Last week, I enjoyed a meal at Xiquita in Denver, Colorado, with my friend Katerina.
At dinner she told me about her first 3-star Michelin experience (very fancy, I know). She recalled the dessert course - a cold beet pasta. Certainly unlike any dessert she had eaten before. The vast departure from the sweets she was used to wasn't what made it so memorable to her. It was the story the chef told as the dish was presented. I will do it no justice here, but it was an ode to his days in culinary school, coming home exhausted and eating cold spaghetti. He reimagined the dish to finish out what was no doubt an exhausting experience for both chef and diner, a long and extravagant 10-course meal.
She didn't like the dessert; in fact, she hates beets, but the story stuck with her long after the taste left her tongue.
Xiquita takes inspiration from Ciudad de Mexico, a city once known as the heart of the Aztec Empire (Tenochtitlan), then colonized by the Spanish, and further developed in the modern day. The decor is a juxtaposition of natural materials, cinder blocks, and lush fabrics in an otherwise modern commercial space.
After our server introduced herself, she introduced us to the menu. It isn't in English but a combination of Spanish and other languages native to Mexico. The chefs who developed the menu have proudly signed their work by printing their names upon it for all to see. Xiquita serves Mexican cuisine focused on three staple ancestral foods: corn, beans, and squash. From our first bite to our last, it was clear that the kitchen believed those otherwise humble ingredients were not only worth elevating but celebrating. While not every dish hit as hard as we would've liked, and our server may have forgotten that we asked to order a second round of drinks, those missteps could be forgiven because every other aspect of the experience reinforced the Xiquita narrative.
Despite having little knowledge of the cuisine of Mexico City, I believed the story Xiquita told me about it and I am eager to learn more.
Being someone who talks about food online, strangers regularly recommend restaurants to me. More often than not, the word "authentic" is used to describe the food. And I have to assume what they mean to say is that the food is "traditional" or familiar to them. And to be honest with you, as far as that definition of "authentic" goes, I don't give a flying fuck.
The authenticity that I am concerned with is in the story being told by the food. Is the preparation authentic to the experience of the chef making it? Does the dish diverge from the traditional, because the chef's family moved to a new place? Because there was a time in their lives when certain ingredients weren't available to them? Because they met someone who changed their entire outlook on life?
Especially in the United States, a nation of immigrants, we should be more accustomed to the idea that what is authentic to a chef may not be what is traditional to their food heritage.
Surely, by now, your mind is wandering in the direction of the fusion restaurant. Maybe you're rolling your eyes because they often seem gimmicky and thoughtless. And you're right; a lot of them are. A lot of fusion restaurants are bad, not because they are untraditional, but because they are inauthentic. Successfully combining cuisines from multiple cultures, especially if one or more of those cultures is not your own, requires an incredible amount of deference. It requires patience and a willingness to acquire deep knowledge of flavors, textures, and techniques. To surprise diners or subvert their expectations, as is often the aim of the fusion restaurant, a chef must first know what is actually expected.
The night before dining at Xiquita, I fell head-first into Dumplin', an Italian-Generically-East-Asian fusion concept. I hated it.
I intended to eat somewhere else that night. I met my Supper Club friends at Blue Pan, but there was a 45-minute wait. We walked over to Fire on the Mountain, 25-30 minute wait there. We just kept walking until I spotted a familiar name, "Dumplin'."
I remembered seeing other influencers raving about the food, so I ignored the fact that it was the only half-empty restaurant on the street that night. Upon first glance, the space had an eclectic vibe. Mid-century-inspired chairs, lazy Susans full of mismatched sauce bottles, and a rainbow of miniature bull heads doubling as coat hooks along the brick wall. No immediate red flags, except maybe the communal buckets of unwrapped chopsticks on each table. Genuinely, an insane decision to make during a "quad-demic" of COVID, the flu, RSV, and Norovirus.
Our server approached the table with a beaker full of sake and offered it to us. We all declined. "It's Dry January," I said. But that should've been my next sign. Anyone offering up free booze before you've even looked at the menu cannot feel confident about their cooking. And why the fuck was it in a beaker? How is a beaker full of sake relevant to this story? As far as I can tell, it isn’t and I have very little patience for forced quirk and kitsch. I suddenly found myself very concerned, but I tried my best to keep an open mind.
Now, look, the food was all technically edible; I didn't spit anything into a napkin. The service was fine; I didn't have a drink poured into my lap. But with every dish brought to the table and every dollar spent, the resentment inside me was slowly building. The story of Dumplin' is told by an unreliable narrator and an inaccurate menu. There is no passionate chef at the helm of the ship, just a restaurateur out to make a quick buck off his neighbors.
