This is a new restaurant in DC. Thoughts?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnn.com/travel/amp/immigrant-food-restaurant-white-house/index.html
I’m not a great fan of fusion food. Unless it’s done really, really well, it tends not to work. On the other side of that coin is my liking for restaurants which have a cohesion to their menu. I do not want to go to my favourite Mumbai street food place and be offered sausage & sauerkraut. So, this place doesnt appeal to me at all, as a place to eat.
I’m also not really convinced that “good cause” places are successful in the market place, once an initial interest has work off. There will, of course, be exceptions - I’m thinking of a cafe in Sussex, UK, which is staffed by folk with learning difficulties (they make good cake!)
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Trying to do too much doesn’t work.
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I’m not a fan of bunch-of-stuff bowls, but Sweetgreen is crazy popular, so there’s no reason this place couldn’t succeed as well. The menu at the chef’s fine dining place looks pretty good!
I agree with all the comments above. Around NJ, we have a somewhat new fad over the last few years, Asian fusion. You can have a menu that is a third chinese, Japanese and 1/3 thai. Generally speaking, they don’t making anything that well. Usually it is just bland food that is trying to appeal to many people.
I wonder how the name will go over with people. It seems like a pretty strange name to me.
My guess is this place goes out of business in 6 months or it takes off. I will see if I can find a menu and look at pricing.
There’s a link to the restaurant’s website in the article you cited in your first post.
https://emmastorch.org in Brooklyn is another interesting development. Been there twice, as its close to where I live. The food itself was mediocre.
I just looked at it, thanks. 13.00 or so for a bowl. The combinations look pretty interesting on paper. That doesn’t mean they will be grea, but I suppose it’s a start.
Like the concept of this, and have had fusion food, which I’ve loved. I think it may work, but they’d have to be careful with the menu, or maybe have specific nights for their various cuisine focus.
Yeah, but is it … “AUTHENTIC”?
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Lol, but totally on point. Immigrant food from anywhere is all about adaptation to available ingredients. As you obviously know…
The article and the hype conflate legal and illegal immigrants and are using that emotional tag to sell weird and expensive “fusion” lunch bowls. The whole business plan seems to be a political statement so that is the elephant in the room.
One comment from Yelp: " It is perhaps the only place where you can select between Filipino-Sub Saharan African, Vietnamese-Caribbean, and Ethiopian-Salvadoran (among many other cultures!) fusion dishes." $20 for a small bowl and a drink for lunch is a lot.
I’m all for creativity. Please don’t put kale in my chicken adobo. Salmon is common to many cultures - listing them does not make it fusion anymore than listing the places chickpeas grow and are commonly eaten is fusion.
Overpriced, pretentious, and entire reason for being a hackneyed political statement. Pass. When the novelty wears off they’ll close. In the meantime hurry down for a selfie in front of the sign and then head to any of the other eating places up and down Pennsylvania Ave.
Not impressive: https://immigrantfood.com/food/the-menu/
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That was, obviously, the only reason this thread was started in the first place, to get someone to chime in on this aspect of the restaurant.
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Obviously that worked. grin It was hard to be as generic as possible and not blatantly transgress HO rules of engagement. Perhaps the OP is sufficiently inflammatory that the entire thread should be removed? Not my call. I am but a simple guest here.
Not so far, according to me (whose call it also is not). But hey, stick around!
Take the quotes away and the discussion simply returns to the general topic we come back to here and elsewhere over and over. Repetition doesn’t make it less interesting.
Whether you call it fusion or integration or creativity there are opportunities. I’ve found that Thai sweet chili garlic sauce goes nicely on an egg dish with roots in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Fusion? Should I care? If I make a pineapple-coconut milk curry (Pacific rim) for my Atlantic pelagic fish is that fusion or personal brilliance? Okay - probably not brilliance.
Personal taste weighs in. I’m not a fan of kale (beyond kale chips which I do like) so I’m not putting them in chicken adobo or much of anything else.
Somewhere here we talked about ratatouille recently. If I fiddled with Chef Keller’s confit byaldi rendition where is the line between creativity, adaptation, and fusion? I’m certainly not going to put pineapple or mango in it, but potato or turnip or rutabaga might be interesting.
Which reminds me, I picked up a rutabaga for @Harters Branston pickle recipe (or was it some other chutney?) that I’ll have to make in the next few days. Given my heritage is fiddling with that British-American fusion or British-Russian? grin
That coconut curry sounds interesting. What kind of pelagics do you pair it with?
I also hate kale but that adobo one looks half decent if you remove the kale IMO.
Does this place have servers? If so, you are indeed looking at 20 or so after a drink and tip…more if you have one of their pricier drink offerings.
I stumbled across this and did not expect to see El Salvador as the largest population…
A guest who is typing fast again! 
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Mostly tuna. 30 minutes from the hook to the plate.
Why not ? - These are the restaurants we often prefer that try to combine ingredients/cultures/flavors you don’t see anywhere. It’s good to have “classical” dishes in restaurant but that can get pretty boring fast. For us the appeal in restaurant visits is to eat dishes and especially unusual flavor combinations we can’t easily create at home.
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