This story was produced as part of a collaboration with students in the Future Business Leaders of America program [FBLA] at Normal Community High School. Reporters Julia Min and Bhavinki Kake are students at NCHS. This story was edited by WGLT’s Charlie Schlenker.
Cuisine is a constant evolution of existing food ways. But the pace of change has accelerated in Bloomington-Normal in recent years. At the heart of that change is fusion food.
Broadly speaking, fusion combines various cultural cooking styles, which leads to new dishes or combinations of dishes that touch consumer taste buds as well as hearts.
“Social media and the Internet have really, quickly allowed it [cuisine development] to happen … Everyone’s so globally connected, we can look on our phones, and we can get an influence from China, and I’m watching videos from all over the world,” said Ken Myszka, owner of Epiphany Farms Hospitality Group, which has multiple restaurants from various food traditions.
Myszka and Illinois State University anthropologist Jim Stanlaw both said food influences also tend to ripple out from major cities. What is popular in Chicago one year might be a hit in McLean County a few years later, and in Wisconsin a few years after that, said Myszka.
Stanlaw noted in an article written for the McLean County Museum of History and the Illinois Humanities Council that a not-insignificant part of the rise in popularity of sushi in the U.S. during the 1980s came from the cultural influence of Second City Theater in Chicago and Saturday Night Live in New York. He said actor John Belushi and his colleagues loved sushi and used it in comedic sketches, which brought it to public attention and curiosity.
“Due to the influence of larger areas such as Chicago, diversity and appreciation of culture is more widespread and there is more willingness to try new foods and to broaden our horizons,” said Stanlaw.
The big city ripple effect has also become more complex over time as more major metropolitan areas have embraced a vibrant cuisine sending waves of new food out from these centers.
“When I went to culinary school… there were only five cities in the U.S. that were successful restaurant cities… by the time I graduated there were like 15,” said Myszka.
The rise of fusion restaurants such as Rice N Spice Indian Grill, Epiphany Farms and Anju Above, Flame@Bloom, and even Kochi and Sushi Primos not only feeds the Twin City community, they contribute to its cultural evolution.
Rice and Spice has dishes from Nepal, India, and the U.S. Epiphany Farms and Anju Above offer a menu with dishes from many culinary traditions: sushi, pizza, French high cuisine, American standards, and even Korean kimchi. Sushi Primos uses a variety of ingredients that test the boundaries of even American definitions of sushi. Flame@Bloom pairs some Indian and Tex-Mex dishes.
What is fusion?
Asking for a precise definition of how fusion combines separate cooking styles, though, is a good way to start an argument among chefs. Myszka said he doesn’t love too much experimentation.
“[There are] multiple concepts that I think would possibly be considered fusion, but honestly, I don’t consider them fusion. It’s a word that boils my blood, and I don’t really like it so much. I think that all cuisines and all regions, to some extent, fuse different heritage and different traditions to create what is their current kind of expression of their local cuisine, or their culture and food.”
Since cuisines change with technology and globalization of ingredients, he believes the word "fusion" becomes less useful. Myszka defined fusion cuisine as “taking two aspects of traditionally different cultures of cuisine and blending them.”
Stanlaw defined fusion as “the mixing and nativization or localization of a food associated with a particular area, transplanted to a new locale.”
As the definition of fusion differs, so do the ways restaurants approach a practice of the idea. Puja Rani, co-owner of Rice N Spice Indian Grill in downtown Bloomington, said their menu tries to maintain authenticity in their food.
Rani said she and her husband focus on keeping the integrity of original Indian and American cuisines while also exploring creative combinations. For her the practice of fusion emerges from conscientious attention to customer opinion. Both Rani and Myszka said they believe creating fusion dishes requires a chef to honor the original culture of the dish in question.
