Learning a new cuisine.
I was born and raised in Western Europe. As such, I am very familiar with Western European cooking, particularly with Swiss, Italian, and French cuisine. It is food which I love, admire, and know. The familiarity and consequential nostalgia make me crave its flavours and dishes regularly. For a long time when I thought of comfort food, I would think of the hearty Swiss, Italian, or French-inspired dishes that surrounded me when I was growing up. They are the flavours and dishes I would have craved most regularly because their memory was so deeply imprinted in my brain and palate.
This is a sensation we all have. Everyone has their own individual palate which has been formed by their socio-geographic environment, their families, their upbringing, and their personal preferences. While I would have craved bowls of saucy Italian pasta or my dad’s potato gratin, others would in moments of nostalgia long for hot and spicy bowls of tteokbokki, a creamy, fragrant curry, or a steaming pot of Jollof rice.
It is often the regularity of the intake of these particular meals, perhaps coupled with the memories we make when these meals were being cooked, eaten, and digested which make them so memorable and craveable. It follows, then, that we can change and adapt our palates and cravings when we switch up our meal choices and start to eat new dishes or cuisines more regularly.
It is for this reason that I – for the time being – don’t wish to work in a restaurant that specialises in Western European cuisine. As much as I enjoy going to Italian and French restaurants, when I eat these types of dishes, they rarely strike me as new or revolutionary. This is not to undermine the chefs creating the menus and cooking these dishes – I will still be impressed by their craftsmanship and commitment to presenting me with a delicious and comforting meal. And I am aware that there are many amazing chefs out there imbuing traditional European cooking with some fresh air and modern ideas. But due to my own familiarity with the cuisine, it simply does not excite me as much -someone growing up Japan may feel the same about eating or cooking in Japanese restaurants. I can fairly easily make a pretty delicious pasta that would not overly offend Italian technique and tradition. I know how to approach making a French-style stock or sauce. As such, were I to work in a Swiss, French, or Italian restaurant, while I would still undoubtedly learn more, I would not feel like I was entering a new style of cooking altogether.
So, when it comes to choosing a place of work, I aim for a steeper learning curve by choosing a cuisine that I am largely if not fully unfamiliar with. It allows me to explore a new set of ingredients and get introduced to techniques and dishes which – with my Western European background – I may never previously have heard of.
Familiarising yourself with a new cuisine is like learning a new language. You begin learning individual vocabulary and a few set phrases which you may be able to repeat and say without too much difficulty after a while. But as you become more comfortable, you are able to combine the learned vocabulary with more ease and independence, creating your own sentences in the grammar and style of that particular language. It is the same with cooking. After spending weeks, months, and years cooking dishes of one cuisine, you become more fluent and confident in creating dishes without relying too much on formal recipes, knowing that with certain ingredients and techniques, you can create a dish that is unquestionably a dish of your chosen cuisine.
In addition to strengthening your cooking skills in that particular cuisine, you also adapt your palate accordingly. After months of working in a Korean restaurant, I started to crave the same Korean dishes daily, even on my days off . What were originally new and perhaps even strange dishes to my Swiss palate, had now been elevated to comfort food status. So now, on a cold day at home, I may no longer just pine for a big, saucy portion of Italian pasta, but I may crave a bowl of dak juk, Galbijjim with rice and kimchi, a steaming pot of Doenjang stew with tofu and vegetables, or a sweet and savoury Japchae. It introduced new staples into my pantry, and I now heavily rely on there being ingredients like Doenjang paste, toasted sesame oil, and gochugaru in my home.
This is what excites me about learning new cuisines. Doing this professionally allows me to develop these new skills and preferences much quicker than if I had tried to, say, find and recreate a Korean dish at home once a week. So when it comes to choosing a restaurant to work at, I always hope for an environment that will tickle new parts of my brain, expand my food, culture, and cooking knowledge, and which will develop my palate beyond its Western European origins.