hypenated cuisine

Here's a great mouthwatering NYT piece on the marvelous international variety of Chinese food with its fugue-like iterations (many of which, as all things eventually do, have found their way to New York). The Jamaican-Chinese restaurant sounds delightful, and the lingering memory of the peppery, unfamiliar Indian Chinese food I ate in Bombay will certainly drive me to Chinese Mirch next time I'm in Manhattan. This isn't haute cuisine fusion cooking; it's immigrant food gone half-native. It reminds me of something I read around Thanksgiving last year about the ways immigrant and/or regional communities in the States have tweaked the traditional Turkey dinner--from stuffing the bird with pine-nut studded saffron rice, to roasting it tandoori-style. Last year's multinational Thanksgiving feast in Oxford featured a free-range English turkey roasted with a pomegranate-molasses sauce and filled with rice and feta, which pretty much erased the memory of every turkey that came before it. I'm not much of a purist when it comes to food (I love real sushi, but I also regard the California roll as one of America's great contributions to world cooking. Honestly.) Perhaps it's time to give one of İstanbul's Chinese restaurants a try.

(note: also, the amazing chinese-ish chili-garlic chips/french-fries at red star in oxford. moan.....)