When I interviewed chef Vivek Surti for my story on Indian ice cream and chai, he posed a tantalizing question: Will immigrants’ children determine the future of Southern food? It’s something he’s been thinking about for years, but he told me he was having a hard time finding a platform for exploring his theory with peers.
Reader, that got my attention. I personally wanted to know more about what he meant, and figured the rest of The Food Section community would, too.
Cut to late April: Surti gathered four other chefs at Tailor, his restaurant in Germantown, for a passionate and perceptive conversation about crafting menus that reflect the full spectrum of their cultural experiences.
He invited me to sit in and share with you what I heard. I hope you’ll find it as fascinating as I did.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Participating chefs, left to right
- Rita Martinez. Born in Miami to Cuban parents, her pop-up The Salty Cubana offers her take on Cuban food.
- Colby Rasavong. An Alabama native with Laotian roots, he’s the chef at East Nashville’s Bad Idea, where Lao influence can be seen across the menu.
- Vivek Surti. A Nashville native whose parents immigrated from India, his restaurant Tailor specializes in Gujarati cuisine.
- Ana Aguilar. Both her Mexican heritage and her many years in California inform the food at Tantisimo, a staple of the Richland Park Farmer’s Market, and Mala Vida, a food truck parked in East Nashville.
- Grace Tseng. Born in Taiwan, she moved with her family to Gallatin, Tennessee when she was in middle school. She and her mother operate the dumpling business Mama Yang and Daughter, currently stationed at the Richland Park Farmer’s Market.
Surti: What decisions led you to do the food you do? Because when I started cooking, I did not want to make Indian food. I wanted to make pizza and burgers and fried chicken.
But I remember one day going home, and my mom had made this extremely simple meal. It was just a couple of vegetables and a little bit of rice. And while I’m eating it, I’m like, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever had. And to me this tastes like home. And I need to start learning more about this.’
Aguilar: I did a pop-up. It was my first pop-up where I was going to be making the savory food. So, I had to go from pastry to [being] the entire chef right away. It was a ‘write what you know’ thing.
I’m always building the menu around, ‘What do I want to eat that I don’t know where to go get this thing?’
Martinez: Yeah, like guava. I woke up one day, and I was like, ‘I need a guava-and-cream cheese puff pastry yesterday.’ And I couldn’t get it. So OK, how can I bring that to Tennessee? Give it a little Southern spin and ethically source these ingredients? And then it evolved into Cuban sandwiches, and then the pop-ups that I’ve done, where we got really creative. But it all started with guava.
Tseng: It’s my mom’s cooking. I was a middle school Chinese teacher here in Nashville, and for Chinese New Year, we will make dumplings. And the kids just ate it up. So, I was like, ‘Huh, there’s something going on. There could be potential here.’ So that’s how our menu comes about.
And I picked the items that are more acceptable to people in Nashville. So, we have dumplings, but we also have scallion pancakes. We also have hot-and-sour soup, cucumber salad. With my mom’s amazing skills and recipes, I’m able to launch this business.
Rasavong: Two years ago, I was very fortunate to have a restaurant in New York reach out to me. It’s where I found my voice, doing a residency program up there.
Blankenship: Is there a particular dish you feel encapsulates your voice?
Rasavong: It’s a durian mille-feuille. That was me pushing the boundaries and being like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know who’s gonna like this.’
I went to Thailand, I went to Laos, and it’s something that divides both countries. There are signs that say, ‘Do not bring durian into this business. Do not bring it on the train. You’ll be arrested.’ I didn’t start liking it until maybe three years ago. My mother hates it, and I just thought that I wouldn’t like it either.
Then, I was like, ‘I’m gonna try this. Because I need to feel closer to my family. And I need to understand what this is.’ And I loved it. So, I knew I had to put it on the menu. But I was thinking it would be on the menu for one day. Now it’s our number one dessert. People will probably get upset if I take it off.
Aguilar: Yes. Yes, we will!
Tseng: So, where is the balance? Which side gets more flavor?
Surti: There’s immigrant cuisine, there’s fusion cuisine, and then there’s what I think of as first-generation American.
The way I define immigrant food is people who came from another country, came to America to open a business, and their main goal was to make money. It wasn’t so much to showcase the cuisine that they grew up with, because they were going to make that at home.
Their inherent assumption is that Americans will not eat the food that we had at home. I’ll speak for just Indian culture: They’re making chicken tikka masala, naan bread. Chicken tikka masala is a British dish. Naan bread is Persian. But they wanted to make it cheap. They wanted to put it out on a buffet.
Then you had fusion cooking, where the inherent assumption is still that Americans cannot eat the food that we have at home. But the difference was that in fusion, they said, ‘Let’s take dishes that are recognizable to Americans, and add some Indian flavors on top of that.’ So, it’d be like, ‘Here’s our chicken tikka pizza.’