“For instance, I wouldn't make a Neapolitan style pizza substituting, for instance, rice flour and mochi. That's not what we do. We look up how they make a Neapolitan style pizza in Naples, Italy, and we try to respect that and execute that using ingredients that are available to us, and using our interpretation of it to produce an outcome that hopefully people will enjoy and appreciate for a Neapolitan style.”
Myszka said he believed fusion should be about understanding and honoring the origins of ingredients and cooking methods, rather than randomly combining ingredients.
Jim Stanlaw said cultural influences on recipes may make a food enticing to a new audience and cause a radical change in the original. For instance, the word sushi in Japan pairs the characters for "rice" and "vinegar," he said.
“My Japanese friends tell me that it's [sushi in America] not really sushi. It tastes good. It is good. But it's not sushi because the rice is not vinegared …. vinegar is not a taste that most Americans really require, while most Japanese do. That's what makes sushi sushi,” said Stanlaw.
Stanlaw offered the idea that fusion happens when restaurants take certain liberties to appeal to consumers. This may suggest an abandonment of an authentic foodway, but Stanlaw said something can be learned from this experience too, that fusion cuisine may in fact be a gateway for others to learn about different cultures, in a slow, more deliberate way.
“All of a sudden you have these different forces right there, and you've heard this and heard that, and young people are now cooking and thinking, hey, well, why don't I try the basket in here? Let's see what happens,” said Stanlaw.
In this way you may get sushi in a college town such as Normal that may have ingredients like cream cheese, or peanut butter and banana that may appeal to younger Americans. Similarly, he said the dish chop suey, developed in the 1800s on the west coast of the U.S. with ingredients that appealed to Americans, is not something ever considered or served in China.
This curiosity and experimentation, Stanlaw implied, could spark a deeper appreciation and excitement for global cuisines and the cultures they represent.
Fusion in practice
Myszka’s view of fusion embraces combinations in a different way, presenting dishes from different traditions, each made according to their home culture, as a complement to each other.
And there are a few circumstances where he believes you can respectfully fuse culturally different ingredients in a food, if done carefully to honor the taste of the original.
“We have a very famous and very popular item that’s a dessert menu item called tofu donuts … It was a silken tofu cream with honey. The liquid in the recipe, we use tofu, silken tofu. We took a traditional donut, an American donut. That recipe dates to the vineyards. It’s actually a brioche recipe that comes from France. It’s a brioche dough. Then we modified it to include tofu. So that one, for sure, I would say, is fusing two different elements,” said Myszka.
The kind of fusion that has resulted in tofu donuts, American sushi, and chop suey is not new. It dates at least to the 15th century. Global trading introduced various spices and ingredients that up until that point had remained geographically isolated. Spices from Asia-influenced European cooking. This type of fusion highlights America’s multicultural nature and appears a lot in Bloomington-Normal restaurants.
Stanlaw also said younger people tend to be more willing to experiment with food combinations. He suggested fusion cuisine in and of itself serves as a sort of bridge for people to understand different cultures, becoming a powerful tool for both cultural understanding and appreciation.
“I would imagine your generation [the reporter’s generation] is going to be even more fusion than, say, the generations of the past,” said Stanlaw, suggesting future evolutions of Bloomington-Normal food.
A point of agreement among chefs is the need to embrace the consumer experience. Puja Rani and Ken Myszka said they strive to create a lasting impression through their food. Rani said she wants to create a welcoming experience where consumers can choose to try new foods through fusion cuisine or stick to their comfort foods through the traditional dishes on her menu.
“Instead of online research, we have to go by our feet and ask the people more about [the food], what they think … what they exactly want, how the other restaurants are doing it, and how they are surviving,” said Rani
For Myszka, honoring the customer comes not only through well-prepared dishes, it includes an almost religious adherence to healthy non-processed ingredients, sourced as geographically close to the restaurant as possible.
In the end, as fusion cuisine evolves and influences the dining landscape in Bloomington-Normal, residents can expect to see increasingly diverse and innovative food options emerge.