Misfit Professionals:Asian American Chefs and Restaurateurs in the Twenty-First Century
Since the mid-2000s, many Asian American chefs and restaurateurs have obtained mainstream acclaim by challenging the norms of the restaurant industry. Neither fully conforming to nor opposing industry norms, they reveal new forms of professional and cultural belonging that revise popular perceptions of Asian Americanness. I propose misfit professionalism as a critical concept to describe how this emerging generation of Asian Americans categorically mis-fits with institutional norms, resulting in a subject position socially defined by this mis-fitting. Exercising nonnormative professional practices in an industry where cultural traditions are tethered to professional norms, misfits authorize new narratives of Asian Americanness in popular literary genres like the cookbook. Their cookbooks employ a narrative device that I call the coming-to-career narrative, which challenges the genre's formal conventions. Examining the literariness of cookbook narratives, this article interrogates how industry professionalism engenders new understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and belonging in the twenty-first century.
In 1979, the los angeles Chinatown restaurant scene became an unexpected epicenter of punk rock. With a recession on the rise, many middle- and upper-middle-class city dwellers migrated to the suburbs due to urban financial restructuring and changing economic policies. In an effort to attract clientele, local first-generation Chinese restaurant owners hired punk bands to play at their restaurants. Hong Kong Café and Madame Wong's hosted progressive female-fronted bands like X and The Bags. For punks, these shows turned the Chinese restaurant into a stage for affirming authentic cultural experiences amid encroaching corporate homogenization and industry professionalism. The Chinatown restaurant, Fiona Ngô explains, spoke to punks who "abhorre[d] corporate culture and the kind of deadening, synthetic music that it produces" (221). By decentering the New York and London punk movements to examine their material and spatial peripheries, Ngô exposes how the progressive politics of the 1970s Los Angeles punk scene relied on a racial hierarchy that situated the local Chinese community as Other. Contextualized from an institutional perspective, this brief history reveals spaces of Asian ethnic entrepreneurship and food production to be culturally conceived as antithetical to emerging late twentieth-century industry professionalisms.
Asian ethnic foodways, business ownership, and food production were situated in opposition to the professionalization of the modern American restaurant industry. During the 1970s, the restaurant industry was undergoing a dramatic evolution with the formation of culinary schools. Created to provide vocational training for World War II veterans, culinary schools legitimized restaurant work as a profession that required formal study, projecting chefs and restaurateurs into the [End Page 103] professional realms of American culture. The most esteemed culinary institutions—The Culinary Institute of America, Institute of Culinary Education, and College of Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales—were founded in the postwar years between the late 1940s and the 1970s. Prior to the establishment of culinary schools, restaurant work was considered a working-class labor performed by untrained cooks and amateur business owners. That restaurant work would require formal training, Krishnendu Ray shows, systematically transformed public expectations of dining experiences and food production. Yet, non-Western European food traditions were rarely, if at all, taught. Culinary institutions codified ideologies that devalued Asian ethnic food traditions, culturally coding them as unprofessional. The professionalization of the restaurant industry thus initiated a divergence between professional and purportedly unskilled restaurant work, marking the continued ways that marginalized chefs, restaurateurs, and foodways remain unassimilated and become coded as non-professional.
Not quite fitting in with the prescribed pathways of professionalization, a newer generation of Asian American chefs and restaurateurs have obtained industry acclaim by challenging the professional norms of the restaurant world. The contemporary restaurant industry manifested a fluid space of simultaneous non-opposition and non-conformity for restaurant workers from minoritized culinary traditions to categorically mis-fit with industry norms. By challenging such norms, Asian American chefs and restauranteurs like Danny Bowien, Preeti Mistry, Kristen Kish, Nicole Ponseca, Nik Sharma, James Syhabout, Dale Talde, Nguyen Tran, Kris Yenbamroong, and Roy Choi have won or been nominated for the most prestigious awards of the profession since the mid-2000s, including Michelin stars, James Beard Foundation awards, Food & Wine Best Chef awards, Bon Appétit Best Restaurant awards, and the title of Top Chef on Bravo TV's titular cooking competition series. Their achievements paradoxically stem from approaches to food production that neither wholly subscribe to Western European practices taught in culinary school nor to traditions customary to their Asian heritages. Instead, these chefs and restaurateurs cultivate professional culinary values unique to their own generational experiences. They make visible an emergent form of professionalism that categorically mis-fits within the industry.
Due to their historical relation to the American restaurant industry, Asian Americans provide useful insight into tracing professional [End Page 104] mis-fittings. During the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants first came into restaurant work after anti-Chinese labor laws forced Chinese laborers out of the California gold mines and into segregated Chinatown spaces where they took on service jobs. These laws racialized food production by compelling Chinese restaurant workers to reimagine their food traditions to attract white diners, producing the Americanized Chinese dishes that are ubiquitous today. Attentive to these institutional histories, food studies scholars have also shown how the rise of culinary tourism during the Cold War initiated public interest in Thai, Korean, and Vietnamese foodways in the United States. Since narratives of Asian American cultural belonging are historically tethered to changing relations to restaurant work, critical attentiveness to their professional mis-fittings opens up possibilities for understanding both Asian America's changing relationship to the American labor economy and Asian America's cultural relationship to itself as the industry shifts from a predominantly working-class industry to a professional industry.
I put forth "misfit" as a critical concept to articulate a set of relations to an institution that neither fully conforms to nor opposes institutional norms. Misfit identifies a nonnormative relationship to an institution that can be considered out of place, resulting in a subject position socially defined by this mis-fitting. Often synonymous with the term punk, misfit connotes something like resistance, but, as the 1979 Chinatown restaurant scene illustrates, resistance is a limiting framework because "punk's resistant subjectivities," Ngô points out, operate along an "imperial logic" that "orders subjectivity by situating place and people through specific spatial narratives" (204). Circumventing the more binaristic approaches to punk's oppositionality—"resistance vs. recuperation, authenticity vs. inauthenticity"—that followed in the wake of Dick Hebdige's influential "punk-as-style paradigm," Zack Furness refuses a "habitual focus on punk's origins" by instead orienting punk through its cultural circulations to identify how "punk maps onto or even organizes certain constellations of cultural practice" in order to reveal "the kinds of subjectivities, people and communities that become imaginable or possible" amid "everyday practices, processes, [and] struggles" (18–19). Indeed, contemporary Filipino American chef and restaurateur Dale Talde self-identifies as a "punk Asian kid," even associating his punk sensibility with his identity as an Asian American restaurant professional whose approaches to food challenge preconceptions of Asian cuisines, as evidenced by the title of his cookbook, [End Page 105] Asian-American: Proudly Inauthentic Recipes from the Philippines to Brooklyn (15). Yet, while Furness's orientation to punk intends to "escape models of [industry] production and consumption," Talde does not escape such models (19). Rather, Talde's sense of what it means to be a punk is enabled by his direct relationship to industry professionalism and the commodification of cultural practices. Though sharing an affinity for imagining alternative modes of belonging, misfits are therefore distinguishable from punks through their active participation in industry labor. Misfit names those minoritized individuals who are rendered institutionally inassimilable due to their interpellation into systemic institutional norms yet who nonetheless participate despite such conditions. Misfits do not shed light on a resistant sociopolitical consciousness birthed out of subjugation, but instead reveal unrealized cultural forms of difference rooted in industry professionalism. As a critical concept, misfit identifies, on the one hand, a way to classify the systemic management of difference in the restaurant industry, and, on the other hand, a set of agential responses to professional norms.