Then there’s first-generation American cuisine, where our inherent assumption is that we want to share this food. It was a blend of the food we grew up with, as well as the place that we grew up in.
Aguilar: For me, the one part where it’s an ongoing discussion is spice. Some customers love spice, and some dishes are supposed to be spicy, but you can go overboard.
That’s an interesting thing because we have a couple of sauces on our food truck that are supposed to be spicy. Every once in a while, the chili peppers don’t come in hot enough, so suddenly you’re able to put it on everything. And there’s nothing wrong. It still tastes delicious. But then I have to be like, ‘Hey, that thing’s not spicy enough.’ Every dish that goes on [the menu], there’s that inner battle of, ‘Is this authentic?’
Surti: There’s always that fork in the road, right? Do you have to water it down?
Martinez: We’ve grown up with all these flavors. How do we mesh it with this melting pot of a culture that we’ve all grown up around?
I use ingredients like miso, not remotely Latin or Cuban or Caribbean. However, I love miso. So, I’ll incorporate it into a plantain soup. It’s really yummy and gives it another layer.
With empanadas: Cubans do a spinach-and-cheese empanada, which is lovely. But moving here, I was thinking, ‘What can I do to give the South a little wave?’ So instead of spinach, we use collards, which are the unsung hero of the leaf world. It holds up. It gives it flavor. And people in the South know collards, so they’re naturally gravitating towards it.
Surti: I would love for the public to understand how hard it is to do this in the face of adversity from even family members. I remember the first day Tailor opened. My dad has three sisters, and they all came to the opening night. They looked at the menu, and they’re like, ‘Why are you serving this? This is the food that we have at home. Why would you ever serve that to people?’
We went out with this dish called dhokla, which is a little steamed bread. It’s a dish you won’t find at any restaurant, pretty much in the world, because it’s a dish that’s just made at home. My three aunts are staring at everybody. ‘What are they eating? How are they eating it?’
They start seeing people eating this food, and then smiling and loving it. And they started going around to the tables, asking, ‘Do you like this?’ No shame from the aunties! The questions start coming out. And at the end of it, they started saying, ‘Now we see what you’re doing.’
I’m curious: What are the challenges you face presenting the food the way that you want to?
Martinez: For me, it was finding people that could help me work. Because for me, I’m representing not just my family, but my culture, in a community where it’s very underrepresented.
I can’t afford to have somebody undercook beans or undercook rice, which was happening because for some people, it’s just a paycheck.
Rasavong: It’s so hard cooking your food because this isn’t something that exists here. So, when you hire people, they don’t have the understanding that you have. They don’t have the same care that you have. One of my most difficult moments at Bad Idea was somebody undercooking the rice.
It’s hard to find Lao people that want to cook Lao food. That’s what I’m looking for now. I want to be a voice for my family in Murfreesboro and for people in other cities.
Tseng: Vivek, you were talking about the three stages [of presenting global cuisines]. One of my challenges is, ‘How do I open people’s minds in Nashville to see what Chinese food is about?’
It’s not about General Tso’s chicken. That was invented because of survival. The Chinese restaurant needs that money. How do I open people up to see that Chinese food is not just about that?
We get people who ask if we have General Tso’s chicken. Our answer has always been, ‘We’re dumpling based.’ Which is true, but at the same time, there are people here that haven’t tasted our flavors because they’re so used to the immigrant or the fusion restaurant.
A reason why I do dumpling classes is to talk about how my mom makes the food, how the technique comes about, and how difficult it is to just make one little dumpling. I want to continue to share that story, and help people understand that the world is a lot bigger than just what you know.
Surti: I feel like we’re learning about our own cultures and learning about ourselves, the more we do these things.
I didn’t know how to cook a lot these Gujarati dishes, but the fact that I’m able to connect with my mom and learn how to make them is important. And knowing that eventually it will make a difference in people’s lives and how they eat is really a motivating factor.
We all have this shared experience of: We went to school, we took some food that our mom made, and some kid made fun of us because it smelled weird. And then we went home and were like, ‘Hey, Mom, can you just make me a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich?’ But what was it like for y’all, growing up where you had your culture at home, and then you had a different culture outside of the home?
Tseng: I was originally from Taiwan, born and raised. I moved here in middle school to a little town called Gallatin. I didn’t know any English. I actually learned by coming to Gallatin.
I remember going to school with my mom’s food, because it’s very common in Taiwan to take mom’s cooking to school. And I remember vividly—it gets me emotional talking about it—that my mom made me sushi, but it didn’t have raw fish. So, rice and seaweed, essentially, with no raw ingredients. And I remember there’s a girl next to me. She’s like, ‘Oh, what is that? I would like to try something.’ I let her try a bite of rice, and she just went, ‘Ugh!’ And ever since then, instead of me taking food to school, I just eat cafeteria food.
