Why are all the 'good' restaurants starting to look the same?
medium.com
medium.com
At the same time, more and more attention is being paid to preserve authentic food, while elevating it to more haute cuisine levels.
The author claims they're not trying to begrudge locals good food, but basically the entire article reads "I want to travel to places and have TRADITIONAL!!! cuisine, not this fancy bullshit!"
There's never been a better time to be alive for foodies and even food tourists than now.
Which is no more than a few decades old at most, a century at the outside.
People live, people die, and new people do the "same" food differently; people move, new people come, and there's a new influence in both locations.
A static view of tradition is a Victorian invention, a reaction to the increasing pace of industrialization, and nothing more than nostalgia. Mix that with the idiotic notion that the Medieval period was a stagnant "dark age" and you have the modern notion of "traditional" "organic" food which was the same for ever until Evil Modernity Literally GMO Monsatan moved in and made a Mordor out of our little Shire.
You understand that those two notions are contradictory, right?
If industrialization "increased the pace", then indeed "static tradition" was what existed before it, as food and other aspects of tradition changed with a much slower pace -- even if not totally static (which is a strawman anyway, no Victorian thought food at 20 A.D was exactly the same as food in 1700 A.D)
As for restaurants, I'm not sure I agree entirely. A few generations ago, every 'top' restaurant was a French restaurant. Serving the same classic dishes. Now you have places serving 'Nordic Cuisine' (Noma, Faviken), Spanish cuisine has had a resurgence in a major way (Arzak, Etxebarri), South American cuisine is becoming recognized at the highest levels (D.O.M., Central), as is Asian cuisine (too many to list), there's 'avant garde' (El Bulli and the Adria brothers' other ventures, Alinea), and then you've got the chefs who break all the rules and just create whatever they want at the time (Pierre Gagnaire comes to mind). Not to mention the trends of gastronomic bistros, brasseries and pubs, cheap tasting menus, haute fast food and street food, etc...
While I think it's somewhat true that the 'style' of a restaurant is becoming less location specific, I think there's more variety and innovation than ever before, more restaurants in general than ever before, and I would argue that food itself is getting more interesting.
As for the article, it seems more like the writer just doesn't like the fact that Buenos Aires isn't as they remember it (almost a colonialist attitude IMO, that Buenos Aires should stand still for them). However this attitude also ignores history - people have always migrated, adopted new ideas, cultures, cuisines, etc... 'Traditional' European ingredients like the Potato and Tomato, for instance, both came from the New World.
Nothing stands still.
The best and most exciting food and mixes of ingredients / obscure cooking techniques seem to come from hole in the wall restaurants with chefs who just really love food and know what tools/ingredients/techniques are available to them and like a brilliant mad scientist they serve up and share their successful experiments.
So, you only get originality and inventiveness and "ethnic flair", under resource constraints. Every "local dish" is a local resource optimization, making food tasty using ingredients or techniques that happen to cost less to apply (or, at least, used to, traditionally) in the local area. And hole-in-the-wall restaurants, running under the heaviest resource constraints, tend to thus produce food at its "most ethnic."
Restaurant patrons may often want the best American/European style slab of steak with seasoning they've come to expect. It's possible to create a wide variety of sauces or crusts for a slab of steak/lamb/bird/fish but often the chef decides on something familiar tried and true. There's plenty of room to explore with side dishes, soups, salads, curries.
I highly recommend the book "Modernist Cuisine". It does an amazing job of breaking down cooking methods though photography, history, and scientific explanations of the physics of heat distribution from various sources and equipment. [1]
That doesn't seem to be a very widely-applicable point, I admit. But my real argument is that this a point on a spectrum. Hole-in-the-wall short-order cooks are on one end, inventing new ethnic foods out of necessity. "Globally-ranked" chefs are on the other end, synthesizing together every style in the world and thus ending up with their own "cosmopolitan fusion cuisine" culture that doesn't really belong anywhere except within the space of a fancy lounge.
Between those points, most real chefs lie—not quite constrained to only cook with what's grown locally, but not quite free enough to bring together fresh ingredients from opposite ends of the earth on a whim. Western "home cooking" is precisely in the middle, in fact: a cuisine that sits on one end of the incentive-structure of the global shipping industry, cooking with whatever can cheaply be brought from wherever it was grown to a local chain grocery store.
Even in a culture where the only cooking implement is a fire in the backyard (and a clay oven similar to a tandoor), all the vegetables come from no further than the next village over, and starchy vegetables are dug up from behind the house, the variety was staggering.
Fusion cuisine exists everywhere BTW. African cuisine has Arab and Indian influence, Caribbean cuisine has African, Indian and Amerindian influence, Asian food has Western and Indian influence, and the various Asian cuisines all borrow from one another.
Heck a great example of fusion cuisine is the Kebab - seen from Germany to Turkey to Iran, Pakistan, all the way to Vietnam and elsewhere. All have regional variations, yet all can trace some sort of middle-eastern (likely Iranian) origin.
The fusing of cuisines has happened since the beginning of time, ever since nomads encountered agriculturalists, since Egyptians traded with Sumerians, since Greeks journeyed to Babylon and India, when merchants travelled along the silk road (all Western cuisines use Black Pepper, which is certainly not indigenous to Europe), etc...