Here's a Philadelphia Inquirer piece I wrote a few years ago about chefs who specialize in cuisines that are not their own, featuring Tyler and Nicole of Stock. It felt appropriate to share given the controversy over a recent Bon Appétit Magazine video about pho that many have perceived as culturally insensitive.
Since I am an Asian-American who writes about food for a living, I feel comfortable sharing my opinion about this sensitive topic. In black and white: There is no ma...ndate stating you must be a certain race, color or ethnicity to cook a certain type of food. As long as chefs are passionate and sincere about what they do and respectful of the traditions informing the food they cook, I fully support them. The food's gotta be good, of course. And the food is excellent at Stock. The backlash this small business is receiving — nasty comments, inflammatory headlines, deliberately shitty Yelp reviews, mostly written by people who have never eaten there — is undeserved.
That being said, the optics of this thing are bad, and I think Bon Appétit is to blame for that. Taking Tyler's personal opinions on how to eat pho and presenting them in such a way that it appears he's whitesplaining the only "right" way to eat pho to Asian people was pretty damn tone-deaf, and unfair to both him and the audience. BA's need for slickly packaged content seems to have taken precedence over a more measured but less sexy approach — an individualized feature on how one guy prepares a beloved dish that's been interpreted in countless ways by countless chefs around the world.
I completely understand how someone of Vietnamese heritage could watch the clip cold and be rubbed the wrong way. But all these lusty accusations of "Columbus-ing," fired off so haphazardly on the Internet, are misplaced. Culinary appropriation is real, but it's not something of which the owners of Stock are guilty. They love what they do and it shows in the food, and that's what really matters. 🍜