The Asian American misfit chefs and restaurateurs in this article can be identified through their misfit professionalism, a professional relation to industry norms that falls outside of the codes that mark an individual as either fit or unfit for belonging. As the industry professionalized, chefs were expected to attend culinary school, extern at fine dining establishments, and work their way up the kitchen hierarchy before leaving to start their own restaurants. This professional structuring makes the kitchen a highly symbolic disciplinary workspace. Since the industry professionalized to meet the occupational needs of war veterans, industry professionalism not only became more prescribed but also enculturated a white male heteronormativity brought on both by the veteran population and the kitchen stratification system of Western European fine dining establishments, termed the brigade de cuisine. The kitchen became a site to reproduce social subjecthood, explains Sherrie A. Inness, by disciplining individuals to perform "correctly" through institutionalized norms that privilege whiteness, masculinity, and heteronormativity (4). As such, chefs of color, female chefs, and queer chefs became coded as professionally mis-fit. Misfit professionalism identifies an unstable relation to institutional power through the nonnormative professional practices that minoritized professionals employ when navigating the industry's institutionalized norms. [End Page 106] Examining the forms of professionalism that misfits manifest through their difference in the restaurant industry, this article demonstrates how misfits are not only subject to the industry's regulatory mechanisms but also challenge and reshape the industry from within. As historically minoritized communities increasingly obtain professional acclaim in the restaurant industry, they motivate new conceptual frameworks by which to interpret them.
To elucidate misfit professionalism, I read contemporary cookbook narratives by Asian American chefs and restaurateurs who now use the cookbook genre to expose the restaurant industry's institutionalized racisms, sexisms, and homophobia. Given the cookbook's role historically in the production and circulation of cultural knowledge, these cookbooks function as discursive sites where Asian Americans actively contest the genre's formal generic conventions to revise mainstream conceptions of Asian Americanness. Mark Padoongpatt documents how American cookbooks on Asian cuisines entered the public imaginary during the Cold War with the rise of US global expansion efforts. These cookbooks presented Asian foodways from the perspective of cultural tourism, or what Lisa Heldke has elsewhere called "cultural food colonialism," a culinary version of soft power (xv). The form and content of the texts were organized to teach people about Asian cultures, making the cookbook genre a cultural technology that upheld racial and class hierarchies. Sensitive to what he saw as the emergence of a "new literary genre" that exoticized and commodified ethnicity, writer Frank Chin described cookbooks on Asian cuisines as "food pornography" in his 1974 play The Year of the Dragon (86). But cookbooks on Asian cuisines are changing, rewritten by a younger generation of professionals who have found new agency within the industry and who mis-fit within the traditions and expectations of previous generations. The concurrent publication of cookbooks by Bowien, Mistry, Kish, Ponseca, Sharma, Syhabout, Talde, Tran, Yenbamroong, and Choi, which collectively emphasize narrativizing their career trajectories rather than simply instructing readers on making recipes, signals a significant institutional moment that critically reveals a generation of minority chefs and restaurateurs joined by their shared experiences finding space for themselves within a changing industry.
Their cookbooks make use of a narrative device that I call the coming-to-career narrative, a formal feature that provides readers critical [End Page 107] insights into the personal and professional experiences of Asian Americans in the restaurant industry. Coming-to-career narratives emerged as the pathways for professionalization shifted, altering public perceptions of restaurant work. Whereas the cookbooks from the 1960s to the 1990s popularized by first-generation and early second-generation chefs, like Joyce Chen, Martin Yan, and Ming Tsai, primarily educated readers on Asian customs and emphasized recipe making to allow ethnic cuisines feel more familiar, the cookbooks by many twenty-first-century Asian American chefs and restaurateurs challenge the cultural formations established by previous generations, expose the industry's systemic inequalities, and assert representations of Asian Americanness that reflect their own generational experiences with industry professionalism. These coming-to-career narratives can span over one hundred pages of a cookbook, making the recipes at times appear secondary to the narrative. They make visible multiform modes of professional belonging that expand cultural conceptions of Asian Americanness by demonstrating the various ways that twenty-first-century Asian American chefs and restaurateurs are rendered mis-fit. Rising in tandem with a changing professional landscape, this formal device allowed minoritized chefs and restaurateurs to bring attention to the codified ideologies and institutional inequalities that pervade the restaurant industry. It demonstrates how institutional conditions inform literary production. Misfit professionalism is a highly dynamic cultural formation, making misfits not simply a singular group of professionals but rather a multiply inflected cultural formation that identifies and holds in tension new understandings of race, gender, and sexuality in the twenty-first century. Accounting for the multiform experiences of mis-fitting, misfit professionalism sets a foundation for future studies on Black, Latinx, and queer of color chefs and restaurateurs who are gaining visibility within a diversifying professional landscape. Misfit professionals usher in new meanings of American cooking, while radically redefining the cultural influence that minorities have in shaping contemporary American labor markets.
making a misfit: an "unlikely story" of success
Danny Bowien's path to industry success was not traditional, to say the least. The Korean American chef and restaurateur won the James Beard Foundation's Rising Star Chef award in 2013 after his [End Page 108] Sichuan-style Chinese American restaurant, Mission Chinese Food, exploded onto the San Francisco food scene. Later, he expanded the business to New York City. However, as Bowien details in The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook, the restaurant underwent multiple iterations. The restaurant started in 2008 as a taco cart owned by Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz, who were not chefs. Myint and Leibowitz then converted the cart into a small bi-weekly pop-up shop inside an existing Chinese restaurant named Lung Shan Restaurant. At the time, food carts and pop-up shops were growing in popularity as platforms for accessing industry professionalism. Influenced by the lonchera taco trucks in Los Angeles during the late-twentieth century, Korean American chef Roy Choi helped popularize the mid-2000s food truck movement when he left fine dining in 2008 to co-launch Kogi BBQ, a Los Angeles-based Korean taco truck business. Kogi BBQ gave expression to the city's multicultural landscape. Choi won Food & Wine magazine's 2010 Best New Chef award, becoming the first food truck operator to earn the distinction. Sociologist Oliver Wang asserts that food trucks challenge the cultural values placed on traditional brick-and-mortar dining establishments by calling attention to "the voids and gaps in food distribution" and, in doing so, bringing "hidden social patterns into greater relief" (79). Founded in partnership with Filipino American Mark Manguera and Korean American Caroline Shin, the business represented a seminal moment in the restaurant industry where Asian Americans could be seen mobilizing an active resistance to the traditional spaces and forms of professionalism to promote alternative pathways to success.
