Today’s restaurant environment includes a full array of menu mashups.

It’s been a long time coming, but fusion cuisine is finally getting the respect it deserves. Well-traveled palates, the increased availability of global ingredients and American-born chefs with immigrant parents sharing the melting-pot food they grew up on have all played a role in the growth of restaurants featuring dishes with multiple cultures represented on one plate.

While this border-blurring food isn’t new, its appreciation and abundance are.

Take, for instance, a New York Times review of Café Carmellini, a fine-dining restaurant in New York City that folds together Italian, French and English cuisine on its menu. “This is not just polylingual menu writing. Mr. Carmellini is frequently trying to cook Italian food and French food at the same time, on the same plate,” writes restaurant critic Pete Wells. “Merging the two almost completely, he comes up with a sophisticated new cuisine that belongs to him and nobody else.”

For its late-night taco omakase, Chicago’s fine-dining restaurant Cariño begins the multicourse meal with bite-sized tetelas, which are made with tortillas from masa that is nixtamalized in-house. Photo by Kelly Sandos

At Maxwells Trading, the menu represents an expression of the chefs’ varied experiences and heritages, which includes China, Korea and the city they now call home, Chicago. One of the more popular dishes at this genre-defying spot is a bruléed Japanese sweet potato served atop a Northern-style Thai curry.

And it’s no coincidence that this year’s annual Culinary Institute of America Worlds of Flavor conference in November, titled “Borders, Migration & the Evolution of Culinary Tradition,” will focus on how shifting migrations have given life to entire cuisines and new ways of seeing authenticity.

In the 1980s, fusion cuisine in the United States often referred to a mix of East and West with chefs like Wolfgang Puck in California leading the trend. But not everyone was on board with this “new” cuisine.

“I think it was due to the concept of the purity of traditional cuisines,” says John Selick, director of culinary at Dallas, Penn.-based Metz Culinary Management, of the initial pushback by some to fusion cuisine. “It wasn’t so long ago that French cuisine dominated fine dining in restaurants, and there were rules and techniques.”

Darren Tristano, CEO of Foodservice Results, has seen a similar reluctance. “Many chefs and consumers are traditional and purist in nature and as a result prefer that profiles are not blended together,” he says.

But thankfully that’s changing.

For its Street Eats monthly promotion, Metz Culinary Management often pairs recognizable dishes with those that may be new to its diners, such as this Japanese okonomiyaki that’s topped with all the ingredients of a Reuben sandwich. Photo courtesy of Metz Culinary Management“One of the misconceptions about fusion cuisine is people think there’s a right and wrong,” says Laura Lentz, FCSI, design principal at Culinary Advisors. “Personally, I think the whole point of fusion is to get outside the box, think about something new and to break down barriers.”

Fusion cuisine has also suffered from a misunderstanding that it’s less authentic than other cuisines. “There are a lot of fusion cuisines that developed simply because people have always moved around the world or were forcibly displaced,” says Mike Kostyo, vice president of Menu Matters. “Now you see a lot of people who understand that ‘fusion’ can mean a lot of things, particularly in the U.S. It can mean a chef who grew up with a Filipino mother and a Mexican father who lives in the American South and opens a restaurant that celebrates that entire background. Chefs move around, study under different chefs, fall in love with cultures and cuisines, and that’s all going to be reflected in their cooking.”

That last scenario tells the story of chef Norman Fenton and his recently opened Chicago fine-dining restaurant, Cariño, which features a Latin American-inspired tasting menu with Asian flavors and a heavy Mexican influence. A late-night taco omakase menu provides Fenton the opportunity to dive even deeper into his passion for the cuisine and ingredients of Mexico, a country he fell in love with during a nine-month road trip, which led to his working at a restaurant in Tulum and living there part-time.

To educate himself on Mexican food, Fenton would study those making it, including at his favorite taco stand in Tulum. “If you’re interested in what they are doing, these people are willing to share their experience with you,” he says. “The difference between me and a taco cart, though, is that I’ve been trained classically in French cuisine and fine dining. I have a much broader spectrum of technical support when it comes to cooking.”

For Fenton, fusion cuisine becomes more than marrying two ideas from two different cultures together. “I think a much more intelligent way to approach fusion cuisine is thinking about the culinary techniques and how you can apply them.”

For his taco omakase — a concept that enables Fenton to utilize some of the by-product from the tasting menu to offer a lower-priced option — he swaps tacos on house-made tortillas for the rice-based dishes found in the traditional Japanese-style multicourse menu. “We are basically looking at what an omakase is and the structure of the menu and then incorporating some influence and ingredients from Asia and also the rest of the world into our tacos,” he says.

