“I’m being anthropologized.” A Conversation with Mark Zolun of Iraila Mediterranean Rustica 8 January 2007 8:17 pm
Posted by Tracy in : anthropology,cooking,eating,eugene,friends,interviews,people,restaurants,vegan,vegetarian , trackbackAs a project for Anth 365 (Food and Culture by Professor Geraldine Moreno-Black, fall 2006 term at the University of Oregon), I interviewed Mark Zolun, co-owner and head chef of Iraila Mediterranean Rustica in Eugene, OR. What follows is a transcription of our conversation of 28 October 2006, which I tape recorded because I knew better than to rely on handwritten notes. It’s always great to talk cook-to-cook with Mark, and that Saturday afternoon was no exception.
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Tracy: Let’s start with family and food, since that’s so central to what Iraila is about. What did you eat growing up, how did you learn to cook, and how does all this relate to the idea of family, however it may be defined?
Mark: Mom always said that she wasn’t going to force any partner that we were with to cook, so we had to learn to do it for ourselves. And food was always a commodity in the family. Any time that we took the 25-30 minutes to drive into town to my aunt’s house, it was because there was a feast going on there. As a matter of fact, my aunt got a ping-pong table not because she wanted to play ping-pong, or play anything like that, it’s the only table that was big enough to get the entire family around, that she could get her linens on. So it was, there was always just events and food, and it always amazed me too how there were really specific different foods for each special event that was going on, including confirmations, and communions, and weddings. If you didn’t have a certain cookie that they stack up with like a spun sugar thing on it, you wouldn’t be having a wedding. That always had to be on the table. So there was always event food, pretty much. And since it was Italian, and it was a big family, you know, the talking and the camaraderie thing was really, really big. And when we started with the restaurant, we knew we wanted to kind of recreate that family feeling.But also, in Europe, especially along the touristy areas, and even in some of the smaller towns, you don’t get individual seating. You’re sitting at a long banquet, you may not have to sit next to somebody, but if they’re busy, you’re going to. And it forces, you know, camaraderie. You have to get to know the people, if you’re not a total dolt [laughter] you’d have to decide to completely keep your eyes closed to the culture, to the people who were living there. Also, when we were in Egypt, it was in the time of Ramadan. And a lot of shops would actually set tables out in front, because the thing is you fast all day, and then at the end of the day you break your fast, but since you’re applying community, you’re offering extra food, so anybody who comes to your place is going to be offered a seat at the table in front. And it’s just amazing, being in this city of millions of people, and all of a sudden it’s like being in a little town, because every shop is putting their places out for dinner. So a lot of that we really wanted to start incorporating through food, food being not the thing that you’re just grabbing because you’re getting a bite quickly… the base for the restaurant was to do that. And then one day, we had two large parties that were kind of sitting back to back and we realized, they started talking, and kind of commiserating over the food and we realized if we could kind of force that, and create that experience for people, it would be a really cool thing. Boy, it’s good you got a tape recorder. [Laughter]
Tracy: The central theme, like the articles we got to read as the background for this project, were about culinary tourism. Had you ever heard that phrase before I mentioned it to you?
Mark: I actually haven’t.
T: And so, when I say that phrase, what does it mean to you? So we have a shared definition, so I don’t start talking about something and you’re like, “That’s not what it means to me at all.”
M: To me, I would assume it’s either the thrust from traveling essentially to find culture through their food. From our standpoint, I’d like it to be bringing that experience to people. One of the proudest comments I get at the restaurant is that people feel like they’ve been transported. And that’s really important to me, because there is a slightly different style, we’re introducing people to different foods, and so in that sense we’re kind of being a cultural tourism information booth. You know, so people can then find out and go do that.
Am I close?
T: That’s one. I mean, there’s a broad definition, but basically it’s about, like you said, experiencing other cultures through food, food as a vehicle for cultural understanding. It can also be learning to cook foods from other cultures, instead of just eating them. One neat example that was in one of the articles, someone had to, their kid had a school project about foreign food, and he was Irish, and he had been raised on very Irish food, and you know, it wasn’t foreign to him, but it was foreign to all her classmates, and so they did a project about that, and so it was sort of getting back to family roots, which again ties back to the family thing.