Critically, Bowien professionalized during this changing food scene, yet still ushered in his own unlikely success story. As he recounts in his cookbook, he curated a "Seoul Food" themed menu as the guest host of the pop-up in 2009. Then, he took over the rights to the taco cart the following year, renaming it Mission Chinese Food, and turned the bi-weekly pop-up into a permanent restaurant-within-a-restaurant. That is, Bowien fit his Sichuan-style Chinese American restaurant into Lung Shan's existing Chinese restaurant space. The two restaurants operated distinctly yet simultaneously in the same space. After early struggles, Mission Chinese Food skyrocketed to success in 2011. Bon Appetit named it the second-best restaurant in America. Food critic Andrew Knowlton, who conducted the rankings, described Mission [End Page 109] Chinese Food as an "unlikely story," speaking to the extraordinary circumstances that brought Bowien's project into America's public consciousness. Like Choi, Bowien followed an unconventional professional path; however, Bowien's attempt to fit an Asian American restaurant into an existing Asian restaurant distinguishes his professionalism as one that literally and symbolically mis-fits with what anyone had seen at that time. Bowien reveals a misfit professionalism that demonstrates how a chef and restaurateur can find success by neither fully resisting nor ascribing to the normative pathways for professionalization.
Bowien and Choi's stories indicate how institutional inequalities play a central role in the systemic management of minority professionalism and cultural belonging. The restaurant industry has not exactly been hospitable to marginalized chefs. Their encounters with regulatory professional norms begin in culinary school. David Chang, Michelin-starred chef and owner of the Momofuku Restaurant Group, recollects little time dedicated to instruction on Asian foodways while attending the International Culinary Center. In fact, he remembers that an instructor once told him that pork stock, a key component of tonkotsu ramen, was "disgusting" (qtd. in Mishan). This credentialization of certain forms of educational training over others exemplifies what John Guillory has elsewhere described as a "social process" built on "the reproduction not of values but of social relations" (56). Though the rise of culinary schools reconceived the restaurant industry as a professional career field open to anyone, aspiring chefs from marginalized communities and cultures are more prone to being rendered mis-fit. In his industry exposé Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Anthony Bourdain suggests that professional restaurant work represents an alternative kind of professionalism that speaks to misfits. Bourdain recalls his "fellow culinarians" at the Culinary Institute of America being "misfits for whom CIA was preferable to jail or juvenile detention" (37). His use of "misfits" to describe restaurant workers communicates that they do not satisfy the conventional image of working professionals. Restaurant work therefore does not easily fit within the professional codes of more traditional professions. Culinary professionalism articulates a middle ground between white-collar business professionalism and working-class labor. If contemporary culinary professionals can be thought of as "misfits," then historically marginalized communities like Asian Americans professionalize as mis-fitted [End Page 110] misfits because the modern American restaurant industry that rose in tandem with culinary schools initiated a divergence from the minoritized food traditions of non-white, non-Western working-class laborers by privileging Western European foodways and culinary skills.
Bowien's restaurant-within-a-restaurant business model further demonstrates how misfit professionalism manifests mis-fittings between two generations of Asian American restaurant owners based on differing conceptions of professionalism. As a dining establishment, Lung Shan fits the traditional image that diners have about Asian restaurants. In his cookbook, Bowien describes Lung Shan as "a janky hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant" that looked "rundown and unsophisticated" (56). Lung Shan emblematizes the stereotypical Asian restaurant—dingy, outdated, and unappealing. Bowien explains that he differentiated his restaurant from Lung Shan by reworking the interior décor and streamlining the menu to appeal to contemporary diners. He opened with a fifteen-item menu that reflected a shift away from Lung Shan's crowded 150-item menu, making Lung Shan seem more like a relic of the past. Bowien's non-traditional vision for the restaurant worried Lung Shan's owners Sue and Liang Zhou. In an interview printed in Bowien's cookbook, Liang admits that he "didn't think it was a good idea" to partner with Bowien (71). Sue criticized Bowien for "not trying to attract Chinese customers" but rather "second generation kids" (72). Like Bowien, Liang and Sue understand restaurants to be spaces of cultural production. However, Bowien's professional and cultural values categorically mis-fit with those of Sue and Liang. Asked about her thoughts on Mission Chinese Food's success, Sue responds, "It was unbelievable. It was strange. I kept thinking, How come there are so many people standing in line? (72)." Based on her understanding of professionalism, Sue could not comprehend how Bowien's business could result in success. Bowien's rise to fame not only illustrates how he mis-fits professionally in the restaurant world through his unconventional pathway to restaurant ownership, but also showcases how he mis-fits with the ideological expectations surrounding the Chinese restaurant as a cultural formation. Ethnographer Karla Erickson identifies restaurants as spaces that "can be read like a text" (22). Read rhetorically, Mission Chinese Food and Lung Shan communicate what anthropologists David Beriss and David Sutton have articulated as "bustling microcosm[s] of social and symbolic processes focused on the [End Page 111] formation and maintenance of identities in the context of highly sensory environments" (3). Bowien's misfit professionalism demonstrates how the construction of restaurant spaces ascribes racial meanings that result in intergenerational cultural divides.
Bowien's story makes legible a theme of professional mis-fitting common to other twenty-first-century Asian American chefs and restauranteurs. For instance, although Choi's food truck service resisted normative modes of industry professionalism, his career path can be traced to his earlier struggles fitting in at the Culinary Institute of America. In his cookbook, L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food, Choi describes himself as a "misfit" whose Asian Americanness marked him as racially distinct from the predominantly white student body (1). His racial difference affected how he saw himself in relation to his colleagues and directly influenced his career trajectory. He writes that he "avoided working in the kitchen of an Asian restaurant" because it was "too obvious a career path for a Korean dude" (272). Instead, he cooked "classic French food" (207). Similarly, Michelin-starred chef and restaurateur James Syhabout identifies as an "outsider" whose French culinary training made him aware of his racial and class difference in culinary school as "the little brown kid from Oakland," which spun him into an identity "crisis" that enabled a journey of "self-discovery" and taught him to embrace the Isan Thai and Laotian cuisines of his heritage (52–3, 67). Lacking formal training in Southeast Asian foodways, Syhabout recounts in Hawker Fare: Stories & Recipes from a Refugee Chef's Isan Thai and Lao Roots that he opened his second restaurant, Hawker Fare, despite the fact that it "didn't even have a wok station" and that he "didn't even know where to shop for all the ingredients" (70, 67). Cognizant of the discrimination that structures the cultural logic of the restaurant industry, Nik Sharma and Nguyen Tran bypassed culinary school all together. A food-blogger-turned-chef, Sharma writes in his James Beard-nominated cookbook Season: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food that being of Indian descent and openly gay motivated his desire to use new media spaces to explore "dishes that speak from a deeply personal place" on his own terms to make a "contribution to the new way we approach food today" (20). Tran, the Los Angeles-based chef of Starry Kitchen, describes in Adventures in Starry Kitchen: 88 Asian-Inspired Recipes from America's Most Famous Underground Restaurant how he ran illicit dinner parties—a business operation that he terms an [End Page 112] "illegal+underground restaurant"—out of his North Hollywood apartment (9). Tran's pseudo-restaurant operated stealthily on "black-ops mode" to avoid detection by health inspectors, prompting an alternative informal underground economy that challenged the culinary establishment (xi). Together, these chefs and restaurateurs evidence how codified institutional racisms within the restaurant world can produce a generation of industry professionals whose career paths, business professionalism, and subject formation cohere around multiform experiences of mis-fitting.
