As an accompaniment to its September issue, Bon Appétit magazine posted an article online called “PSA: This Is How You Should be Eating Pho,” along with a video featuring Tyler Akin, chef/owner of Stock, a Philadelphia Vietnamese restaurant. Akin happens to be white.
In the video, Tyler shows viewers a non-traditional way of using chopsticks to eat slippery rice noodles and offers up some other pho eating tips.
“I do not put hoisin and sriracha in my soup,” he says into the camera. “If the cook or chef or owner or whoever sees you dump your hoisin and sriracha in your soup before you’ve even tasted your broth? It hurts.”
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This video was not received well. Especially by Asian viewers who were offended that a white guy was telling them how to eat the food they’d grown up eating. They also made it clear that he didn’t know what he was talking about.
Pho culture
Angry Yelpers rushed to give Stock one star reviews and rip him to shreds online and Bon Appétit has since taken down the video, changed the headline of the article and issued a long apology.
I found out about all this from Taylor Hoang, owner of the local Pho Cyclo restaurants, who wrote me to say she was upset by the video.
“I think the audience was offended by the title of the article,” Hoang says. “It said, ‘This is how you should be eating pho.’ Taking something that has existed for many, many years, in a culture with a lot of history, and then making it into your own and Americanizing it, and owning it, and not giving credit back to the culture of which the people struggled so hard to bring it to this country.”
“That’s part of the immigrant story,” she said. “That’s how pho was introduced, right? They had no other means of making a living and what they do know is their ethnic food. It took, basically, 30 years before pho became a mainstream dish and talked about in the media. So discrediting all of that is very hurtful.”
Hoang wonders why Bon Appétit chose to feature a Caucasian-owned Vietnamese restaurant when there are thousands of immigrant-owned pho and Vietnamese restaurants around the country.
“The perception is that Asian restaurants aren’t good enough to be featured in Bon Appétit,” she said. “You know, they took the easy route featuring him because the fear is always the language barrier, the cultural barrier. But there are multiple ways you can get around it.”
“I think the harm in it is it stereotypically places Asian restaurants in a category of not being at the top,” Hoang said. “Even though they could have great food, great ambiance, but we’re never good enough to compete at the top with American-born chefs.”
Hoang doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with a white chef cooking Asian food and even straying from the traditional recipes. She thinks cooking is about creativity. In this case, she doesn’t blame the chef — she blames the magazine for its portrayal of pho.
“I think everyone has a right to appropriate another culture’s dish as long as you do it in a way that is respectful,” Hoang said.
On its website, Bon Appétit has taken full blame for the misstep and said:
We misrepresented the chef (who is not Vietnamese), by putting him out there as a pho authority, something he never claimed to be. Instead, he's someone who was kind enough to give us a day of his time so we could film a video in his small, independently owned restaurant, opening himself up to an avalanche of criticism. He is not the one to blame—that's on us for not doing our diligence as writers, editors, and video producers.
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