As the first dish was dropped at our table, the server mentioned something about "their version of hummus." Half paying attention, I thought maybe they were offering up an amuse bouche, albeit a strange one, since hummus isn't typically associated with either Italian or East Asian cuisine. And we certainly hadn't ordered hummus. Turns out what was on the table was actually the Whipped Tofu, Green Chili Crunch & Togarashi Gnoccho Fritto, which we had ordered. It tasted fine, mostly like garlic, but I was confused and disappointed to see wonton chips on the table.
When I see words that I don't know on a menu, especially words in a different language, I look them up so that I know what to expect. I believe wholeheartedly that reasonable expectations are a business owner's best friend. When I looked up "Gnocco Fritto," I learned about light and airy fried pillows of dough with a satisfying crunch on the outside and a nice chew from lamination on the inside. Something between a beignet and a cracker is what I expected. And it's not just that the Gnocco Fritto didn't live up to expectations, but that we weren't served Gnocco Fritto at all. A fried wonton wrapper does not even begin to approximate the shapes or textures evoked by the phrase, so why bother using it?
Next, a plate with a little pink patty atop sheets of nori arrived at the table. I quickly identified it as a tuna tartare but was curious why it had been served to us. We had ordered a Hawaiian Tuna Carpaccio, not a tartare. Sure, both carpaccio and tartare are preparations of (usually) raw meat, but they are different enough from one another to require different names. Carpaccio is thinly sliced, shaved, or pounded meat. Additional flavorings are typically drizzled or sprinkled on top. A tartare is chopped meat. Other ingredients are typically mixed into the meat, and the dish is often served in a molded shape.
Look, I get it. I have worked in the service industry and eaten at plenty of restaurants. I know sometimes things happen: ingredients aren't available, or issues in the kitchen lead to a last-minute change. I feel like I shouldn’t need to explain the concept of a menu to anyone, but it’s sole purpose is to inform diners of their actual options at the restaurant. If what is being served differs drastically from what is described on the menu, the staff should be informing diners as orders are being placed, or at the very least before the food hits the table. There was no acknowledgment from the staff that this was not what we ordered. So we ate the glorified tuna salad, unappetizing as it may have looked.
At this point in the meal, I'm a little peeved. One mistake or mislead I can handle, but two is pushing this into a territory I'm not comfortable with, especially at this price point. With five dishes, four glasses of water, and an automatic 22% gratuity, this experience cost us about $140. Yet, I am still holding out hope that things will improve. I like to believe the best in people, and honestly, I am sick of being the Negative Nancy at dinner with friends.
"Do not attribute to malice what could be attributed to ignorance," I say to myself. I took a management class once, alright? But, the Shrimp Scampi! dumplings were my final straw. You can't sell me ignorance of your own culture for $24 a plate. Have I mentioned yet that the restaurant's owner has Italian heritage? Or that they own several Italian restaurants around town?
Like many before them and since, Italian immigrants came to this country with their own unique cultural foods and recreated those dishes with the ingredients available here. The Shrimp Scampi we are familiar with today in the United States is no exception. Shrimp Scampi is so well-known, so ubiquitous, and has so much mass appeal, that multiple national chain restaurants have included a version of it on their menus. There is very little room for interpretation, when a diner sees the words “shrimp scampi” on a menu, they know there will be shrimp, there will be white wine, and there will be garlic.
My friend Annie was particularly intrigued by the idea of a Shrimp Scampi dumpling. No doubt she expected at the very least, for the two main flavors in the dumpling to be shrimp and garlic. Perhaps, she like me, was excited by the prospect of a shrimp dumpling tossed in a white wine and garlic sauce.
Well, we were served seven prawn and ginger, yes ginger, dumplings. Slopped onto a plain white plate, not a drop of sauce or even so much as a pathetic leaf of green lettuce for garnish. So, why bother evoking the very familiar flavors associated with Shrimp Scampi if you have no intentions of serving them? Had this dish been referred to as a prawn and ginger dumpling, we would not have ordered it.
If my math is correct, that's three dishes with Italian words or references in the description and three dishes where those Italian words were misspelled, misused, or both. One dish I could've forgiven as ignorance, but three in a single meal feels pretty malicious to me. I find it insulting, to be quite frank, to be sold a story that even the teller doesn't believe.
I have nothing more to say on this; except that duck confit is famously French, not Italian, and those bao buns were an abomination.
I hope you know that as I post this, I am giving Bonanno Concepts a BIG double middle finger. FOR SHAME.