Rather than identify a singular group of racialized professionals, misfit professionalism expresses a multiply inflected cultural formation that also accounts for the ways that gender and sexuality influence belonging in a heteronormative male-dominated industry. A self-professed "contrarian" and "outsider," James Beard-nominated chef and restaurateur Preeti Mistry notes in The Juhu Beach Club Cookbook: Indian Spice, Oakland Soul that their difference in the food world is tethered to their identity as "a lesbian, a person of color, [and] an Indian American who doesn't speak Hindi" (248, 249). As a queer gender-nonbinary person of color who experiences their Indianness from a linguistic distance, Mistry is aware that their inability to "pass" as straight, white, male, or even Indian affects their ability to fit in "traditional restaurants" or in "militaristic, hierarchical fine dining environment[s]" (222). Like Bowien, Mistry entered the food world by awkwardly attempting to fit an early iteration of their Juhu Beach Club restaurant into an existing establishment—in their case, a rundown liquor store near their apartment. Their "classic Indian cuisine with a modern, Cali twist" challenged diners' expectations of authentic Indian food: "When critics ask me if my food is authentic, I say: 'Hell yeah, my food is authentic. It's 100 percent authentically me.' And when people ask me what region of India my food comes from I tell them: 'Oakland'" (156, 218). Mistry's commitment to harnessing their mis-fitting to undermine the cultural expectations and boundaries of Indian food is echoed in their business practices as they imagine their restaurant to be a space "to create community where all kinds of queer and colorful people are comfortable" (118). Indeed, they refer to their restaurant as "a mom-and-mom shop," a subversive queer take on the heteronormative mom-and-pop shop (118). Imbuing their misfit professionalism as a queer gender-nonbinary person of color with a sense of empowerment, Mistry demonstrates how [End Page 113] mis-fitting not only shapes their professional development in an industry structured by white male heteronormativity but also how it can contest and revise popular conceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in a historically rigid kitchen culture.
misfit form: the coming-to-career narrative in contemporary cookbooks
Given the Asian-themed cookbook's roots in twentieth-century sociopolitical imperialist ideologies, the genre offers a discursive space to trace how Asian American chefs and restaurateurs respond to long-standing assumptions about Asian Americanness. Cookbooks written by Asian Americans about Asian foodways entered the US mainstream between the 1950s and 1980s when prominent first-generation immigrant chefs like Joyce Chen and Martin Yan were at the height of their celebrity. To make content accessible to a broad American readership, these cookbooks presented foods and recipes to appeal to Western sensibilities. This generic convention required chefs to make their recipes feel less foreign. Joyce Chen famously described her northern-style Chinese dumplings as "Peking Ravioli." This dynamic placed the chef at risk of perpetuating orientalist views about Asian cultures and foodways that fit mainstream preconceptions of Asianness. Representations of Asianness in popular cookbooks therefore lend insight into the ideological constructions of Asianness that permeate the cultural imaginary. The Asian-themed cookbook burgeoned during the Cold War as the United States adopted integrationist policies to maintain power in the global arena. During this time, the American tourism industry grew, inaugurating an era of soft power driven by cultural tourism. The earliest cultural tourists, Padoongpatt finds, were white American suburban housewives who embarked on culinary excursions around Asia. Many of these women published their culinary adventures in cookbooks after returning to the United States, making white American suburban housewives the first authors of Asian-themed cookbooks in the United States. This publication history indicates that the genre played a decisive role in propagating cultural imperialism and constructing racial and class formations for white upper-middle class women as well as their ethnic subjects. Twenty-first-century Asian American cookbooks challenge the assumptions that readers maintain about Asian foodways by calling attention to the constructedness of these long-held ideological [End Page 114] beliefs. Observing the interplay between the literariness of Asian-themed cookbooks and the contexts under which they were created, we can see how cookbooks function as what cultural historian Yong Chen calls "social texts" that not only preserve ideological conceptions about race, gender, sexuality, and class, but also operate as the sites through which to rewrite such ideologies (491). Cookbooks are far from a mere collection of recipes. They are narrative texts that "effect social change and forge communities" (492).
Rather than serving as cultural tour guides, contemporary Asian American chefs and restaurateurs use cookbooks to assert their own professional identities and expose institutional inequalities in the restaurant industry. Traci Marie Kelly charts formal developments in the cookbook through the evolution of the culinary autobiography. The culinary autobiography is a "literary extension of kitchen storytelling," Kelly contends, that provides personal histories, recipes, and photographs while implementing a "recipes-with-memories" format that portrays chefs from their own perspectives (252). Kelly identifies three culinary autobiographical forms: the culinary memoir, which privileges nostalgic stories about an author's encounters with food; the autobiographical narrative, which joins biographical information and cooking instruction; and the autoethnographic narrative, which educates outside audiences on in-group food traditions. Kelly suggests that these cookbook narratives bring visibility to minoritized subjects, especially women, whose labors have been coded as domestic and nonprofessional. As the contemporary kitchen becomes more public with the professionalization of the restaurant industry and the popularization of restaurant work through mainstream entertainment media, formal evolutions in the cookbook's narrative elements enable new interpretations of Asian Americanness. Whereas Asian-themed cookbook narratives previously intended to educate readers on Asian cultural histories (e.g., what Kelly might categorize as culinary memoirs or autoethnographic narratives), contemporary narratives increasingly center a chef's professional experiences navigating the restaurant industry. Considering how dramatically the industry has professionalized, it is not surprising that cookbooks have been reframed to highlight a chef's professional trajectory. I call this narrative device the coming-to-career narrative. The coming-to-career narrative is the defining feature of the twenty-first-century Asian American cookbook because it distinguishes the [End Page 115] contemporary cookbook formally, conceptually, and ideologically from its twentieth-century predecessors. Narrativizing the professionalization of the Asian American chef, these narratives provide readers access into an industry that has evolved within a cultural landscape increasingly preoccupied with food and travel documentaries and competitive cooking shows. They also bring into relief the institutional inequalities facing Asian Americans in the restaurant industry while complicating popular conceptions of their professional successes. The meaning of success ranges from gaining mainstream visibility as a chef to becoming an award-winning restaurateur. The coming-to-career narrative communicates how misfit professionalism takes on different forms by formalizing the various conditions for mis-fitting within the restaurant industry and the variety of professional outcomes that result from these mis-fittings. The content and form of the coming-to-career narrative uncover the complex nature of professionalization, thereby revealing new forms of Asian American professionalism and cultural belonging. Coming-to-career narratives elucidate Asian Americans' changing relationship to the twenty-first century American labor economy.
