 And following Elendicoff is like being a shitty garage band following Led Zeppelin. There's just nothing that can be done about it. And on behalf of my profession I would like to apologize for New York. It was really odd. New York has this thing that when anybody comes in from out of town with some kind of big reputation they've got to knock them to size, right? So like Frank Gehry, the world's greatest architect, comes in, yeah, I'm going to design a museum, and the press is like, not so fast, Frank. Then you have somebody like, you know, Alex Rodriguez, one of the greatest baseball players the world has ever known and greatest drug abuser, and comes in and is like, yeah, we don't really care about your five MVPs. You know, what are you going to do for the Yankees? And I think it was that way with, you know, Dukas, that it's like his, you know, his Michelin stars and his head was up there like a big fat pitch to be knocked at, knocked around. He was given, I think, zero stars by the post and one half star by the Daily News and the New York Times made joke after joke. And I was the New York critic for Gourmet at the time. And I was just astonished by the food. There was nothing that had ever been like remotely that quality in the United States before. There was, I mean, maybe people are used to it now, but things like the pigeons were strangled instead of bled out. So that, you know, every bit of juice and every bit of flavor was in it. That the vegetables were cooked in, you know, so many different stages that you didn't know that there were that many levels that could come out of a zucchini. That there was a dessert of a sort of chocolate fondue with like sugared croutons of such extreme bitterness that I wrote about it that it would probably make children cry if they came across it. It would be like the aversion method of chocolate to wean everybody off of it. But it was an extraordinary restaurant. It was a fearless restaurant. It did things for the sake of them being the best, for the flavors being the most that they could be, not for the fanciness of the preparation or the astonishing strong flavors in the sauces, but for the fact that finally here was somebody in the United States who was taking the time to not only find the best halibut, to hire the best chefs to cook the halibut, but to cook the halibut exactly the way it should be so that it wasn't like wet paper anymore. Every flake of the fish almost felt alive in your mouth. It was as if you were eating something like that for the very first time. And we're all very lucky, and I'm very proud to be in the same profession that he is. Sorry, I know we just got through our due cost workshop, but I'm still a little... On my way over here to Copenhagen a couple of days ago, I spent six hours or so in the transit lounge of the Moscow airport. Which was the area where the secret stealer Edward Snowden spent so much time just a few months ago. And for those of you who have never thought much about the Moscow airport, I can assure you that it is a fascinating culinary environment. There are two kinds of restaurants there. There are coffee bars, the same coffee bar that repeats one and two, and then between every two coffee bars there are branches of TGI Fridays, which is an extremely tired American restaurant that I think had its last purpose as a singles bar in about 1978. And the two outlets alternated so regularly, coffee, coffee, TGIF, coffee, coffee, TGIF, coffee, coffee, TGIF, it was almost like a DNA sequence. A DNA sequence containing lots of pre-wrapped cake that contains everything that was wrong with cooking in the world right now. Anyway, at the end of this DNA sequence, at the end of this very long terminal, was a nominally Russian cafeteria called Something Like Mamas, which served things like borscht and pachysblini and completely inedible sausages as big as fence posts. There was one slice on this grizzly hotline left of something that the cafeteria had labeled herring and fur. Me being me, I got it. I should probably point out that while I am of Russian Jewish descent, I own a couple dozen Russian cookbooks and have eaten at most of the Russian restaurants in the United States or at least a fair percentage of them, I had never before set foot in Russia. This herring and fur was to be my first bite of food cooked by Russians for Russians in Russia. And I had no way of knowing whether the vivid pink concoction, which is basically potatoes layered with herring and drifts of beets that were grated with horseradish, was a Moscow nursery standard or it was something that the cook had just found in Woman's Day. The dish was attractive in an odd sort of way, especially compared to the grizzly chicken legs and the none-too-recently-fried pierogi. The gilding of sieve-yagel yolk on top was a nice touch and it tasted okay. Ten years ago, it probably would have stopped there. I would have eaten the snack, I would have made a joke or two about its preposterous sauce on a postcard or something and have forgotten about it by the time I boarded the connecting flight to Copenhagen. But this is 2013 and the Wi-Fi in the Moscow airport is excellent. And my joke about the herring and fur went out on Twitter where, through the magic of retweeting and retweeting, it