Cuisines Mastered as Acquired Tastes

Only this time, the screams and tears were for harmonies of fish sauce and lime and the pulsing heat of chiles. Befitting an election year, the phrase “game changer” rippled through the blogosphere; writers and diners heaped praise on the chef’s new restaurants, Pok Pok Wing and Pok Pok NY.

But that chef, Andy Ricker, isn’t from Thailand. He flew in, instead, from Portland, Ore., where he runs a small village’s worth of kitchens.

To be sure, Mr. Ricker’s experience in the cuisine runs deep; he has cooked in Thailand for months out of every year since 1994. Still, New York already has nearly 300 restaurants run by Thais, so it is notable (and more than a little curious) that the man expected to lead the city to the papaya-salad promised land is a white chef from the Pacific Northwest.

And yet Mr. Ricker is not the only one to become a high-profile ambassador for a cuisine in which he has no family roots.

At Kin Shop in Greenwich Village, Harold Dieterle’s “contemporary reinterpretations” of Thai food, as he calls them, have won him a perennially packed dining room. The Chinese restaurateur of the moment is Ed Schoenfeld of RedFarm, a self-described “New York Jew.” Alex Stupak’s innovative presentations of Mexican flavors are making Empellón Cocina hot enough to char chiles. And for more than 20 years, America’s most renowned master of Mexican cooking has been Rick Bayless of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo in Chicago.

“For a lot of these chefs, they traveled and had meals that changed their lives,” said Ed Levine, a New York food writer and founder of SeriousEats.com. “So their food is born out of passion.”

On the other hand, he said, they can end up getting more attention than many chefs who were born into their cuisines. “It’s predictable, but maybe it’s not fair,” he said.

Mr. Ricker, who won the 2011 James Beard award for best chef in the Northwest, has mixed feelings about being cast as an emissary for Thai food. “I’d be happy if someone called me that, honestly,” he said. “But I would never make that claim myself, because in Thai society, a foreigner representing them doesn’t make sense.”

So why does it happen?

Some reasons are obvious: An American-born chef is more likely than an immigrant to have the connections and the means to grab investors or news media attention — even more so if the chef came up through a prestigious restaurant or culinary school or is quick with a witty quote.

Diners’ familiarity and comfort levels can play a part, and can even edge into prejudice. Mr. Ricker mentioned a widespread misperception in this country that restaurants with white owners are somehow cleaner than others. “It’s ridiculous,” he said.

Still, there are more complicated explanations for why these chefs find it easier to break out of the pack. One is that there may actually be advantages to learning a cuisine as an outsider.

Distance may allow a chef to explore traditions without the baggage of having to follow Mom’s recipes to the letter, even if the goal is to stay true to the original dishes. “My greatest gift is that I don’t have a Mexican grandmother,” Mr. Bayless said, “so I can look at all Mexican grandmothers as equal. If you grew up with this food, you’ll defend to the death the way your family makes a dish. So sometimes, with lots of experience, you can speak with a bit of a broader perspective.”

Mr. Ricker says his obvious foreignness helps when he asks chefs in Thailand to share their secrets. “They know I’m not their competition,” he said. “They go: ‘You’re white! How the hell can you possibly do this?’ So they get psyched to show me how they make something.”

And when it comes to selling the food, it certainly helps that American-born chefs tend to know the mainstream American audience better. Presenting a cuisine from afar is “fundamentally an act of translation,” said Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at New York University. “So you have to be attuned to two cultures. It’s a kind of bilingualism.”

On one level, that means they may have an easier time with the language — telling the story of their food, or knowing how to make obscure dishes sound sexy in menu descriptions.

But that sense of translation also carries over to flavor; these chefs can more easily intuit what might impress or intimidate mainstream customers. Frontera Grill or Pok Pok NY can serve food that is true to the original because they can choose dishes that don’t have to be diluted to appeal to their clientele.

“Shrimp paste is delicious, but superpungent, hectic,” Mr. Ricker said. “I just know it will be sent back. But I can do very close versions of specific dishes that don’t require a sense of adventure to try.”