Swallowing Our Cultural Differences

Talk about eating disorders -- just think about restaurants like Chi-Chi's, Benihana and Olive Garden. Not that these restaurants are the only examples of this kind of natively authentic phony foreign cuisine, and not that there's anything wrong with the food, necessarily. Because there isn't -- for the most part.

The question is why. Why do Americans want to eat this stuff in the first place? Why eat this faux-ethnic food instead of something else, whether ours or theirs, that would be "better" or else "more authentic"?

Take Chi-Chi's (any Chi-Chi's) for example. A sunny Sunday at noon; plenty of church folks having a meal. So you join them, order a cranberry margarita, then maybe some Mexican spring rolls for a starter. Funk-a-delic elevator music plays on the sound system. You order an enchilada combination.

"The enchilada is the oldest known Mexican food," the glossary on the back of the menu advises.

Maybe the enchilada is the oldest known Mexican food, but what about the stuff on the plate; is it really Mexican? Does anybody think it is?

By way of comparison -- sort of -- there's the more authentically staged fakery of the Benihana Japanese steak house chain. If Chi-Chi's is conducting a kind of salsa diplomacy, making the NAFTA world south of the border comprehensible as appealingly deracinated food categories, then Benihana is about something else.

In the context of our Yo-Quiero culture (as in "Yo quiero Taco Bell"), this is just another way of skinning the Other's cat, another way of eating the concerns that are eating us.

"Sushi bar or steak house?" the young Asian host asks at the door, and if you pick steak, you end up sitting at a communal table with maybe five or six strangers, arranged in a horseshoe around a central grill. You sip your drink, taking the measure of your tablemates. Then the chef appears, who is going to prepare dinner for all of us, simultaneously.

"Tempanyaki," the guy sitting next to me says, deciding to break the ice, at least I think that's what he says. He's trying to explain what kind of place this is: "It's an imitation of a kind of restaurant that Americans would like in Japan."

Turns out the guy, who's having dinner with his two little boys, has spent several years in Japan, can even speak the language. He says "hello" in Japanese to the chef, who by now is putting on the Samurai-Edward Scissorhands show that maybe you've seen in TV commercials. He slices and dices; he whisks the tails off shrimp, flipping them up into the crown of his chef's toque. The kids are loving this.

"Spaghetti," my native informant says, explaining that the house specialty, which I've ordered, is like "peasant food."

The inscrutable chef now breaks his silence. "Hot dogs," he says, correcting my informant. "Like hot dogs."

What I want to know is why this food, and why this place, when there's food of our own to eat -- burgers and Coney dogs, pizza and barbecue -- not to mention the other kinds of food commonly referred to as "foreign," as in "foreign bodies," of the sort the Heimlich maneuver is meant to save people from, when things get stuck going down the wrong way. (Not all foreigners are equally relevant as food -- Chinese and Poles, Koreans and Indians, for instance. If there's nothing about them, politically, that's eating us, then we needn't bother eating them back.)

So Benihana is a cultural Heimlich in reverse. We're not choking things up, but chugging them down, devouring all that disorderly Japanese stuff that might otherwise confuse us or threaten our sense of well-being: stuff about those people we just can't seem to figure out, with their well-made cars and incredible SAT scores, and their crazy ideas about work and savings accounts. What we're dealing with, in other words, is not so much food as a concept.

And when it comes to concepts, the Olive Garden is the smartest of American "foreign" food purveyors because it is the most fully conscious, although calculated might be a better term. There's no myth of origins here, like there is at Chi-Chi's, no grasping at ethno-authentic straws, like our Japanese chef at Benihana. This is all-American phoniness at its market-researched best.

It took General Mills seven years to come up with Olive Garden. And it worked. By the 1980s, this had become America's fastest growing full-service "concept," which is how corporate management refers to its restaurants. And concept is what this place is selling. Not quantity and price and consistency (about on the level of a Stouffers frozen dinner). Those you could find at other places too.

But those places are not special the way Olive Garden is special. Not just because it's "full service," but because it's "Italian." Just like The Godfather was Italian, which came out in 1972, when General Mills was trying to figure out what "concept" Americans would want to devour next. Then along came that cooking scene. Remember it? When Clemenza gives the impromptu lesson about making tomato sauce. Right there, that's when Italians -- Hollywood Italians -- became the people of family and food, the people of roots.

So naturally we'd want to eat with them, especially when we're feeling a little millennially rootless and homesick ourselves. That's what makes this place a concept more than a restaurant, just like Chi-Chi's and Benihana are concepts.

In the end, it's not food we're eating, but the concept of authenticity itself. That's what's being gobbled like so many breadsticks at Olive Garden. That's what's getting carried home to be microwaved in those little Styrofoam containers.

We allow ourselves to believe in the reality of the fake so we can enjoy the superior feeling of having mastered it. And what better way to do that than by eating. Not food in some funky little mom-and-pop authentic joint, which wouldn't be relevant at all. But our version of what their food would taste like if they ever perfected it conceptually. That's what's on the plate at Olive Garden.

And is it a good idea? Of course it is. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. It's where America comes the most vividly to life, when we're eating the things we aren't.