was seen by a couple million people instead of the two or three who might have seen the postcard. Several of these people pointed out that the dish more properly apparently called herring under fur was a common, if widely unloved, Russian-composed salad. This turned out to be perfectly true. A quick Google search turned up thousands of recipes for herring under fur. And one of the respondents even noted a restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin that was actually named after the dish. This leads me in an odd way to the subject of authenticity, as it says under my lovely visage. Do I look like that? Was this herring under fur authentic? Was it delicious? Did it matter? In the days before the internet became a panopticon, the equivalent of Borges Aleph, misunderstanding, culinary misunderstanding, was a powerful spice. A botched reading of old Chinese manuscripts in the 700s led to the sluggish of beautiful catter-walling of traditional Japanese music. Renaissance-era Florentine scholars misread Greek treatises on the complete drama, and they ended up creating opera. Monteverdi came out of that. Monteverdi was one of the scholars. Botched translations of a piquius led to several of the less good tropes of Neuvel cuisine in the 80s. And in the very recent history of United States cuisine, it has been possible to present, quote-unquote, Sichuan cooking by and for people who would have trouble finding Sichuan on a map. Cantonese people mostly. Dishes invented, there are half in recent memory, been dishes invented by Michelin-starred chefs in San Sebastian being presented as originals by chefs replicating these dishes in New York. It is no longer possible. It is no longer possible for a chef in Chicago to serve a plate of scraped raw meat sauded with wood sorrel without somebody pointing out that the inspiration may not have been completely original. In my hometown of Los Angeles, which is home to more Mexicans than Guadalajara, as well as vast... as well as vast communities of Salvadorans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Peruvians, Filipinos, and the Cambrian community deep and complex enough as a decent prefecture of soul, a chef in a non-Sichuan restaurant serving a Sichuan dumpling is likely to encounter a customer who has just eaten a spicier, silkier dumpling made by a recent emigrant from Chengdu. And a Korean-influenced short rib stew at an expense-account restaurant is likely to compare unfavorably to the one you had last week in Koreatown. You can, if you're a chef, make pho with completely prime organic pastured beef, with organic onions blackened in a silver-plated pan, and with basil lovelily grown on the slopes of an extinct volcano. But if you as a chef do not feel the noodles in your fingers, the beef noodle soup will taste flat. You can prepare your ceviche with a finest quality bluefin. Please don't use bluefin. It's going extinct. But if you... Pará, no bluefin. But if you're doing... But if you're making that kind of ceviche because all the cool kids are making ceviche, you might as well be using the cantuna fish from your kid's sister's unloved school lunch. The best Dantanmian tacos, tiradito, paratas, pickled herrings, fufu with a goosey, vadavan curry and bunny chow probably comes from the country of origin, or the exact region of origin, where the dish evolved in exquisite concordance with the culture, the weather and the land. Second best is probably the same food made by expats fabricating a sense of home for people much like themselves. Something like... like undegu jorim, a spicy Korean cod-fair soup cooked for Mr. Kim because he has always had it on Wednesday for lunch, and he will always have it for Wednesday for lunch, and it had better taste like home to him. That's why you're there. But cuisine has never been static, and the idea of authenticity is a constantly moving target. Coleman Andrews talks about a particular Genoese ravioli that includes cow udder as one of its ingredients. The cow udder in Genoa is probably in there because it's cheap, because it's readily available, because it's a part of the cow that's not used that much, so people want to get rid of it. And... it has all things going on, as well as like a texture and a particular sort of lovely rubbery texture, if you like rubbery textures. If you're trying to recreate the dish in California or New York, where you have to special order cow udder, because while every cow that's sent to slaughter presumably has a udder, precisely none of them come to market, except as beef byproducts and cat food probably. It becomes something different. It becomes something you actually have to put special effort into instead of having it be a Tuesday night dish. It becomes luxurious instead of something every day. Even if the taste of the dish is exactly identical to the Genoese original, it's something completely different. Something has changed. Something has been lost. In a lot of Italy, whose cuisine is so intimately associated with the tomato, tomatoes were considered impossibly vulgar well into the 20th century, still parts of northern Italy that refused to use tomatoes. Thai cooking existed for centuries before the chili was introduced in the 19th century. And it's impossible to think of Thai cuisine