“You’re Indian? Don’t take this the wrong way, but I went down to E. 6th St the other day…”

A couple of nights ago, I had to go to dinner on E. 6th Street and Avenue A with a bunch of my friends. I got off at Astor Place, walked down to 6th and took a left eastwards. For those of you who are not in New York City, East 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues is flooded with Indian restaurants. One thing that you notice about a lot of them is that they have sitar and tabla players entertaining the diners. And yes, I admit it. I’ve definitely been to at least one of them. (Some of them are okay, but I hear everyone who runs them are Bangladeshi…kind of like most pizzerias are owned by Albanians in New York. But let’s get it straight, all the kitchen workers are always Central American, so I guess there’s no need to get carried away with this authenticity of “who” is making our food.) Though I had walked that block numerous times, at that moment I wondered: who thought that was a good idea? And more humorously, what was the reaction by the other restaurants when the first Indian restaurant on the block decided to have a sitar and tabla player. Moreover, what motivated them to follow suit? And lastly, the most loaded question: what do Indians think of this? Do they even go to these restaurants or are they embarrassed?

Thus I found it to be kind of interesting that Newsweek has an online exclusive article that has highlights from Chris Fair’s new book on international relations (that’s what they call political science now…weird) and food, called Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States: A Dinner Party Approach to International Relations. As cutesy and pop-py as the book sounds, there were a couple of notable passages from the article:

How can a nation’s food describe its place in the world?
There are some countries for which the project of becoming more established in nationhood can be read through food. In Israel, for example, you see shirts, postcards, dedicated to promoting the falafel as the national food. The Arabs, of course, say that’s utter nonsense. The food that is designated the national food says a lot about how that nation interacts internally and how it wants to be seen from the outside.

Can food explain how countries interact?
An interesting indicator of historical relationships is what countries consider to be cheap food. Usually that reflects some imperial history with the country that produces cheap food. When you go to the Netherlands, you eat Indonesian food. When you go to France, you’re eating the stuff from northern Africa. In England, it’s curry. In Japan, it’s Korean. And in the U.S., it’s Mexican. So when you go to these countries and see what the fast food of popular choice is, it usually represents a deeper political history.

Pretty interesting. The interrelation of the process of becoming a nation and standardization of cuisine. Maybe the famous study Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson could have used some of this. I think that the second point is far more interesting regarding colonialism and food. And I think it’s relatively accurate. But I wonder if that applies to New York. In New York, one can pretty much any cuisine in both high-end and low-end forms. Mexican food in my neighborhood (East Harlem) is delicious and cheap. But one can easily go to Rosa Mexicano and get a pretty overpriced burrito (still delicious though). So is a plate from Rosa Mexicano still considered cheap eats if it costs a lot? It seems that in NYC and other cosmopolitan centers in the world, cheap is no longer necessarily from subjugated cultures. And likewise, there has been in the past decade a revival in “peasant food” in the New York City fine dining scene. (David Chang’s success in Korean low-brow but upscale food.)

This is of course related to something that attracts many diners–the mythical “dining experience.” But when diners go to places that serve peasant food, wittingly or not, they are gastrono-tourists, who have ventured beyond their class and cultural background to experience another. You may ask: what’s so different about peasant food when people have been eating non-domestic cuisine since the inception of the American union? Well, I would suggest that that the high-priced peasant food gives even more authenticity and legitimacy to the diner’s desire to be the exotic Other, without having to deal with the obvious discomforts of eating with actual peasants. In other words, the peasant food revival, thus, allows those who can afford to, the luxury of saying “Oh, X and I went out to eat at Z the other night. And it was so good; it wasn’t, you know, Americanized at all, it was authentic.” What the Indian restaurants on E. 6th Street do with their tabla and sitar players, the high-end restaurants do with “peasant food.” It is, to allow us, fancy diners, to feel closer to another culture in a climate-controlled environment, not to their sultans and kings, but to their volk. It is the best of both worlds: feel close to peasants, but not be around them.

But I don’t have to tell this to those of us in New York, where Katz’s Deli, which serves the food of once-poverty stricken immigrant Jews has a sandwich for over $10.

That’s New York for you…