Narratives about professionalization convey as much about the sociopolitical climate surrounding an industry as they do about the individual professional. In a study of a recent publication by the Singapore government that profiles overseas Singaporean professionals, Cheryl Narumi Naruse demonstrates that narratives of professional career success not only showcase the socioeconomic mobility of Singapore's elite but also elucidate how they become coopted to promote the state's transition from a manufacturing economy to a professional knowledge economy after the 1997 financial crisis. The publication associates social citizenship with economic production for the state. Naruse refers to these narratives as "coming-of-career narratives" because they express how "the convergence of corporations and states shape national subjectivity through life writing" (146.) The coming-of-career narrative places an individual's self-actualization within the context of Singapore's entrance into the global economy such that "the processes of self-cultivation" become entangled with the "conditions of neoliberal globalization" (150).
Situated in an Asian area studies context, the coming-of-career narrative affords an approach to understand how the "background against which professional lives are constructed and valued" can be imagined [End Page 116] from a US perspective through an Asian American Studies framework motivated by epistemological inquiries into racial and ethnic belonging (150). While Naruse's emphasis on the "of" in coming-of-career highlights the socioeconomic conditions that make cultural citizenship possible amid neoliberal globalization, my turn to emphasize the "to" in coming-to-career orients stories about individual participation in the professional labor economy less as an endpoint that confirms one's sense of belonging and more as an on-going process of self-making that allows for multiple readings of Asian Americanness. That is, coming-to-career narratives enable highly differentiated depictions of professional success even within the same industry. In contemporary cookbooks, some chefs highlight their appearances on network television cooking competitions, while others focus on their experiences as restaurateurs. Professional success is indeterminate because the restaurant industry constantly evolves. Danny Bowien insists that his cookbook is "not retrospective" because his labors are part of an on-going process (xv). The coming-to-career narrative thus "socialize[s] its audience into the ideological norms" of the industry, as Naruse describes in her characterization of the coming-of-career narrative, yet also reveals how the conditions and consequences of institutional formations are part of an on-going and highly diverse process of Asian American self-making (150).
Coming-to-career narratives are ideologically distinct from the narratives published by first-generation immigrant chefs in the mid-to late-twentieth century due to their content and form. Twentieth-century Asian-themed cookbooks primarily educated readers on Asian customs to bridge divides between Eastern and Western cultures. Like Joyce Chen, Martin Yan envisioned the cookbook as a vehicle for first-generation immigrants to facilitate their assimilation into American culture. His 1982 cookbook, The Martin Yan Can Cook Book, uses wordplay in the title to indicate how first-generation immigrants are capable cooks like anyone else. To make Asianness legible to Western sensibilities, he adopts the voice of a native informant who teaches people about Chinese food and culture. His narratives portray the Other as less foreign to make readers feel at ease when encountering unfamiliar recipes, causing them to read like travelogues that help readers understand and master Asianness through food production: "the gates of the world's Chinatowns stand high for all of us to honor—and to pass [End Page 117] through. With this book, I hope in some small way to help keep those gates open forever" (xxii). Martin Yan's Chinatown Cooking includes sections like "How To Order In A Chinese Restaurant" to demystify Asianness by turning a mundane act—ordering food—into a generative cross-cultural experience (xxxii). Timothy K. August notes that such interactions within the restaurant space reinforce for non-Asian dining publics "the enduring image of the perpetual foreigner" (99). For Chen and Yan, Asianness must fit what the reader can grasp. These cultural imperatives in part derive from the limitations felt by twentieth-century first-generation chefs who occupied a cultural landscape where Asians and Asian Americans were less visible than they are today. Nevertheless, they illuminate how twentieth-century first-generation chefs not only avoided challenging the neoliberal structures of the industry but also implicitly legitimized the institutional conditions that conceived Asian foodways as foreign and Other.
Though changes to the professional norms and cultural values of the restaurant industry started to take shape by the 1990s, they often reproduced the industry's systemic inequalities rather than dismantling them. In his 2020 memoir Eat a Peach, David Chang recalls how restaurants in the 1990s remained bifurcated into "prohibitively expensive" European-inspired establishments that were "inaccessible to most Americans" and "more affordable options serving the cuisines of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in humble settings—a genre that's been lumped together as 'ethnic food' since the 1960s" (35). To bridge these clienteles, many chefs of the time turned to fusion cuisine. Fusion cuisine was marked by the incorporation of purportedly exotic foods—coded as "ethnic" in the ways that Chang mentions—into more refined Western European culinary traditions. Fusion cuisine, a defining craze of the 1990s food scene, has been criticized as a mode of cultural appropriation where white chefs who specialize in European foodways coopt the foodways of historically marginalized non-Western culinary traditions in manners that disregard their unique cultural histories. At the time, fusion chefs were regarded as industry risk-takers, and became celebrated as bad boy rule-breakers. Chang acknowledges as much when he criticizes these chefs for being able to "do whatever they want" without "even bother[ing] to learn the rules" of ethnic culinary traditions. Indeed, the celebrity chefs who gained notoriety around the 1990s, like Bobby Flay and Jeremiah Tower, fused French culinary [End Page 118] traditions with the Mexican foodways of the American Southwest and with the Polynesian foodways of the Pacific Islands, respectively. Even early second-generation Asian American chefs like Ming Tsai participated in the fusion craze. In his 1999 cookbook, Blue Ginger: East Meets West Cooking with Ming Tsai, he writes that his "East-West dishes" establish a "happy mingling of Chinese, Southeast Asian, Japanese, French, and American culinary traditions" (xi). However, due to his subject position as an Asian American, Tsai does not exactly become seen as a bad boy rule-breaker like his white colleagues. Instead, he performs "a kind of hybrid cooking that is," Anita Mannur writes, "reminiscent of model minority discourse—Asian ingredients assimilate quietly into the culinary scape of American cuisine creating a newer and better but 'unobtrusive' blend of flavors" ("Food" 97). This aligns Tsai and other early second-generation Asian American fusion chefs like him more with Chen and Yan than with Flay and Tower. Therefore, while bad boy celebrity chefs might appear to symptomize a new institutional landscape that accommodates minority chefs who do not fit in, the phenomenon actually reveals how the deck continues to be stacked against minority chefs and foodways. As Chang contends, "race play[s] a major role" in the maintenance of the status quo around the 1990s (36). Though early second-generation chefs like Tsai risk doing little to undermine institutional inequalities in their cookbook narratives, the coming-to-career narratives of newer twenty-first-century Asian American chefs and restaurateurs actively engage them.
