It’s not quite noon, and the line’s still short at Hapa Ramen, Richie Nakano’s movable stand at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza. The 32-year-old Nakano hawks bowls heavy with broth, noodles with a crisp bite, and rich proteins like kara-age (Japanese-style fried chicken) and soft-poached egg. Hapa’s slow-cooked pork ramen is just the thing to neutralize the breeze blowing in from San Francisco Bay, satisfying with seared hunks of fat-streaked pork, as lush as browned butter.
The people eating nearby can be excused for thinking they’re slurping something objectively Japanese, but they’d be wrong. Hapa Ramen is part of a growing movement redefining American food in the Bay Area and beyond. A new generation of Asian American chefs is creating a cuisine that pays tribute to cultural identity, but with flavors and techniques stitched together from wide-ranging sources: neighborhood noodle dives, kitchens in the non-Asian restaurants where they’ve worked, early memories of meals overseen by moms and aunties.
You might call it the new wave of Asian fusion. Only, unlike much of the first-wave fusion of the 1980s, which arc-welded a handful of “exotic” Asian ingredients onto fancy Euro frames, this time it feels unselfconscious, authentic, lived.
A hallmark of this new genre is the way it’s mostly intuitive. Chefs like Nakano—or James Syhabout of Michelin-starred Commis, who serves bowls at Hawker Fare steeped in his Thai mother’s food but recalibrated for the immersion circulator—have business plans amounting to little more than winging it, based on what feels natural.
Before striking out on his own with a nomadic ramen shop, Nakano was a sous chef at Nopa, San Francisco’s farm-to-table alphabistro. His dad is Japanese Hawaiian, his mom the Anglo-Scots-Irish mix conventionally denoted as “American”: The name Hapa is the Hawaiian word for people of mixed heritage. But thanks to Nopa, French cooking technique is also part of Nakano’s identity.
When Hapa launched in May 2010, Nakano was using a stock-making method derived more from Escoffier than Ebisu. Hardcore ramenphiles Yelped that Nakano was flouting the standard of authenticity.
Chef Richie NakanoThing is, Nakano didn’t really give a damn what they thought. Instead, he says he experienced a kind of validation when David Chang’s Momofuku book came out, and realized their approaches were similar. “If I tried to do the most ‘authentic’ ramen, then I’d be trying to do something based on what I think ‘authentic’ ramen tastes like,” Nakano says. Taste deeper and you’ll realize that the authenticity lurking in Nakano’s compostable ramen bowls is the kind that reveals itself as an aggregate of its maker’s experience, hapa to the bone.
Of course, one might ask why this kind of cooking gets called “fusion” anyway. “You look at a restaurant like Nopa, or even Chez Panisse,” says Dennis Lee, 31-year-old chef of Namu, a Korean-inflected restaurant. “Everybody calls them California-Mediterranean, but nobody ever calls them ‘Mediterranean fusion.’ It’s funny that people are just coming around to realize that restaurants like ours are as American as anything else,” Lee says. “We can use French or Italian technique where we want that flavor or that bite or that texture, but it’s seamless.” How else can you explain a dish that wraps sauerkraut and noodles together in collard greens with a yogurt sauce?
“You have chefs who are Asian American, born and raised here, and ate their parents’ food at home, but also ate lots of other Asian and non-Asian foods,” Thy Tran says. Tran founded San Francisco’s Asian Culinary Forum, and describes this cooking not as a movement, but as a coming of age. “Asian food is just more matter-of-fact. It’s not, ‘Let’s go out for ethnic on Sunday.’ These days, Asian or not, we all have a little wasabi in our refrigerators, and sriracha – that’s right up there with ketchup and salsa.”
The problem with fusion’s first wave, Tran says, is that it borrowed Asian ingredients in isolation, slipping in lemongrass here, dabbing on mango-ginger chutney there. “We’re now seeing food on menus with some context.”
At Mission Chinese Food, Anthony Myint and Danny Bowien’s hermit crab-like Chinese restaurant set within the scuffed-up bones of an older-generation Chinese-American dive in San Francisco, the sense of context can be dizzying.
First, there’s Bowien, Mission Chinese Food’s chef, a 29-year-old dude with long hair and Redfoo-scale eyewear, born in Korea but adopted as a baby by non-Asian parents and raised in Oklahoma. Shy and reserved, Myint – who grew up in a Virginia suburb of D.C. – seems his personality opposite.
Bowien cooks food mostly inspired by regional Chinese food he loves…served at restaurants in America. He’s worked the line at upscale places pumping out food ranging from Ligurian pasta to fancy sushi rolls. And so the menu features a Kung Pao pastrami, and a “Chinese BBQ” plate featuring a slow-smoked brisket that really is more Texas BBQ than anything else. He has a particular affinity for dishes from Sichuan, and he’s not afraid to use techniques he’s learned in the myriad places on his resume to yield results that feel true to dishes that click in his imagination. To achieve a kind of authenticity, in other words.
Myint says Bowien came home from a disappointing eating trip in China determined to improve on something that translated as “saliva chicken,”: older, stronger-tasting birds poached whole with the skin on, a slow and very measured process impossible to reproduce in Mission Chinese Food’s closet-size kitchen. Although the Chinese original had amazing chicken, the final dish had a lackluster quality, a haphazard drizzling of brown rice vinegar and Sichuan pepper oil. “We had it everywhere,” Bowien says. “Toward the end of the trip I was like, ‘Man I like this dish, but how can we get a more concentrated flavor?’”
“Mouthwatering chicken” is the dish that resulted. Bowien combines slices of cold poached breast with whole cured chicken hearts for a dimension of earthy depth. “I cured the chicken hearts for 24 hours, then seared them in a wok and put immediately put them in a pickling brine,” Bowien explains. “It’s almost like making an escabeche,” referring to the classic Spanish cured sardine. Instead of a final drizzling with vinegar and oil, Bowien improvised a vinaigrette – daikon radish soaked and pureed to give it body, brown rice vinegar, oils infused with chile and Sichuan pepper, but also herbs: red perilla, celery leaves, even parsley. “A lot of people get caught up on this level of authenticity, but a lot of people don’t know that in China they use a lot of herbs, red shiso and a lot of other stuff,” Bowien says.
“We’re never shooting for ‘authenticity’,” Bowien says. “It’s all about figuring out how to do something on my own and have it make sense. You start out trying how you would do it in a French restaurant, and then let it take off. When you come out on the other side, hopefully you’ll have something rooted in how you remember the original tasting.” And that’s how this generation works, feeling its way to a cuisine that tastes somehow truer than its sources of inspiration, with none of the seams showing.
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