Commentary: In claiming national dishes, we underestimate how fluid cuisine is

LONDON: With this year’s list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants announced on Tuesday (Jun 20), there will be lots of talk of the signature dishes and inimitable styles of the top spots. 

Central in Lima creates its singular cuisine from the most astonishing produce of Peru – from Amazonian piranha to Andean potatoes to globular algae plucked from forest rivulets. Alchemist in Copenhagen and Mugaritz in San Sebastian continue to push the radical rethinking of dining that El Bulli began on Spain’s Costa Brava. 

The Chairman in Hong Kong innovates Cantonese tradition – the steamed flower crab, the smoked goose, the rice broth with lobster – with such elan that lesser establishments have little choice but to imitate to stay current.

Creativity and craft establish the identities of these restaurants. Foodies like me make pilgrimages to them at great expense and with much gusto because the experiences can’t be replicated anywhere else.

BEYOND PLEASING THE PALATE

Food’s also been used to establish broader identities – a sensitive subject explored by Anya von Bremzen in her incisive, spirited and mouth-watering new book National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History and the Meaning of Home. 

Thus, we’ve come to associate pizza and pasta with Italy, sushi and ramen with Japan, tapas and jamon with Spain and so on. These national signature dishes are so intertwined with the identities of their countries of origin that they are an impetus for patriotism. 

Some governments have won UNESCO recognition for the uniqueness not only of specific dishes but of whole swaths of kitchen culture: Neapolitan pizza, Singaporean hawker stands, the traditional Japanese meal of rice, fish and soy, the cooking of Mexico, French gastronomy.