Chef Erling Wu-Bower, son of a Chinese mother and a Creole father, grew up in Chicago. Chris Jung, executive chef at Wu-Bower’s new Chicago restaurant Maxwells Trading , was born in Korea and raised in New York and D.C.
To build their menu, they didn’t pinpoint a single cuisine from their pasts, instead the leaned into eclecticism. Maxwells— No. 3 on our list of best new restaurants in America—serves tortellini that taste like soup dumplings and flatbreads that look like scallion pancakes, which diners use to scoop up hummus.
If anything, the cultural mishmash on each plate is unapologetically inauthentic. As we sampled dishes across the country this year, it became clear that the most inventive chefs have stopped chasing the idea of authenticity. Some are even gleefully subverting it.
Mashups, fusion, eclecticism—whatever you want to call it—was on display as chefs felt unafraid to cross cultural lines in a way that had largely fallen out of fashion the last decade and a half in the food world. Until recently, celebrated restaurants had adhered to a prevailing ethos of authenticity. That could manifest itself as a restaurant being the outgrowth of the place it was rooted in, like Noma or Faviken.
Or it was a restaurant working to faithfully recreate dishes from a distinct culture like Sean Brock’s exploration of Southern food. But the label “authentic” also carried a moral weight—it was a signal that the cuisine on offer hadn’t been dumbed down, diluted.