Rasavong: I had a very similar experience. I remember vividly it was gaeng nor mai. It’s a Lao-style curry that’s very green. It’s got bamboo and silkworms and all these things that I think are very delicious now. It’s one of my favorite things to eat.
But at the time, you show up to school with Tupperware that’s not really a Tupperware. It’s a used box of some sort. You open it, and people are looking at you with this face, and you’re like, ‘Maybe I’ll close it and eat later.’
Aguilar: I can relate to the container thing. I grew up eating cafeteria food. Just out of necessity. There was nobody cooking in my house because it was very turbulent. But if I ever did take a snack or something, my mom was putting it in a plastic bag. I was like, ‘Absolutely not. That’s not a lunchbox. I need a lunchbox.’
So, it was a lot of cafeteria food, and a lot of junk food, and a lot of frozen food. I was thinking about how my mom grew up eating, which was so completely different from how I grew up eating. She talks so much about making tortillas and rice in Mexico. She would get up at four in the morning and make tortillas for her nine siblings.
She was telling me the stories but not feeding me any of the food.
Martinez: My experience was quite a bit different than what you’re describing, because Miami is a weird place. It is the United States, and it’s the capital of Latino America. So, I didn’t have a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich until a year ago. Because at my house, it was black beans and rice. There was always a pot of them in the fridge.
But anyway, back to Miami. The Latin population is the majority, so I would eat what everybody else was eating. But we did have a boy who transferred into [our] middle school. He was of Arabic descent, and his mother packed dolmas, the grape leaves. He pulled them out at lunch, and I’ll never forget one of the boys saying, ‘Ew, what is that?’ You could hear a pin drop.
I always took that [memory] with me when I traveled. Moving to Tennessee, coming here and not having any of those comfort foods—specifically Cuban food—I just remember feeling what that kid must have felt.
Surti: When my parents moved here, the way that they preserved their culture was through food. They would take seeds and plants and bring them back from India, sneaking through customs and wrapping them in clothes and putting them in yogurt containers.
When I look back on it, we were so lucky to grow up that way. It was fresh food made every day for breakfast, lunch, dinner. I took it for granted, because I would take that dal and rice to school and the kids made fun of me. I felt a little bit more like Colby and Grace on that one. I was embarrassed to take that food to school. And I was just like, ‘Let me eat the food from the cafeteria. I’m happy to have the tater tots.’
Rasavong: I didn’t want to be Laotian growing up. I wanted to be American. I didn’t see Lao people beyond my family, and so I didn’t have somebody to help guide me and be like, ‘OK, this is what your culture is.’
My mother came here in a very hard part of her life. They were running from war. She hates talking about how she came here when she was six years old, with eight brothers and seven sisters and my grandmother. They were running for their lives.
I was running from what they were bringing over. I was trying so hard to be an American.
Then, as you get older, you start seeing people starting to be accepted for who they are. It’s so exciting to see Lao chefs and Asian writers or see an Asian superhero. I finally feel like I can almost be myself.
Martinez: Coming here, it’s such a different world from anything I’d ever seen before. I fell in love with a boy from Nashville, which is how I ended up here. It wouldn’t have happened for me any other way.
My grandparents used to send me to college with a plastic bag full of mangoes, and I would give them away because I didn’t want them. I took them for granted. And then, mid-pandemic, I was like, ‘I would kill for a mango right now.’ It’s little things like that. And [The Salty Cubana] ended up fulfilling my need to reconcile my worlds.
In Miami, I’m the gringo from Nashville. When we go to Spain, where my family is, I’m the American. And then here, I’m the Cuban. So, you have this game of musical identities that you’re playing all the time.
[The restaurant was] my way to reconcile it. Because when I was designing the menu, I wanted it to be traditionally Cuban, but still have Southern elements. How do I blend these two cultures that are such a big part of who I am?
Tseng: I’m very proud to say I’m a really good hybrid of everything. I’ve got the Gallatin, and now Nashville. I’ve got Taiwan. Just having that hybrid allows me to say, ‘OK, what will people like here? What menu item can draw directly from Taiwan, and then place it in Nashville?’
Martinez: I like that term “hybrid”
Aguilar: I moved to Nashville in 2012 from California and really struggled to find food that felt like home to me. And I’ve been really grateful to the Nashville community for liking my food and validating that it is special.
Like, sometimes I’ll [make] lengua tacos, the beef tongue, which was my favorite taco growing up. I’m not the most adventurous eater on the planet, but beef tongue was just one of those things that when my dad made it, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s my birthday.’ And when I put that on [the menu], I knew people would like it because by then I had gained enough confidence.
Martinez: There is an element of fear, cooking ethnic foods for people. You’re coming out here; you’re creating art, essentially; and you’re going, ‘I hope you like it.’
And when they like it, [it]’s like, ‘OK, I’m making abuela proud.’
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