without chilies right now. There's a lot more back and forth than is commonly acknowledged. I mean, Beijing's beef noodle soup craze a few years ago was kicked off by a Chinese American who learned his trade in the LA suburb San Fernando Valley and brought the San Fernando Valley noodles to Beijing where they became a huge hit. The snow-top bun, which is a standard at every dim sum restaurant in the world now, was developed at a restaurant in Toronto. In Seoul, Korea, it is easy to find LA-style Galbi short ribs, a jigae soup made with hot dogs, spams, American cheese, and prefab ramen noodles, and a kind of tofu stew that was not invented in Los Angeles but was popularized there. Things go back and forth all the time. All those dishes are as Korean as kimchi, yet as Los Angeles as Korean taco. Often when food is referred to as inauthentic, the proper follow-up question may be intoauthentic to whom? California Mexican cooking, even Orange She's intensive Tex-Mex cooking are not inauthentic Mexican food. They are authentic representations of Chicano culture, of Chicano cuisine, which is something different. And while, in a sense, authenticity is the most important thing in the culinary world, that sense of grounding, that sense of flavors, that sense of everything coming alive in a way that could happen nowhere else on earth than where the dish originated, authenticity is simultaneously not important at all because if the opposite of authenticity, the drive to take flavors and techniques and the soul of traditional cooking and make them thoroughly and unequivocally your own has brought us the Kogi taco, the splendid mission Chinese food we had for lunch, and Momofuku's bosom, which is better than the traditional Korean version to the extent that a slow-roasted chili rub pork shoulder is better than a slab of plain-boiled pork belly, then I'll take that kind of authenticity too because it amuses me to be in this, before this audience, and talk about this particular subject. I'll finish by talking a little bit about my favorite totem of culinary authenticity in America, which is to say, spam. That pinkly-glistening corn pork shoulder that is the proudest culinary product of southern Minnesota. As I've said, not just the mainstay of the Midwestern diet, but a star of the Korean budae-chigae, which is a spitting cauldron of superheated liquid ejecting droplets of superheated liquid ejecting droplets of orange goo and puffs of sulfurous steam, sometimes translated as army-based stew because it was supposed to originated from what people could catch from army bases around Itaewon and Seoul. It is a souvenir of the impoverished years after the Korean War. In Hawaii, still in the United States, you have to try Spam Musubi, triangular bricks of vinegared sushi rice stuffed with shiny bricks of Spam and rolled into sheets of dark green seaweed. You buy Spam Musubi in gas stations and at the 7-Eleven. There is culinary culture at the 7-Eleven. You just have to look past. In some Japanese restaurants, you can find spaghetti with Spam. You can find Spam donuts and Spam burgers practically anywhere. Spam is like nothing else in the world of cured meats. It's clawing and sweetly porky. Salty, fatty food manufactured for and revered by folks for whom salty, fatty food was once an unobtainable luxury. What were the Melanesians and remote cargo cults hoping for when they built palm frond replicas of American warplanes? Spam. Lots of Spam. Spam from Heaven. In some of the more civilized corners of the Pacific, people are said to eat an average of a can of Spam per person per day. I've been told that this is no longer the truth for American Samoa, but I like to believe that it's so. On the other hand, I'm neither Samoan nor from Minnesota, and Spam is not necessarily among my favorite meats. But I did once sit through an eight-course menu of Spam prepared by California's best-regarded Filipino Hawaiian chef. There were skewers of grilled Spam dusted with sesame, spears of tempered fried Spam, with asparagus, Spam wrapped sea scallops, little blocks of Spam tethered to sushi-sized blocks. Of crunchy caramelized rice. Spam carpaccio was better than I thought it might be. Sin slices of Spam brushed with the sticky sauce and garnished with sprigs of foie gras. The next course was good, too, which was charcoal-grilled on-dive strewn with clumps of blue cheese and broiled little batonette of Spam. It was kind of like a Tongan equivalent of a country salad. At this point in the meal, most of the restaurant became aware that we were eating an all-Spam meal. Other diners drifted over to the table to see what was up, as if we were the guys eating earthworms on Fear Factor. Nobody asked for a bite. Then came a plate of open-faced Chinese dumpling stuff with Spam and rock shrimp, and bowls of arroz caldo, which is a Filipino kind of rice porridge, which was dressed with a few shreds of sauteed bok choy and Spam. And a Spam Wellington, which is exactly what it sounds like. An entire can's worth of Spam baked in pastries with foie gras and a du sel of shiitake mushrooms. The outside was decorated like a Spam can in pastry. The dish was so revolting in its native pinkness that even I was done. Was the Spam Wellington authentic? I'll leave that up to you.