Category: Santa Fe

Fusion cuisine.  The term often makes the most stodgy of purists cringe.  Even those among us with the most liberal of palates have been known to cower at its mention.  All too often, fusion cuisine is a loosely defined excuse for restaurateurs to unleash any number of unnatural flavor combinations upon the chaste, unsuspecting taste buds of diners seeking a memorable meal.  Like a shotgun culinary marriage, felonious acts have been perpetrated in the name of fusion, with disparate exotic ingredients forced together by the imagination of sadistic chefs. It would be impossible, however, to dismiss fusion cuisine entirely.  In one respect or another, much of the food we eat is a product of fusion.  There is no one national cuisine entirely self-contained and isolated.  Food is a work in progress–always adapting, always assimilating, always evolving.  Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in the melting pot that is America where the influence of immigrant cuisine from throughout the world has resulted in a true fusion of culinary cultures, where the sum of the whole is more delicious than the cuisine of each culture individually. Over the centuries–through brutal conquests, peaceful immigration and mutually beneficial trade–Southeast Asian nations in close…