M: And as a cook, the one thing that fascinates me, you know, the typical kind of Central European sauces that I grew up with and my aunts did, you know, was always a white bechamel sauce, and those types of things, and specific things that you would use for thickeners, and then of course when you start learning about Asian cooking, and it’s all, you’re using the corn starch, well it wasn’t until we started the restaurant, that I realized… I knew there was a lot of nuts used in a lot of North African and Eastern Mediterranean countries, but didn’t realize that the reason they used nuts, they pulverize them so they become a flour and be used as a thickener. And that’s something as a, with a European base, that you just don’t get.
T: Something I read, it was in one of my cookbooks I think: that polenta, originally, was not corn, it was whatever nuts were around, chestnuts or hazelnuts, and I had no idea! You think of polenta as this kind of cornmeal thing, but obviously corn came from the New World, it couldn’t have been, the original polenta couldn’t have been this American grain, which, you know had never occurred to me. Culinary geography, I could just go on and on.
M: I actually had one customer, one time, we had a Spanish dish, and I was using poblano pepper, and they wrote me a little comment card and said, “Well, actually, poblanos aren’t Spanish,” and it’s like well, actually technically then, tomatoes, and bell peppers, you can just keep going.
T: Let’s make a list.
M: So it’s just, you know, the incorporation.
T: Especially, in sort of the southern Italian, sort of very tomato-based that people think of as Italian food. Because one of the things I love about Iraila’s, is that when you say Mediterranean, you mean Mediterranean.
M: There’s sixteen countries!
T: A lot of people, think Mediterranean, they think Italian food. And there’s so much more. And I really like that. So. That sort of brings us to geography and traveling.
Tracy: Where have you traveled, what did you eat, how much was about visiting the places that your family came from, and how much was it just about exploring new things?
Mark: A lot of it was exploring new things. We did, for one trip, we were gone for a year, traveled to 23 countries across the world. We spent 3 months in the Mediterranean region proper, and then spent an additional month in Egypt and in Turkey. Kenne [Mark's partner, Kenneth Glenn] then had been through Syria and Israel, so he was informed by some of that. And being able to be in the countries for a little bit longer, and kind of an extended time, you really got to get into the food a lot more. I had trouble at first getting Kenne to realize that… he was wanting to eat very thrifty, so getting cheap, cheap food and all that stuff. Which is fine, kind of, to begin with, but… getting him convinced that eating a good meal, or eating at a restaurant that was a local restaurant, where you had courses set up the way that they eat, and those types of things, was just as important as getting a hotel room central to the museums, or any of those kinds of things. Because, we got so much more information finding the local dives that we could go to.
I remember one time in Italy, the one guy who was with our pension couldn’t tell us what the name of the place was, he knew the family, and they had been there for I think it was like 80 years, and it’s been passed down, but it was just look for the old Pepsi sign, that used to be painted, and it’s peeling and faded on the wall, and it’s that door right next to it. Which was just brilliant. And the thing that was fascinating to me about that, when you start getting into family and culture and the whole thing, it was family run, the son was now running it, the great-grandmother was still in the kitchen, must have been about ninety-some-odd years old, but she would look at every single plate before it went out, and she would just mutter something in Italian, and it would either make it out, or they’d fluff something or do something, and that’s one of the most incredible things that I’ve been able to bring then back here is that whole attitude while you’re cooking. It is a collaborative effort, and everybody in the kitchen is working to get the best for the people out there, and I think it shows in our food, you know, that everyone’s behind it, and is realizing that you are like having someone visit your home, you want to make sure you are getting the best thing possible.
T: By the way, what generation in your family… who’s the Italian? What generation came to the States?
M: My mother’s mother was born in Italy, she was born outside of Naples, and my mother’s grandfather’s family emigrated from Sicily. And one quick side note, whenever you go to find your family’s village, make sure that you’re Google searching their village, and not your grandmother’s maiden name. [Laughs.] What you were saying about going back to some of the places, you know. We tried looking for the village that my aunt had given me, my aunt was on vacation herself and I couldn’t get in touch with her, and it wasn’t until about two weeks later that I found out that the town we were searching for was my grandmother’s maiden name. But it was interesting to me that once you start getting into certain regions, once we got into the Naples area, there was a lot of things we were like “Oh, okay…”
T: That’s what that’s about!
M: Exactly. So that was pretty cool. What was the last one you missed?
T: Let’s see… this was sort of getting to how far back was to go back to your roots, that kind of thing.
