What Is Asian Fusion Food? A Straight Answer

“Asian fusion” has been used to describe so many menus that it has stopped carrying much information. It gets applied to genuinely inventive kitchens and to places whose only qualification is having both sushi and pad thai on the same page.

Here is the definition worth using, and how to tell the real thing from a kitchen hedging its bets.

The useful definition

Asian fusion means two or more culinary traditions combining inside a dish. Not on a menu. Inside a dish.

That single distinction does most of the work. A restaurant serving Vietnamese pho, Korean bibimbap and Japanese katsu is running three cuisines in parallel, each intact. That is pan-Asian. Useful, popular, not fusion.

A restaurant putting fried chicken inside a steamed bao bun has made something that belongs to neither tradition on its own. That is fusion.

Pan-Asian, fusion, and modern Asian

• Pan-Asian: several Asian cuisines side by side, unmixed. The dishes are recognisable to someone from each country.
• Fusion: traditions combined within dishes. The result is recognisable to nobody as traditional, which is the point.
• Modern Asian: usually a single tradition cooked with contemporary technique and presentation, without crossing cuisines at all.

Why “but is it authentic” is the wrong question

Fusion attracts a specific criticism: that it dilutes real cooking. It is worth taking seriously and it mostly does not survive contact with food history.

Consider Nepal, which is a useful case because it sits where India, Tibet and China meet. Momos arrived from Tibet. Chowmein arrived from China. Chilli arrived in Asia from the Americas via Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, which means no Asian cuisine had a hot curry before then. Every one of those is now completely naturalised.

Fusion is not the opposite of tradition. It is how traditions are made, observed at a stage before anyone has stopped noticing.

The real distinction is not fusion versus authentic. It is whether the cook understands both sides of what they are combining, or is guessing.

How to spot the lazy version

Four fairly reliable tells:

1. The menu is enormous. Forty items across six cuisines means the kitchen is hedging. Nothing that long is cooked from scratch.
2. An ingredient appears with no argument for it. Wasabi in a mayonnaise for no reason other than it being recognisably Asian. Ask what problem it solves; if there is no answer, that is the answer.
3. Every dish is fused. A kitchen that understands both traditions usually also serves several things straight, because some dishes are already finished. Total fusion is a sign of a concept rather than a cook.
4. The fusion is only in the naming. “Katsu-style burger” that is a crumbed chicken burger. The words changed; the food did not.

What good fusion looks like

Each element earns its place by doing something the alternative could not. Take a fried chicken bao bun, since it is the clearest example.

A steamed bao is soft and slightly sweet, and it collapses around a filling rather than compressing it, which keeps a piece of fried chicken crisp longer than a dense burger bun does. The sweetness works against the salt of the coating. Slaw brings acid and crunch. Every part is there for a mechanical reason, and the fact that the bun is Chinese and the frying technique is American is incidental to why it works.

Same logic with Nepali dried buffalo through Chinese wok noodles: sukuti is intensely savoury and chewy, and a hot dry wok is the cooking method that suits it best. The combination is not novelty, it is a fit.

Nepali cooking as a fusion cuisine

Nepal is a good illustration of the whole argument. Its food is South Asian in its lentils and curries, Tibetan in its dumplings and noodle soups, and Chinese in its stir-fries, and no Nepali finds that combination remarkable.

The spicing is what naturalised the borrowings. Momos became Nepali when they were filled with buffalo and served with tomato achar rather than a soy dip. Details in what are momos and the history of momos.

Where we sit

We describe Snax as Asian fusion in Auckland CBD, so it is fair to hold us to the definition above.

A good part of the menu is not fused at all. Momos, sekuwa, thukpa and sadheko are cooked as they are cooked in Nepal, because they are already finished dishes. Burgers and fish and chips are straightforwardly Kiwi.

The fusion sits in a handful of deliberate places: the fried chicken bao bun, meat on chips where sekuwa-style grilled meat goes over chip-shop fries, and buff sukuti chowmein. Three or four dishes with an argument behind them, rather than a concept applied to everything.

Judge for yourself. The menu is here, and you can order for pickup from Commerce Street.