I applaud you for not giving in / up (and agree with much of what you have said) and yet caution you to notice that this was restarted by someone who spends all their time here complaining on other threads (about the world at large and also about the “conspiracy” of HO posters, so I don’t know that it’s worth your energy to keep going for their entertainment 
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I think that if anything demonstrates that “authenticity” re food carries far more meaning than a dictionary definition, it’s the longevity and intensity of these threads, where posters’ identities can be utterly wrapped up in whether they can find, try, know, or appreciate the “authentic”. (All of which I imagine typed up by someone in a pith helmet.)
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I think the Anchor Bar in Buffalo NY should change their recipe for buffalo wings because that is the thing to do. keep up with the times ya know. Because everything old is bad.
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Spot on. “Yum. Oishii. Wow. Just like Mom’s. Yucky” are pretty much the range we understand. When they start saying “solid,” etc., we’re clueless.
I know a lot of folks (mostly recovering Chowhounds) who read but do not post on HO, so I do not assume the audience is only the folks posting.
I mentioned the Portugal thread started by @Ziggy because it’s a great example of what people would like to come across without purchasing a plane ticket. Of course… it can’t be done. You do need to travel. But there is always hope that maybe one or three dishes of an entire menu might evoke the same sensations. Worth seeking out. And authentic is a shortcut word to get to that.
OMG thank you for the name! We went there once well over a decade ago, and it was such a memorable meal - but I could not remember what it was called for the life of me!
Nuance is not your forte, I take it.
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I was at Koo Zee Doo with Dulacacheesemonger from Chowhound and five of his Wino buddies. We each brought a bottle of wine, but my wine from Virginia did not get touched. (rightfully so, their wines were better) . I most remember the shrimp peri peri (the thin sauce belied a potent flavor) and the rich octopus gravy. That’s what the dish was called, octopus gravy.
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Authentic
adjective
of undisputed origin; genuine.
Genuine
Adjective
truly what something is said to be; authentic.
If here, in Austin, I make and serve rump steak prepared saignant in a pan, accompanied by home made duck fat fries and a small cup of Bernaise, is it authentic, or do I need to be in a Bistro in St. Germain de Pres? If I follow scrupulously the recipe for veal saltimbocca a la Romana but like it better flat than rolled, is it authentic? Does it need to be veal from Italia? Will any good prosciutto serve?
I am concerned first and foremost if the dishes are good. If the taste and smell transport me to Paris or Roma, I’d call them evocative. Proust would have used a sentence twenty lines long.
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I do agree with you that the word transportive is an excellent choice. I use it when applicable.
The definition of authentic I prefer is the (1a) definition on mirriamwebster.com:
worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact
So if someone familiar with Sichuan cuisine would accept a Sichuan dish made in Cleveland, then I find that very valuable information. Especially if I lived in Cleveland.
I do not believe that authentic is the same as traditional since Nouvelle cuisine can be authentically French.
Aside from that, trying to dissect my opinions to the very last detail is not the point. If you prepare a meal that would have Italians or the French singing your praises, that’s good enough for me.
Or to quote the great sm koppelman from Chowhound: I am not about to get into an argument with someone named Pu Wen about Chinese food.
Et tout d’un coup le souvenir m’est apparu. Ce goût c’était celui du petit morceau de madeleine que le dimanche matin, à Combray (parce que ce jour-là je ne sortais pas avant l’heure de la messe), quand j’allais lui dire bonjour dans sa chambre, ma tante Léonie m’offrait après l’avoir trempé dans son infusion de thé ou de tilleul.
I get my madeleines from Whole Foods. It’s just not the same, I guess.
I’m a heathen that way.
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(post deleted by author)
“to be a tourist is to have already decided that it is not one’s own feelings that count. Whether an experience is authentically X is precisely what you, as a non-X, cannot judge.”
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I am not sure I can read the entire article because some of it is too stoopid. Many false premises.
I suppose one can write the same article about HO’s love for food… or anything else at all really.
To get to your point, of course I am not in the same position as someone from the Sichuan province to declare a Sichuan dish authentic, hence my quote upthread by sm koppelman.
Where I live, the best real estate, the biggest signs, the most advertising is devoted to widespread corporations. So it’s awesome for me when I can learn from others about some little joint churning out what they love and know how to do that doesn’t cater so strictly to the same aesthetic or lack thereof.