M: So my mom was first generation, which makes me second, which is kind of bizarre. And same thing on my father’s side, they immigrated though from Russia and Hungaria. But um, for some reason, that side of the family were pretty cold fish. The eating experiences there were pretty lifeless and dead and perfunctory, and you were eating a meal, you weren’t sitting around drinking wine and laughing and talking for hours and hours on end, you know. Italians, especially in Chicago, almost every single one of them has a basement. And there’s a kitchen in the basement, because you don’t want to cook upstairs when you’re having company over for the formal dining room, and when you’re having family over you’re always crowded in the basement anyway, so it’s okay that the kitchen and everything is right there. And that’s one of the things, too, with Iraila, we have a lot of family tie-ins, we have the family pictures, and a lot of that, and one of the reasons for that was too, every guy with the basement kitchen that was there has his basement bar, and you always had family members, and pictures of everybody there, and got really plastered while you were looking at them. [Laughter.]
Tracy: So, that ties into the sort of family… this is sort of the question about menu planning, sort of how the menu is sort of a mix of family favorites (by the way, your mom’s eggplant parmesan, two thumbs up) and, I’ve decided to call them “culinary souvenirs” — recipes that you bring in from other countries. So. The family style dinner this month is a really good example, because it has explicitly, this is a family recipe. And your menu always has sort of country of origin, traditions and stories behind everything.
Mark: And that’s one of the things we really… we’re not to the point yet where we’d like to be with education, but a lot of our thrust, concept is: we did get this food, we really enjoyed it, we would be, though, in Germany and think, oh my god, wouldn’t that thing we had in Egypt just taste fantastic with this? And with the restaurant, being able to incorporate all those areas we’ve been able to pull all that in.And, um, having the family recipes, I’m finding out afterwards, we just kind of jumped into this, and I really had no formal training, I did do food styling and did a few things for television, when I was doing prop mastering and art direction and all that kind of stuff on food segments that I’d do with talk shows and things, so that kind of informed a little bit of that, but a lot of it was family stuff, and I found out that in culinary school, that is the big no-no, is to do family recipes, because if you have your favorite pot roast, or your favorite lasagna, everybody’s going to be well, that’s not my family’s lasagna. But being able to kind of play with these things and introduce them from the family, what we’ve always been doing. We had one reviewer come in one time, and she kind of whispered about our gnocchi, oh you just didn’t do it right, you’re supposed to roll it on the back of a fork. Well, yes, you can do that when you’re having ten people, five people over to your house for dinner, but if you’re doing production you can’t. Plus my aunt was always cooking for eight people, and she would just dimple the gnocchi. Well, I wanted to tell her, after she told me I was doing it wrong, that I really wanted to let my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother know that they’d been doing it wrong for all these years! You know? But I think that there’s those little tricks, those little things that really inform the food.
And being on an extended trip, when we were in those countries, you were able go back to the places that you’d eaten, you know, a couple of days before, start striking up a little camaraderie with the people, we were starting to get little cooking hints and things like that, that were really, really wonderful, you know, like the perfect temperature of what a potato should be when you’re making potato gnocchi, that you’re not going to get unless you’re established, kind of warm and welcome there. And it’s been really interesting to me, because so many some people are, do you think you, you say you’re using local ingredients but you’re doing these foreign recipes. And it’s so easy to just substitute one or two things, and then because of the way our delivery systems and everything else is, I can get some of the imported cheeses, and olives, and just the base things that help create the flavor, and then use whatever we need locally, at kind of the cog end of the wheel.
T: That was…
M: Oh, I jumped ahead!
T: That was Question 6, but that’s fine. This is why I’m tape-recording, ’cause I knew I wasn’t going to turn the page fast enough. [We both laugh.] So, how do you choose what goes on the menu? I remember the last time we spoke, you said you were working on the winter menu.
M: Yeah, and a lot of the stuff that we kind of pull in, especially in Eugene — if we had this restaurant in Texas, I would have a different approach, because I could be much, much heavier with meats and things, and the meats and things we’re using are local, they’re really clean, they’re certified, I know where they’re coming from, so I feel really good about using it, but — I have to take in vegan and vegetarian choices, it would just be stupid not to. And fortunately, with the region we’re in, it’s really vegetable-centric, you know, if you can’t find a good vegetarian dish in the entire 16 countries of the Mediterranean, you’re not doing your job. So a lot of it is trying to balance to diet, that’s unique to Eugene. I don’t think that, like I said, you know, my sister lives in Texas, I wouldn’t really have to worry about a vegan choice in a Texas restaurant, but it definitely becomes a concern here. And then as a cook it gets really fun, because…. There’s like a, Persian rice is a good example — in a really traditional sense, it’s made with tons of butter, I mean it’s almost a dairy, from all the butter that’s in there. But to keep it vegan, I wanted to have another vegan choice, I just modified it slightly to do it with just olive oil. And, you know, it tastes just fine, there’s still really interesting flavors, really interesting textures, but those are the kind of modifications you can kind of play with, once you start catering to your local crowd.
