Gordon Ramsay’s newest restaurant, Lucky Cat, will open in London this summer, but the social justice crowd is already giving it terrible reviews. Ramsay announced that that Lucky Cat will be an “authentic Asian Eating House” that is “inspired by the drinking dens of 1930s Tokyo and the Far East,” with Chef Ben Orpwood at the helm.
Critics say that Lucky Cat cannot possibly be an “authentic” Asian restaurant, even though Orpwood is a renowned chef best known for his pan-Asian seafood dishes.
Orpwood and Ramsay are both white and British, and therein lies the controversy. Can authentic Asian food be made by someone other than an authentic Asian? Of course it can.
Ramsay is not Asian. But nor is he Italian, and no one seemed to doubt the authenticity of Murano, an Italian restaurant in London in which Ramsay is a former partner — Murano’s first head chef, Diego Cardoso, hails from Argentina. His former Dubai restaurant, Verre, had a French-Italian menu and a British chef.
What makes a meal authentic is the chef’s methods, not the chef’s ethnicity.
Many of the world’s superstar chefs are so remarkable in part because they have perfected cuisines other than their native ones. Spanish-American chef Jose Andres has a fiercely popular Eastern Mediterranean restaurant, Zaytinya. The late Anthony Bourdain, a New Yorker, made his name in French food at Brasserie Las Halles. David Chang, the Korean-American chef behind Momofuku, has Jamaican chef Paul Carmichael running his restaurant in Sydney.
Critics also took issue with the use of “Asian food” to describe the cuisine, because Asia is home to a variety of food traditions.
I dig his shows but it‘s impossible to have an “authentic Asian restaurant” because Asia is a *continent*, not a cuisine. It’s like if he said he was opening an “authentic European restaurant.” He’d get laughed out of town and I hope this does too.https://t.co/9Zot0XD5oJ
— Jeff Yang (@originalspin) February 7, 2019
Ramsay does have a restaurant, Petrus, that bills itself as “modern European cuisine.” The restaurant wasn’t laughed out of town; it was awarded a Michelin star.
Great food is made with the freedom to innovate with flavor combinations, techniques, and ingredients. Great businesses are only made in free societies. So, it is only right that the restaurant industry, at the intersection of food and business, should be a creative free-for-all.
Angela Morabito (@AngelaLMorabito) writes about politics, media, ethics, and culture. She holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Georgetown University.
