So you’ve survived Thanksgiving, the launching of the holiday season; the first of those family get-togethers.
For all the holidays — but especially Thanksgiving — the celebration centers around food and that all-American bird — the turkey.
If you are descended from immigrants (and aren’t we all?) then the fusion of cultures and food traditions make Thanksgiving a perfect time to celebrate all our heritages — traditional American fare spiced up with a dish or two from the country your family came from.
If we serve lumpia and pancit with that turkey, does that make our Thanksgiving less “American?” or less “authentic?”
Popular Top Chef Dale Talde, Food & Wine’s Best New Chef in 2013, bristles at the word “authentic.” Who’s to say what’s “authentic?” he asks.
“For my parents, it’s a learned holiday. For years the turkey was horrible in our house. Now we do it right, but everything else is Filipino food,” Talde told People.
It wasn’t always this way. Growing up in Chicago where he was born, as he went to school, he resented the cuisine of his parents. He just wanted to eat McDonalds and fries, chicken nuggets and Hot Pockets like his classmates.
As he got older, he formed an alliance of commiserators, friends of a varitety of ethnicities united by their second-generation Asian immigrant experience. Their homes all smelled different for different reasons—Dale’s from shrimp paste, Robert’s from kimchi, and Raj’s from asafoetida. With their families, they were foreigners.
Talde and his friends were all-American. Like their peers they listened to American music (hip-hop, mostly), wore the latest Jordans and sported jerseys of their favorite sports heroes, played basketball, and ate American food, which for Dale meant burgers and tacos, kielbasa and hot dogs, egg rolls and deep-dish pizza—anything that wasn’t Filipino.
As an adult, he’s learned to appreciate his roots and the Filipino dishes his mom made in her Chicago kitchen. He parlayed his training and his heritage into two appearances on the Food Network’s Top Chef, including the series featuring Top Chef all-stars, and a string of restaurants reflecting his own vision of America.
Today, his dual identity is etched on the menu at his restaurants in New York and New Jersey. There he reimagines iconic Asian dishes, imbuing them with Americana while doubling down on the culinary fireworks that made them so popular in the first place.
In his restaurants you’re likely to see menu items like pretzel dumplings, breakfast ramen, and his insanely delicious (if unholy) take on pad thai, made with fatty bacon and deep-fried oysters. A few blocks up the road at his after-work bar Pork Slope, he’s serving tater tots, cheeseburgers, and a pork chop banh mi.
Some chefs cook food meant to transport you to some foreign land. Talde’s food is meant to remind you that you’re home.
Talde’s various restaurants offers up dishes that is a mishmash of cuisines from around the world: Korean, Japanese, Singaporean, Filipino, German, French, Italian, even Jewish.
That’s about as American as you can get, right?
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