People sometimes are overwhelmed by the menu, they say it’s really big, and I’d rather have a lot of things that people can jump around to. One of the nicest compliments we got was from one of my cooks’ fathers, not that he was biased or anything, but he had worked with a lot of large chains, like that do the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower, all those mega kind of corporate places, and he just couldn’t believe that we were doing the type of food, and the varied menu that we were. And he said, you know, most menus you come into, you see maybe one thing that really, ooh, and another thing you might want to come back and try. He said right off the bat there were four or five things that he had never seen before, or hadn’t seen in the way that we’re developing them, and he really was eager to want to come back and taste all those things. I think a lot of restaurants do that with specials, but I kind of like having a nice broad base for people, and then playing the specials off of that. And that’s one of the things, too, that the family style really helps me, as a cook, with. Because not only can I test market my things for potential menu adds, but I can just keep bringing in different regions, and playing different foods off each other.
I really… I don’t like fusion. I think that if you have a side dish of a certain country, and you have another main dish from a country, and they go together, that’s fantastic. But to mush four different things —
T: Don’t put them in one dish —
M: Exactly, and tower them. That’s not our approach. We do have a tag name on the restaurant, Rustica, and it’s basically because I do consider myself really sloppy. I don’t cut perfect dices, you know, we really want that kind of peasant food, where it’s what mom would be making at home, you know?
Tracy: And so, along those lines — you sort of touched on it with the idea of adapting things to vegan and vegetarian diets — do you have any other examples of foods you had to adapt to be Eugene-specific, and Iraila-specific?
Mark: Well, at Iraila specifically, I did work with Hilda, who had a lot of Latin American food, and it was interesting to me what people consider hot in the Northwest. I was in Southern California for twenty-some-odd years, so you have a definite hotter palate down there, people are used to eating a lot hotter. And that’s kind of been interesting to me, having to modify spice. There’s a few things that I didn’t, I was using Anaheim chiles, which are the mildest pepper you can get, other than a bell pepper, and people were freaking out about the heat!
T: I knew this guy from Minnesota who swore up and down that bell peppers were spicy. [We both laugh.]
M: Um, hello?
T: Yeah, you know, the guy thinks that butter is a seasoning. No, no, no. I’m like, “Sweetie…”
M: That’s amazing. That’s just amazing.
T: It really is fantastic. And again, that goes back to family background, what did you grow up eating?
M: Exactly. There’s, I can’t remember where I read it, but there was a fascist quotient, and it had I think ten different categories, and if you answered more yes on one side, you lean more towards fascism, and if you didn’t, you were on the other side, and there were one or two things that were related to food, and the more you demanded Mom’s home cooking, and not anything that varied from that, like if you wouldn’t try Asian food, or Thai food, or any kind of Indian food, and ooh, I can’t take that Cuban food, or anything the more isolated you were palate-wise, the more likely you were to be fascist, which I think is fantastic. Because I do think that the more you’re willing to experience a food from a culture, the more you can bridge over into what they’re doing and what their ?? is.
T: And that’s sort of at the heart of the culinary tourism interpretation that I’m taking is, that it’s sort of intentionally going and taking that risk. And it doesn’t necessarily even have to be another culture, it could be another way of life within the culture you’re in, that you haven’t experienced. I grew up in a town where there were a lot of Jewish kids, so I’ve been to Seder at my friend’s house, which is not something that a lot of people have experienced.
M: Right.
T: That could be interpreted as a culinary tourism thing, because you intentionally seek out the new, in the interests… for me, it’s always in the interests of learning something, experiencing something, whereas for some people I guess it’s a thrill-seeking thing or whatever, you know, see how hot you can eat, like I dare you to eat that glob of wasabi.
M: We had, quite frankly, in the early eighties a friend brought me to an Ethiopian restaurant. And it was some of the most amazingly spicy things that I had eaten. And one friend, of course, she was like, oh my god, no wonder they’re starving there, no one can eat it! It’s too spicy! Which was horrible, but there you go. [We both laugh.]
Tracy: Wow. Were there any foods that you decided you couldn’t translate to Eugene?