Coming-to-career narratives follow a consistent narrative structure so that formal alterations, including length and placement in the cookbook, communicate a lot about the kinds of professionalism that get associated with Asian Americanness. Coming-to-career narratives always appear at the beginning of cookbooks to give readers an impression of the chef's professional background while establishing a framework for approaching the recipes. However, it sometimes carries on into later sections of the cookbook. In these cases, the narrative serves as a textual marker that establishes the contexts for the chef's more recent recipes if the chef has become a restaurateur and has opened multiple restaurants. Bowien acknowledges the deliberateness of this narrative structuring when he writes, "Following each chapter of the story are recipes that were inspired by, or developed during, the period of time covered in the narrative" (xvi). Likewise, Mistry writes that their [End Page 119] recipes are arranged "intentionally" around "two things [that] are pretty much tied together": their personal journey and career track (11). By distributing the coming-to-career narrative across the book, Asian American chefs and restaurateurs indicate that their cuisines evolved alongside their professional career trajectories. The narrative component provides the contexts to analyze food and food production by situating recipes as products of professional development. Foods contain stories about a chef's professional development, not simply their cultural heritage. Food production and business ownership are part of the on-going process of personal and cultural exploration. The form of the narrative depends on the definition of Asian Americanness being constructed for the reader. Critical analyses of coming-to-career narratives motivate discursive possibilities in Asian American food studies because, as Robert Ku, Martin Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur have argued, "despite the abundance of Asian-themed cookbooks, the scholarly treatment of Asian—let alone Asian American—foods and food practices is relatively rare, at least compared with studies on European foods" (4). Attending to the formal evolutions of cookbook narratives reveals that new forms of professionalism, professional belonging, and cultural meaning are being attached to Asian American chefs and restaurateurs. Coming-to-career narratives convey how chefs are legitimated and regulated in different ways, offering rich sites to read the linkages among race, gender, sexuality, labor, and generationality.
misfit professionalisms: the misfit in conflict
Dale Talde's cookbook, Asian-American: Proudly Inauthentic Recipes from the Philippines to Brooklyn, provides an opportunity to explore in more detail the literary and cultural dimensions of misfit professionalism. A second-generation Filipino American, Talde is best known for appearing on Bravo TV's Top Chef and for his eponymous Brooklyn restaurant, Talde. His coming-to-career narrative, a 10-page introduction section that opens his cookbook, joins these professional accomplishments to his personal self-actualization. At first glance, Talde's text reads like an autobiographical narrative that centers a stereotypical assimilation story. He expresses how, as a child, he saw food as a vehicle "to fit in" and "to be American" (10). However, as an adult, he realizes that food offers him a platform to discover his unique ethnic identity. The narrative ends with Talde embracing his Asian Americanness [End Page 120] through food production: "I realized that 'Asian,' 'modern Asian,' or 'Asian fusion' doesn't describe my food. I prefer Asian-American" (17). A popular dish at his restaurant is a Filipino halo-halo topped with Kellogg's Cap'n Crunch cereal, an American childhood staple. Since Talde's sense of social citizenship is legitimized through his professional accomplishments, the coming-to-career narrative appears to traffic in neoliberal ideologies that equate self-actualization with entrepreneurial freedom. This perceived relationship between social belonging and professionalization elucidates how an empowering narrative about self-acceptance risks perpetuating model minority stereotyping that links ethnic subjecthood with economic production.
Yet, while Talde's narrative invokes model minority stereotyping, the text deconstructs it and offers in its place an Asian American misfit identity formation. Formally, his coming-to-career narrative emphasizes the difficult day-to-day realities of working in a professional kitchen to thwart any romantic vision of restaurant work. Talde portrays himself as "the one Asian" among "well-off white boys" who "weren't there to feed their families" (12). He describes his experience being stuck "on the sauté station"—the lower end of the kitchen hierarchy—and typecast to prepare Asian foods because of his appearance (12). Spotlighting the racism and classism that pervade the professional kitchen space, the text shows how food preparation operates within a social economy that, Mannur asserts, "lays bare the processes by which . . . inclusion can reproduce the very conditions of exclusion" ("Peeking Ducks" 34.) Talde's coming-to-career narrative unveils the systemic institutional inequalities that regulate Asian American belonging. His refusal to embellish the professional culinary experience—"I had no mental space for creativity or food-is-art bullshit and no time to fuck around"—serves a rhetorical function (13–4). Cooking is compared to being imprisoned: "It's like being in jail minus the shanks and the communal showers. You arrive—in chef's whites, not orange jumpsuits—and immediately size everyone up. . . . Chefs assumed I could make dumplings, so I made them" (15). Asian American food production is racialized as hard labor, not an idealized artistic pursuit. The coming-to-career narrative exposes how Talde's perception of professionalism is shaped by a white culinary world that compels him toil like a model minority, preparing highly expected, uncreative foods. Nevertheless, even as these experiences confirm how Asian Americans are [End Page 121] interpellated into the restaurant industry's day-to-day working conditions, the coming-to-career narrative reveals the model minority not to be an individual person but rather an institutionalized ideological cultural formation. Talde's text brings to the surface an emergent professionalism identified through his mis-fitting.
Talde's misfit professionalism manifests through his efforts to navigate the restaurant industry's established norms to make space for his own belonging. His narrative presents a chef in conflict, a conflict that appears both in the Asian American's cultural relationship to the foodways of his heritage and his relationship to the industry's professional expectations. The text expresses how his desire to fit in motivated a "straight-up rebellion" against his Filipino heritage. He ate and prepared "anything but Filipino food" when entering the profession (10). But his enrollment in the Culinary Institute of America also communicates his willingness to adhere to normative modes of professionalization and to align himself with Western culinary values. Attempting simultaneously to rebel culturally and assimilate institutionally, he admits feeling conflicted about preparing the foods of his Filipino heritage: "I figured that since I liked Asian food and everyone kept asking me to make it, I might as well really learn" (14). Talde's conflict paves the way for understanding Asian American professionalism and Asian Americanness anew. Talde writes that he attended culinary school because he "didn't want a desk job" (12). As one of the "dumbasses" who was often "hungover or high," he was not a model minority (12). This unwillingness to conform entirely to—or fit in with—stereotyped expectations of model minority-ness led him to get "in people's faces and punch walls," as evidenced by his volatility on Top Chef (15). Formally, his coming-to-career narrative follows a trajectory that charts his progression from a stoner with no work ethic to a professional with little regard for professional norms. Approached from this perspective, the narrative becomes less about acquiring social citizenship through professionalization and more about an Asian American coming to terms with a sense of Asian Americanness that categorically mis-fits professionally, socially, and culturally. Like Bourdain, Talde identifies with his fellow culinarians who mis-fit in relation to other traditional industry professions. But simply becoming a chef does not make the Asian American a misfit. Instead, the Asian American mis-fits within the industry through the ideological institutional mechanisms that condition his mis-fitting. [End Page 122]
The coming-to-career narrative is as much a formal device that documents the conditions of food production as it does food. Coming-to-career narratives interrogate the professional circumstances under which foods get produced. Talde's Cap'n Crunch halo-halo is not simply a form of cultural production that reflects his experiences growing up as a second-generation Filipino American. Rather, the dish expresses the terms through which Talde professionalized. While cookbooks document professional regulations, they also provide opportunities to challenge cultural conceptions of Asian Americanness. For example, in labelling her James Beard-nominated cookbook a "manifesto," Filipina American restaurateur Nicole Ponseca communicates the genre's capacity to contest and revise mainstream assumptions about minority subjecthood (15). As Asian American foodways are commodities enmeshed in institutional formations, industry professionalism informs cultural production. Therefore, critical investigations into marginalized foodways are always critical investigations into the conditions and consequences of professionalization.
