LEO's Eats with Robin Garr
Hey, when did fusion cuisine stop being a thing?
It seems like only yesterday - well, OK, maybe it was the '80s and '90s - when top chefs had everyone oohing and aahing over such multicultural goodies as Wolfie Puck's smoked salmon and caviar pizza at Beverly Hills' Ma Maison or Jean-Georges Vongerichten's pricey Thai-French mash-ups at his almost-eponymous Vong restaurant in New York City.
It didn't take long for Louisville to get into the act, and some of our own top chefs, including Seviche's Anthony Lamas with his pan-Latino creations and Ed Lee with his Korean-Southern-all-over-the-place inspirations, eagerly embraced the muse to fuse.
But what has fusion done for us lately? Vongerichten oversees what may be the priciest chain operation in the world. Puck went corporate, too, but his lower-price, faster-food chain was last seen slinking out of Louisville's downtown Convention Center without a word of farewell, the space now filled with a police mini-station on watch for roving gangs.
Louisville's fusion chefs, though, joined by many more (including the noteworthy restaurant brothers Steven and Michael Ton of Basa, Doc Crow's and La Coop), are still going strong. It's just that you don't hear them using that particular f-word much anymore.
After all, what's new about fusion? Sure, trendy '80s chefs gave it a name and a boost, but people have been "fusing" food as long as there have been hungry people who travel. The Portuguese took fried goodies to Japan, and before long, the Japanese were happily munching tempura. The Italians brought tomatoes home from the New World and noodles from China, but that doesn't make spaghetti with marinara sauce one bit less Italian.
In short, we got along without fusion before we met fusion, and we can get along without fusion now. Our best chefs will just keep on putting good flavors together in creative new ways, without worrying about where they came from or whether anyone ever put those flavors together on a plate before, and the rest of us will keep on chowing down and going, "Mmm, mmm."
I can't think of a better poster figure for this movement than Chef Peng Looi, who's been feeding us fusion for 20 years or more at his popular restaurants Asiatique and August Moon. It's a gig that comes naturally to a guy from Malaysia, a tropical Asian food paradise where, he says on the August Moon website, "there is an exciting panoply of ingredients and cuisines."
From Asiatique's original location in St. Matthews (near, as Louisville tradition has it, the place where the big Sears store used to be), to its current stylish venue in the Highlands (where the old Cherokee Dairy used to be), Peng Looi has created memorable dishes that fuse the flavors of Malaysia, Southeast Asia, China, the Americas and beyond.
Read the full review on LouisvilleHotBytes,
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/asiat ... nt-a-thing
and in LEO Weekly:
http://leoweekly.com/dining/asiatique-d ... %99t-thing
Asiatique Restaurant
1767 Bardstown Road
451-2749
http://asiatiquerestaurant.com
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Asiatiqu ... 1190791926
Robin Garr's rating: 92 points