Mark: The one thing I do get really disappointed with, discouraged with, is the different kinds of fish that you can get, obviously in the Mediterranean, than you can get here. Just even some of the sardines, just different fresh fish like that. You walk through some of the markets in Venice, and Rome, and it’s just mind-boggling, the different amounts of seafood. That definitely, you know, you think you’re on the coast, but some of the distribution isn’t as good as it is. I was really appalled, one time I was down in and Pacific Seafood was delivering frozen fish to this restaurant we were going to eat at. And it was like, I can order from that a half-hour into town, those same things, and you guys are on the coast, you should be having this big old fish market experience. That’s one of the most difficult things for me to translate, because I just don’t get it here.
T: Cool. I was wondering, because Oregon, obviously hardly a Mediterranean climate, but we do have an amazing array of fruits and vegetables and stuff like that…
M: The produce is phenomenal. The um, especially with like the lambs and even some of the Knee Deep Cattle are really concentrating on getting some good stuff locally going.Um, you know, spicing, a few people were like, “Ohh…” y’know, and it’s just so easy now, you can get anything that you want to. And if you can’t find it, you can look on the internet, and I think that that’s really opened up a lot. Um, there’s a thing that they’re starting to talk about, I can’t remember, is it petro-miles, or —
T: Food miles.
M: Food miles, yeah. And to me, as long as your bulk is coming from close by, get that special thing that’s shipped from wherever.
T: People have always imported spices, I mean, that’s where colonization comes from, spices were one of the major historical thrusts of that. Things like coffee and wine, you know, there’s a lot of things that historically, have always traveled. But yeah, when your bread is coming from five hundred miles away, maybe you should be worried, maybe what you’re doing isn’t sustainable in the long term. But you know, spices is something else. And so I’m interested in the concept, but at the same time I think that there’s some things that people have always traded long-distance, and unless, I don’t know what could stop that. It would have to be something so catastrophic, that —
M: Yeah.
T: We’d have bigger things to worry about than, you know, the lack of good cayenne.
M: Exactly, chewing on grass with a little salt would be okay.
T: Exactly, but that’s definitely sort of an interesting concept. And again, the translation idea, that you can translate foods from one culture to whatever is available regionally.
M: Yeah, and you can do it pretty easily. There’s a Greek food supplier, Alexis, and they do like the gyros and the whole thing, all the pressed, formed meat, and I remember in Egypt there was a guy just taking slabs of beef with tomatoes, and green pepper, and red onions, and he was layering up the stack for the gyros oven, which is like a vertical oven, on the skewer, and that’s, instead of having to go oh, I’m going to do Greek food, so I have to get this pre-pressed meat that’s manufactured for me, you can just mimic what they’re doing there, and you’re getting just the same result, like that.
Tracy: Let’s see, Question 7 is: Tell me about the restaurant of your dreams. Or, it doesn’t have to be a restaurant, sort of the culinary project of your dreams, you know. If there were magic, and we could get fresh fish anywhere in the world, price is no object, and your fairy godmother says “Hey, let’s rock.”
Mark: My fantasy would be, originally before we did this concept, we were thinking of doing a yurt and breakfast, which would kind of be themed out to different countries, and then have a really varied menu. And actually have farmland where produce is being done, have our own meat that we’re growing. I would love to have stocked fish ponds — I think that’s one of the smarter things that the Romans did — you know, so that you have everything, and you’re essentially walking out and grabbing it. When we were on the Black Sea in northern Turkey, we were sitting at this one fish place, which the kid from the hotel, his father told him to take us to this place, so he gets us through these winding streets, we get to the place in Turkey, on the Black Sea, just some little tables on this platform that went over the water. And one of the local guys from town came in, oh “hi, hi, how you doing” to the owner, and everything, and the elder son then goes outside, drops a fishing line into the water, and he pulls up these little, I think they were mackerel or little sardines, and they’re like flopping on the ground as we’re eating dinner, and he scoops them up after he gets five or six of them, you know, and he just goes. And just that concept of being able to pluck your food together for the night with what’s around you.
Plus, being in a town like this, you have to do volume. You’re just not going to be able to sustain. Ultimately, if we had an inn situation like that, being able to do a dozen tables, you know, you have food available for the people staying there, but then you’re doing these just incredibly dense, complicated, intense meals, so that people are reallly having an experience from eating there. You’re not necessarily going to sustain yourself from the locals, but because you have this built-in thing from all of your visitors, but you have the opportunity for locals to go “ooh, let’s do that tonight!” you know, and I think ultimately I would really love that kind of situation, where you’re really limited but they’re just such intense meals that it’s going to stay with you when you leave.
