When it comes to dining out, few words stop me in my tracks quicker than “fusion”.
For every one innovation in cuisine that fusion has served up into a culinary mainstay, there are fifty examples where it’s just misadventure masquerading as ingenuity.
Often I can’t shake that sneaking suspicion that “fusion” is a convenient facade for not being able to truly master any single, established cuisine type. After all, no-one can accuse you of serving inauthentic food when there is no benchmark. It is what it is.
Picture it: the proprietor of a soon–to-open Thai restaurant trialing the dishes of candidate chefs. Each chef fails to hit the mark in some way with key classic dishes. The proprietor just huffs and hires them anyway. He informs his investors (purely coincidentally of course) that he’s decided to to embrace an “Asian fusion” theme for the establishment: classic Thai dishes, but with a twist!
Or, I find that fusion is code for trying too hard to be different and ending up as completely distracting, and not in a good way, like wearing a tuxedo to ten-pin bowling.
Fusing ingredients is one thing, but what about fusing cooking techniques? I can certainly see this being keenly adopted to address home dinner party hiccups. Beef Wellington a little tough to the bite? That’s the new Brit-Italian fusion concept of al dente meat. Over-salted gratin dauphinois? No, no, that’s how it’s meant to be. It’s the classic French recipe with a Te Fiti twist. You know? The island of Te Fiti, where the food is always liberally salted (the islanders have suffered from low blood pressure for generations).
Looking back on my University days, lack of ingredients or time or motivation seemed to be a stumbling block to a decent meal. But I can now give myself due credit for being a Fusion Food Master. I recall that I once ingeniously stumbled upon the pairing of smoked mackerel and sweet corn. It was edible. Therefore, it was a resounding triumph of fusion.
I dare say that if I ever decide to open a fusion dining emporium, Smoked Mackerel with Sweet Corn would be the signature dish. The menu would proclaim it as “a winning combination of antioxidants beta-carotene and lutein, and omega-3 fatty acids”.
I would call the restaurant “SweetSmack” (the fusion shouldn’t be limited to the food, folks) and open it in a newly gentrified part of town. I’d be looking to attract not students but hipsters: people with a sharp eye for novelty and a glaucomic eye for value.
I would have my “fusion” chefs in the kitchen on busy nights, armed with scissors and can openers, furiously cutting open the vacuum-pre-packed mackerel and reaching up at the shelves stacked high with tinned sweet corn……
Fusion is often equated with “modern” and “edgy”. I recently ate with three friends at a “modern” Indian restaurant. It displayed its pretensions to modernity by mandating that pretty much every one of its desserts must be served on a bed of smoking dry ice. Four desserts were wheeled in on a trolley. Instead of a butler’s dome-lidded tray to facilitate the big, smoky reveal, the desserts were hidden away in a wooden bread bin (domestic kitchen storage meets high-end dining – fusion!).
The first smoking dish was greeted with a “oooh, wow”, the second with “mmmm”, the third with “hmmm” and the fourth with something approximating to silence. The chef had clearly not understood the Law of Diminishing Dry Ice.
One of the desserts was “Jalebi Caviar” (for jalebi, think small, deep-fried, pretzel-shaped, soaked in sugar syrup, crispy shell, soft centre, radioactive orange colour). This was a traditional jalebi that had had been finely grated into a plate of tiny balls – hence Jalebi Caviar. I took a spoonful. My friends looked at me: “Does it taste any different?”
I paused to think before replying: “Yes, actually, I think they’ve put something extra in it. What’s that ingredient, begins with a “g”? Ah, yes – gimmick”.