6 11 APRIL 2024 News&Views There’s a school of thought that traditional recipes should be respected, which stands true. But when many of today’s diaspora chefs have the skills, experience and a worldly outlook, why shouldn’t they adapt a recipe to make it uniquely theirs? That’s the idea behind third-culture cooking. Fusion 2.0? It’s more than that. Food trends consultancy Egg Soldiers describes it as “an evolution of culinary authenticity” as growing numbers of chefs “[break] the shackles of traditional cuisine constructs”. Third-culture chefs are not limited by ‘authenticity’ in the rule-laden sense of the word. Instead, they create dishes that are a personal expression of their lived experience, celebrating the movement of food and flavour across global boundaries. Those boundaries are “fluid, blurred, porous and dynamic”, says food writer Gurdeep Loyal (below) in his 2023 cookbook, Mother Tongue, asking pointedly: “Who gets to gatekeep what is or is not permitted as cultures and cuisines migrate?” Nobody, is the emphatic answer from these six third-culture chefs. CULTURE CLUB INSPIRED BY THEIR HERITAGE Chefs are melding flavours from their varied backgrounds with ingredients and influences around them to bring exciting flavours to the table, as Tessa Allingham discovers In focus SPASIA DINKOVSKI Chef-owner Mystic Burek, Sydenham, London “I grew up in Crawley with Macedonian parents, but always felt too Balkan to be British and, during summers in Macedonia, too British to be Balkan. Becoming a chef, creating Mystic Burek [Spasia’s lockdown project found a permanent home last year], and writing my cookbook Doma helped me cement my identity. “My recipes are me in a hot pie. They’re based on Balkan burek [ lo pastry pies, typically lled with spinach and cheese], but the llings mix everything I’ve learned, including as a chef in New York and cooking my Macedonian grandmother’s recipes. I do a layered chorizo, burnt butter, potato and broccoli raab [cime di rapa] pie, and a pork fat pie with whipped ricotta, sage and honey. “In the early 2000s, fusion food was often a mash-up by chefs with no connection to the cuisines, but people like me draw on our lived experience and heritage. I hope we hear more voices like mine.” OMAR SHAH Chef-restaurateur, Ramo Ramen and others (Maginhawa Group), London “Ramo Ramen only exists because of my Filipino (on mum’s side) and Bangladeshi (dad’s) heritage, and my obsession with Japanese ramen. There’s nowhere else in the world you can get it. “It’s a meeting of Filipino sopas, a creamy chicken soup with pasta, and ramen that results in dishes like oxtail kare-kare, a Filipino beef stew that we interpret as ramen. We combine the meat with fermented shrimp paste and serve it in a peanut beef broth. And the avours in our Bangladeshi lamb keema ramen are incredible. “I promised myself I’d never open a traditional Filipino restaurant, but I imagine my aunties and mum saying ‘it’s not right’. Everyone has something to say about another cook’s adobo [chicken in a syrupy, soy-sugar sauce] or caldereta [beef stew]. I wanted to open new doors. Our cooking has become part of this country’s food culture. We helped create it, and that gives me goosebumps.” NINA MATSUNAGA Head chef and coowner, The Black Bull, Sedbergh, Cumbria “We ate bizarre things growing up in a Japanese family in Düsseldorf. Dad put mettwurst [cured pork loin] and mustard in his sushi and we’d have cured herring on nigiri because that was what was available. We ate Japanese food, but made it our own. “Cooking in Yorkshire, I mix all my in uences too. It’s an eclectic menu! Mansergh Hall pork with lotus root and XO sauce is popular, and Japanese tuna tataki [just-seared tuna] with fennel, lots of fresh and pickled Yorkshire GLOBAL GRUB A Scully St James’s spread including pu beef tendons and salt and pepper mushrooms (above); Mystic Burek’s Balkan burek (right); The Black Bull’s Mansergh Hall pork with lotus root and XO sauce Photographs: Verity Quirk, Maginhawa Group, J W Howard, Caitlin Isola, Rob Whitrow Photography, Marcus Spooner
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