And then for the local dream, doing some place that has organic breakfasts that are tasty, and spicy and wonderful. And also I think within that too, being able to do more cooking classes, to educate people and to let them know what things that they can work with, you know carving a leg of lamb, or getting it ready for this, isn’t a difficult thing, that working with eggplant isn’t that difficult, and you know, that you don’t have to be this salt maven to make it actually taste good. Just some of the little tricks of the trade, you know, kind of passing them on is another thing that would be great.
And also just outreach to kids, encouraging kids to get the most unusual, spiciest things that they’ve never eaten before. We had this one eight-year-old boy come in, and we have calamari on the menu. And most Americans only have fried calamari, bread me and give me a little dipping sauce. But we use just the tubes and the tentacles, and it’s in a honey-walnut sauce that is about 2400 years old. And I came out to him after, he was one of the first kids to get it, and he just loved it, and I went out and I told him, you know, we were all really impressed in the kitchen, because some adults don’t even like it, they just can’t deal with the weird calamari. And he said, “I’m gonna tell everyone that this is the best oldest food I’ve ever eaten!” And I was like, “Mmm, it’s the oldest recipe that you’ve ever eaten.” It really hit me at that point that challenging kids really young to have those food experiences makes it so much easier when they’re older, instead of getting the kid who — I had this one mother, she was really into food, she wanted to do personal cheffing, she cooked amazing things, she made you know, her own truffles, and everything else would be just this home-made stuff, but her kid ate like crap, because he just wanted sweets and she would indulge him. And it’s like, you have this repertoire, you know, why aren’t you turning him on with it?
T: I grew up, you know, my family had a food mill, whatever my parents ate, they put through the food mill, and I ate along with them. And, you know, I read a really good article, I wish I knew where it was, about how the kids menu is one of the worst ideas ever, how you should just offer half portions, which, you know, you’ve got the little taster menu, those are perfect kid dishes, because they’re little! If you look at the kids menu at any restaurant, it’s always this appalling white food.
M: Even the pasta we have is a different type of pasta, it’s a rolled pasta, so the kid is getting a different texture at least, and not just a plain macaroni and you know, whatever.
T: Right. Give them a chance to, you know, learn. And that’s true in… most European restaurants, offer a half portion.
M: Oh my god! It was so fascinating, with some friends, in Sorrento, they were from England, and they knew the guy who was in charge of the tourist board there. And so we were in his house, with his old grandmother, who had a just horrible story about dragging a 25-pound potato sack over a hill when it was Nazi-occupied, and having the potatoes taken right before she got to town to feed her kids. Amazing, amazing stuff with this woman. But we got to talking, and Kenne and I brought up binge drinking — they had no concept.
T: No concept! Yeah!
M: At all. You know, why is it such a problem? And we all came to realize, if you’re a kid sitting at an Italian table, you’re getting sips of wine.
T: You want a glass of wine, your parents —
M: — you know, they’re not pouring you martinis down your throat, but you’re introduced to it young, and so when they go off to college, it’s not this big thing. And so they don’t have that problem, which I thought was just really sad and pretty fascinating.
T: And that’s definitely very cultural, the idea that it’s forbidden. Whoa, it must be very exciting to do, I gotta try that. It is almost two o’clock, actually. I really want to keep talking.
M: I’ve got like five more minutes… [One of Mark's cooks, Carrie had walked in at this point so we went into wrapping-stuff-up mode.]
T: Oh, I wanted to say that actually, another idea of culinary tourism, sort of the idea that you can transplant, translate food from setting to setting, I thought the street food dinner was actually a really good example of that, because street food, you know, is, you eat it as you’re wandering around somewhere, you don’t usually eat it in a sit-down, restaurant setting. So sort of that kind of translation is another good example. And, once again, a chance for people to try something new.
M: Right. And the cross-cultural thing is so fascinating to me. Because basically, in that region, you’re dealing with the same kind of food. There’s only X amount of food. You know, and just seeing the different takes on it, and how they can play with it, is really fascinating to me. And that’s why pulling together some of the family dinners is really fun, to see which ones can overlap and kind of hit each other.
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That’s a good note to end on, I think, and Carrie had walked in and we just talked about scheduling and whether I would be making it to the October family dinner and how I had somehow, amazingly, managed to make it through all my typed questions and basically all that personal chitchat doesn’t need to be transcribed for posterity but I did want to end with one funny thing Mark said (which I could not resist using in the title of this transcript): “I’m being anthropologized…. Cool.”
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