the misfit without direction
Similar to Talde, Bowien is described in his cookbook as "a chef in conflict," but Bowien's relationship to the restaurant industry differs from that of Talde (Chang qtd. in Bowien and Ying xii). This differentiation reveals discursive possibilities for conceptualizing misfit professionalism. Whereas Talde negotiates the terms of his professional participation, Bowien navigates the restaurant world without direction. His lack of direction derives from a lack of institutional support structures. For some, systemic institutional inequalities engender a rebellious misfit attitude characterized by a desire to set their own terms for industry participation. For others, systemic institutional inequalities leave them lost, aimless, and out of place. Bowien's cookbook details how he felt "directionless" during and after culinary school (41). Without formalized systems in place for educating chefs on Asian foodways or cooking techniques, he recalls "bounc[ing] around to a few different kitchens, just cooking without any desire to be a sous chef or chef" (51). His coming-to-career narrative uncovers another form of misfit professionalism that categorically differs from Talde's, further demonstrating how misfit professionalism functions as a cultural formation that holds multiple forms of mis-fitting in tension. [End Page 123]
The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook undermines the generic trappings associated with Asian-themed cookbooks by thematizing Bowien's directionlessness on his journey to stardom. The coming-to-career narrative deploys common tropes found in an Asian American bildung. Highlighting his adoption by a white middle-class family in Oklahoma through a Korean adoption agency, the text situates Bowien as "the only Asian person" in his family and "the only Korean kid" in his school (26). The narrative then portrays his matriculation into a San Francisco culinary school as his "way out of Oklahoma" (33). The reader expects Bowien's professional experiences to inspire a sense of ethnic self-discovery through food. But the coming-to-career narrative denies such a reading. Bowien does not connect with his Korean heritage, as might be expected in narratives where food functions as a vehicle to understand one's cultural heritage. He specifically remembers that he "didn't read books about Korea or really concern [him]self with where [he]'d come from" because he "wasn't thinking, My goal in life is now to find and reconnect with my roots" (26, 41). The text situates Bowien's unwillingness to embrace his cultural heritage, but it does not attempt to disidentify him with his Asian Americanness. In fact, later in his career, Bowien explores his Korean roots when hosting PBS' food and travel series Mind of a Chef. Rather, the cookbook illustrates how his unwillingness to connect with his cultural heritage symptomizes the lack of support available to him during seminal periods of his professional life. First, Bowien's' adopted mother passed away from cancer when he was in high school, a profound personal experience that influenced his professional development as he entered adulthood: "My mom's sickness didn't drive me to rebel . . . but it did force me to fend for myself" (29). When his high school was destroyed by a tornado, the district let students "graduate by default" despite the fact that Bowien was at risk of failing (33). Unprepared for adulthood, Bowien dropped out of community college after developing a "good alcohol and drug habit," and left Oklahoma on a whim (11). His turn to culinary school, Bowien confesses, appeared more like a "change of scenery" than an empowered commitment to professional success and self-discovery (11). But the industry's lack of support for cultivating knowledge in Asian foodways and cooking techniques left him unable to establish sustainable connections to his Asian Americanness, rendering him mis-fit. The text notes that, when he opened Mission Chinese Food, his only [End Page 124] experience preparing Chinese food was from observing the immigrant cooks in Lung Shan who could not even mentor him because they did not speak English. Bowien's coming-to-career narrative evidences the role that systemic institutional inequalities play in the production of misfit professionalism.
Coming of age in the food world without direction, Bowien developed a unique form of professionalism that informed his management style at his restaurants. "The chefs I've worked for in the past believed in learning and doing things in a certain order," Bowien writes, "but I feel that our cooking [at Mission Chinese Food] boils down to a lot of split-second decision making and being brave enough to try new things" (126). Such convictions might sound empowering for an upstart chef and restaurateur, but they also make visible the unique hazards and institutional precarity that negatively impact young minority professionals. For instance, when Bowien expanded Mission Chinese Food to New York, the text characterizes him as "clueless" on how to build a business: "I had no idea about building permits or codes, health inspections, fire inspections, [or] community boards" (144). Before becoming celebrated, the New York City restaurant actually closed twice due to health code violations. Out of his struggles, though, Bowien found guidance through informal mentorship. Brandon Jew, the Asian American chef and restaurateur of San Francisco's Michelin-starred Mister Jiu's, introduced Bowien to Asian foodways by giving him his first set of Asian-themed cookbooks. That a minority chef might rely on another minority for informal professional mentorship can signal shortcomings with an industry's formal support structures. At the same time, as an informal pathway for professionalization, mentorship demonstrates how generative professional relationships can cohere around the experience of mis-fitting.
Having established a context for understanding Bowien's career trajectory, it becomes clearer to see how The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook formalizes the theme of Bowien's directionlessness through its narrative structure. In the introduction, Bowien refers to the book as a "strange cookbook" (xv). The word "strange" is apt because the cookbook's focus on Bowien's coming-to-career narrative emphasizes storytelling over cooking. The coming-to-career narrative spans roughly one-hundred pages, making the title of the cookbook deceiving since the narrative is featured more prominently at times than the recipes. The cookbook [End Page 125] also decenters Bowien's narrative voice by incorporating a variety of textual modes, including essays and interviews, from individuals across the restaurant industry, including Anthony Bourdain, David Chang, Sue and Liang Zhou, and his friends Chris Ying and Anthony Myint. The book is less concerned with defining a cuisine for readers, Bowien writes, and more with depicting "a record" of how "Mission Chinese has grown and changed, exploded and redefined itself" (xvi, xv). Structurally, the coming-to-career narrative opens with Bowien's admission that he irresponsibly crashed his car as a teenager while street racing and ends by acknowledging that he "can't be irresponsible" anymore (182). By suggesting that he needs to be more responsible both at the beginning and the end of the cookbook, the text presents a directionless narrative arc. There is no thematic trajectory to the text because, in asserting his need to be more responsible, Bowien implicitly concedes that he remains irresponsible. The cookbook leaves the reader with the sense that "the story is certainly incomplete" (182). Although it intends to communicate Bowien's professional evolution, the narrative does not move in that direction. The narrative does not affirm his self-actualization as a chef or restaurateur. Instead, the narrative is directionless. This directionless nature of Bowien's narrative challenges cultural assumptions that conceive Asian Americans as neoliberal subjects (i.e., model minorities) who follow straightforward paths to professional success amid systemic institutional inequalities. Formalizing the relationship between the restaurant industry's structural inequalities and narratives about Asian Americanness, the coming-to-career narrative presents a directionless story without an ending. As such, it both forecloses the reader's capacity to interpret him as a model minority on a linear road to success and exposes the constructive nature of Asian American subject formation.