These days, Lentz sees fusion cuisine as a thread in just about every project she designs. “I have plenty of projects that might have eight different stations, and one or two might be what I would call fusion or able to be fusion cuisines whether or not they choose to operate that way now,” she says. While working on a project for a hospital in Green Bay, Wis., Lentz created a concept inspired by food trucks, which includes rotating menu items such as Korean beef tacos topped with kimchi. “Street food has become such a popular thing, and that’s a big place where you see fusion cuisine rising to the top,” she says.

Street food has also influenced the menus on the projects Selick works on, which range from colleges and healthcare settings to corporate dining. One of his favorite promotions, dubbed “Street Eats,” serves food truck-style recipes and helps Metz stay on trend. “We only plan this out six months in advance so we can respond to something that comes on TikTok,” he says.

Dishes have included a take on okonomiyaki, which paired the Japanese pancake with the components of a Reuben sandwich (corned beef, sauerkraut and Thousand Island dressing), which was quickly cooked on a flattop making it easy to keep up with the demand. “It’s taking something that’s familiar and pairing with the unfamiliar to create something new,” says Selick. Build-your-own stations also provide Metz with the opportunity to weave in dishes and sauces from other countries, but in this format, diners can customize their bowls.

Street food is at the heart of Los Angeles’ Guerilla Tacos, which got its start as a food truck in 2012. Brittney Valles, managing partner and operator, describes the popular restaurant as the intersection between Mexican food and L.A. that celebrates the city’s diverse cultures. “We are very blessed here in that we are a stone’s throw from all the world’s best cuisines,” she says.

Showcasing inventive tacos is what Guerilla Tacos does best. Take, for instance, the lomo saltado taco, which spotlights a favorite Peruvian dish in taco form. A tostada looks to Hawaii for its topping of spicy mayonnaise-infused poke.

But with innovation comes education. At Guerilla Tacos that means both for the untraditional Mexican food it serves and the higher price points. “Even still in 2024 people struggle with the idea that Mexican food isn’t always going to be the cheapest you can get,” she says. “That is a big stereotype we struggle with.”

Fusion’s Impact on the Back of the House

For Lentz, one major back-of-the-house change has been that she’s designing less for a specific cuisine type but rather for the preparation or assembly of food. “When I was first designing, we would have done an Italian station or even a more specific pasta station,” she says. “Now we see the words ‘action’ or ‘exhibition’ instead.”

Started as a food truck and now in a brick-and-mortar space, L.A.’s Guerilla Tacos isn’t afraid to mix flavors from various cuisines and countries in its inventive tacos. Photo by Joseph N. DuarteHer response is to create basic designs that are simultaneously flexible and specific. She aims for 80% flexible with about 20% to 30% of the design geared toward a specific cuisine concept or blending of cuisines. “It’s important to get a good balance between making something that can transform over the life of a design and project, but also meet the needs of what the client is trying to do.”

Finding that balance can be tricky. “A Chinese kitchen needs high-flame burners for wok cooking, while a Neapolitan pizza concept needs a wood-burning oven,” says Kostyo. “For an operator that is offering up a lot of fusion dishes, they may be looking to incorporate this equipment into their operation because they want to feature items in an authentic way, but they also want to know they are getting their money’s worth and can use them in a wide range of ways.”

At Cariño, Fenton has sourced a collection of traditional, ancestral Mexican cooking tools, including a tabletop masa grinder, a molcajete and a clay comal, handmade in Oaxaca for cooking tortillas. “It’s important to us that we are being as — I don’t want to say authentic because we are far from authentic — but as traditional as possible within our terms of our concept,” he says.

A fusion cuisine-based menu also does away with any preconceived notions about a foodservice operator. “While before you may have seen that an operator is an Italian concept and you would have a good idea of what’s on the menu, what they are ordering and what equipment they may need, today that pizza place might be doing Korean BBQ and crab Rangoon pizzas,” adds Kostyo.

With the increase in ingredients that fusion cuisine demands comes a need for more storage and refrigeration. “It puts some pressure on inventory systems where foodservice managers need to procure food from many more sources than they did before,” says Lentz.

As it continues to grow, fusion cuisine isn’t without its challenges. “American consumers’ flavor palates have not evolved at the same speed to meet the growth in fusion cuisines,” says Tristano. “As a result, fusion will have to continue to put a new spin on traditional items and allow consumers to take small steps toward more complex flavor profiles.”

But there are opportunities too. “At the end of the day, making a dish is an act of innovation and creation, so any chef needs a lot of tools in their toolbox to work with when creating new dishes,” says Kostyo. “Learning from other cuisines helps you amass those tools over your career if you do it in a respectful way.”