of ground beef seasoned with curry style spices, served on a piece of naan and topped with cucumber, red onion, and cilantro, with a cup of a creamy sauce (not sure what it’s called, it’s the sort of sauce they might serve with samosas) on the side. It was pretty tasty, although I’d say it more closely resembled a gyro than a taco, since naan is more similar to pita than a tortilla, plus the cucumber, onion, and creamy sauce combined to create a flavor pretty reminiscent of tzatziki.
India is the sixth largest consumer of beef by weight in the world. There’s areas like Kerala (Christian) that consume beef and pork, and of course there are Muslim areas that consume beef, as well. Just because it’s Indian doesn’t mean it can’t contain beef, depending on where and who is preparing the food.
And there are also Hindus who eat beef, either because they’re not very observant, or because they interpret their religion’s rules differently than most. Most religions in the world don’t have a hierarchy with a single, universally-recognized authority at the top, and so you often get sects and sub-sects and individual congregations and individual people who disagree on the precise rules.