Enticing as it is to generalize connections among Asian Americans who have gained notoriety in the restaurant industry, chefs and restaurateurs maintain highly individualized approaches to food and food production that depend on their experiences with the industry's professionalization structures. Rather than define misfits as a group of professionals who herald in a singular cultural movement, misfit professionalism illustrates how mis-fitting manifests a cultural formation that allows differences to be held in productive tension. With each possessing a distinctive coming-to-career narrative, misfits draw attention to [End Page 126] the variegated nature of institutional inequality, enabling new interpretations of professional and cultural belonging for minorities in contemporary American labor markets.
conclusion: misfit possibilities
Misfit professionalism accounts for the multiform ways that minorities navigate evolving professional norms, especially as they gain prominence in industries where they have been historically marginalized. Recently, Mexican chefs and restaurateurs have garnered a new sense of recognition. The first winner of a Michelin star was Carlos Gaytán, whose Chicago-based Mexique restaurant earned the distinction in 2013 and 2014. In total, five Mexican chefs have won Michelin stars as of 2019. Yet, in an interview with Vice, Gaytán describes feeling out of place in the industry. A Mexican chef professionalizing in America, he explains feeling constrained by the preconceptions that employers and diners have about Mexicans in the food industry. He could only land a dishwashing job in a hotel when starting out. Rather than being content with simply "having a job," Gaytán wanted to "grow" and "dare to try things" (qtd. in Armella). This resistance to normative expectations ostracized him. Even his "Mexican peers criticized" him. Nevertheless, Gaytán dared to "break with expectations" and created "new experiences" for diners by getting "rid of the beans, guacamole, and margaritas" to revise the ideas that people—including traditional Mexican chefs—had about Mexican cuisine. Failing to fit in with industry expectations, Gaytán demonstrates misfit professionalism's relevance as a framework for interpreting the professional and cultural belonging of other minoritized communities as well as interrogating generational differences through professionalism.
But Gaytán is not alone. James Beard-winner Kwame Onwuachi describes feeling out of place in the industry in spite of his fame. In Notes from a Young Black Chef, Onwuachi recounts being told "You're not the right fit" by colleagues and industry professionals throughout his career (184). Onwuachi's narrative chronicles his struggles navigating the food world as a young black chef and restaurateur. His self-described "fine-dining, modern American, globally influenced" Afro-Caribbean creole food of the "African diaspora" positions him outside of the conventional expectations of black cuisine—"fried chicken and cornbread and collards"—in the American culinary tradition (232, 269, 222). [End Page 127] Onwuachi communicates a professional ethos that television producers from various food networks have explicitly told him "America isn't ready for" (222). Like Gaytán and Mistry, Onwuachi experiences a professional mis-fitting that galvanizes his desire to cultivate institutional reform. He closes his book by envisioning "a kitchen full of white, yellow, brown, and black faces—open faces, not faces closed by fear like mine was for so many years" (267). Onwuachi's misfit professionalism thus motivates him to imagine a more just future for chefs and restaurateurs of color.
Misfit professionalism also makes visible the ways that institutionalized gender disparities and homophobia impact subject formation. Andy Baraghani, a gay second-generation Iranian American chef and food writer, explains in a revealing 2018 Bon Appétit article that, despite working in "male-led" kitchens throughout his career, he has only worked "alongside another out gay man" in one restaurant ("I Hid Who I Was"). For Baraghani, professional kitchens "weren't exactly environments that encouraged [gay men] to come out" because such environments were inhospitable to people who fell outside of the profession's cultural norms. Data from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 1995 and 2016 show that over 10,000 employees working in full-service restaurants have filed harassment claims. Social justice movements, like #MeToo, have also brought public attention to the industry's sexism. Considering these disparities, it is not coincidental that many of the chefs examined in this article are heterosexual men. Critical attention toward the restaurant industry's institutional structures in an era informed by social justice activism engenders discursive possibilities for conceptualizing misfit professionalism alongside the intersecting axes of race, gender, and sexuality.
Kristen Kish exemplifies one such point of possibility. Her cookbook, Kristen Kish Cooking: Recipes and Techniques, was considered one of the most important cookbooks of 2017 by multiple food publications, including Saveur and Eater. A queer woman of color abandoned by her Korean birth mother as an infant, and later adopted by a white middle-class family in Michigan, Kish recounts struggling to come into her own as an industry professional. Her coming-to-career narrative describes her circuitous path to becoming a chef: she was first a model, abandoned that profession, studied business in college, dropped out, developed an alcohol and drug habit, enrolled in culinary school, and [End Page 128] hopped around restaurants after graduation. Eventually, she found her way onto Bravo TV's Top Chef and won. At only twenty-eight years old, she seemed destined for greatness. Growing up in a loving home, and fortunate to professionalize in accommodating kitchens, her coming-to-career narrative portrays Kish as having unwavering support. Yet, the narrative spotlights her struggles with depression, anxiety, and insecurity. The narrative illustrates how an Asian American can still feel out of place, or mis-fit, despite having mechanisms for support. Kish is not the directionless misfit that Bowien personified, though they share some similarities. Top Chef brought her tremendous acclaim, but the format of the competition distorted her perception of restaurant work. The narrative describes her quitting her job right after winning the show because she "craved adventure and wanted a new challenge" (17). The show created unrealistic expectations of professional mobility that did not fit with the reality of the restaurant industry, an industry built on a perception of cultural inclusivity that belies the systemic regulation of marginalized communities—especially queer women of color. The restaurant industry is not designed to accommodate her desire for professional freedom and mobility. These unfulfilled aspirations, when operating within an industry where professional possibilities for minorities are illusory, take a toll on the minority professional dedicated to pursuing her dreams. She confesses, "I didn't know how to slow down and take care of myself" (18). Shows like Top Chef risk naturalizing false perceptions of a chef's relationship to the food industry. This false image not only influences public perceptions of the industry, but also informs the chef's perception of herself. Scholars must be attentive to the forms of professionalism that emerge as an industry's professional pathways evolve.
At the time of editing this piece for publication, the COVID-19 pandemic is in full swing. The pandemic has wrought havoc on service sector jobs and exacerbated existing inequalities that have disproportionately affected minoritized labor forces. Critical attentiveness to professionalization and institutional mis-fittings are therefore timely as these industries—the restaurant industry, in particular—are forced to confront and adapt to the economic fallout caused by a global crisis. Misfit professionalism provides a critical vocabulary for interpreting minority professional and cultural belonging in the twenty-first century. Specifically, it diagnoses institutional power structures while enabling [End Page 129] critiques oriented toward social justice by constellating the effects of institutional power on minority subjecthood and by bringing into relief identity formations that have previously resisted legibility. As minoritized peoples increasingly participate in America's professional labor economy, misfit professionalism accounts for the growing diversity of minoritized experiences in the twenty-first century. [End Page 130]
leland tabares is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. His work is published in Profession, Journal of Asian American Studies, Hyphen, and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.