That article is contrary to nearly everything I hold dear, and I kind of like it. I feel like I have just read a review of Pessoa’s “Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Galaxy” and it resonated a bit with me. I have traveled since I was a young man and first got my drivers license but it was in the form of tourism rather than as a traveler, and that is the reason that this article hit me as it did. Because moving from one place to another can be work, it can economic migration, or it can be “tourism” or “traveling”. Tourists move around and count coup on castles, take their snapshots, buy their “native art”, look for the best pizza on Ko Samui and toddle off home 3 or 4 weeks later without talking to a local one on one for any extended period of time. A traveler tends to stay in one place longer, eat local food at locals cafes and to get to know the locals better. I started as a tourist, partially changed to a traveler for 4 RTW trips and then last year relapsed to tourism, much to my dismay. LOL!
While tourism and traveling look similar and in many ways are similar, there are differences, as well as the obvious similarities. I think both travel a bit for the rush, the sense of the new. For their very own “discoveries” of sites they had not heard of before they experienced them. The main difference for me is that tourists take more of their home with them, traveling like a turtle with their protective shell of boutique or chain hotels, Margarita pizza, garden salads and brands of top shelf tequila all comfortably adjacent to the Gringo Trail, where one is apt to run into a friend from Jalan Jaksa, Earls Court, Ram Buttri/Ko San Road or Freak Street/Thamel. A traveler sheds a bit more of the shell and dines like a local, stays with locals, drinks the local grog and gets off the Gringo Trail, albeit not by as much as most would wish.
Pessoa stated that “I abhor new ways of life… Travel is for those who can not feel”. Which really sounds like a screed against both tourism and traveling but I respect the mindset. I just wish a lot of the tourists I “swim amongst” when I travel would recognize their own unwillingness to fit in with the locals and soak up what the locale they are visiting has to offer just below the touristic surface.
Argh. I just reread my post and it does not even make complete sense to me. I guess what I am trying to express is that there is room at the trough of travel for both tourists and travelers. They may travel to similar places but experience them differently, i.e. a tourist generally travels for a month or less and stays at chain hotels while a traveler travels for months or years at a time and stays with local owners of losmen, tea houses or bed and breakfasts.
But the bottom line for me is that simply, as a traveler I look for a bit more of the authentic, local life. While me as a tourist, and most other tourists, tend to skate a bit more over the surface of the cultures of the regions I visit and am willing to accept something that is a bit less authentic, a bit more comfortable and multinational.
Full disclosure, on many a night on previous RTW trips I sat with friends around a table with pitchers of Coke and Ron Centenario, Spitfire Ale, Staropramen or Mekhong and Red Bull and debate/discuss the merits of being travelers vs. tourists, but for the life of me, the things that meant so much then seem a bit less critical now.
But I believe that I have been infected just a bit with a bit of an understanding of what Pessoa was ranting against.
And cheering for.
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“Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it.
Yep.
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Because perceiving oneself as a traveler is far superior 
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Exactly!
Mea culpa.
Mea maxima culpa.
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I am very surprised that New Yorker published such a poorly written article.
The author gets into trouble the very first sentence: nowadays, the most uninformative statement is not about travel: it is ‘I am a foodie.’ Anyone can claim it, even if you love fast food franchises. It costs almost nothing.
The author then immediately demotes the phrase ‘I love travel’ to “everyone likes to travel” turning love into like.
Travel is very expensive. a two week trip to a National Park in the US can set you back a lot of money. So the first thing it says about you is very informative: You are an experiential person. You value the experience, even though two weeks later you will have nothing tangible to show for it. It doesn’t even say you are rich or can afford it, because a lot of people will go into debt to travel.
For some reason the author is quoting Socrates, who already lived in the Cradle of Civilisation, or so he thought. If he lived in Alabama or could scour websites about Macchu Piccu, he might not be so dismissive. The author does not quote Langston Hughes, who wrote I Wonder as I Wander.
The author then says it is a question of pride. That is possible. Bragging rights and all. The second thing the author notes is ‘looking forward to it.’
But the author leaves out the most important part: people love to travel because they have already done so, and just possibly the experience changed their lives.
The article goes on: photos are to ‘prove’ you were there. Really? I can’t look at them just by myself? To keep in touch with the ideas and emotions that swirl through my head? I look a them all the time, and I don’t have to prove to myself I was there.
I can see the case against travel: the ‘waste’, the time, the indulgence. But the author avoids all that and de-legitimizes the emotions, ideas, and the physical nature of travel.
I prefer the Jackie Mason joke about travel: “Eh, nobody ever says you have to be a shmuck to go there.”
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Points for the Jackie Mason bit.
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