“The diners need to just start understanding that we’re cooking our experiences, not our ethnicities.”
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But lately, a new crop of restaurants and pop-ups has begun serving not just fusion, but aggressive, weird, troll-y fusion that’s also thoughtful, being incredibly well received, and actually good. There is cheeseburger arancini, Big Mac pizza, pastrami tacos, tandoori spaghetti, masala cheesesteaks, and biscuit and gravy pierogies. There’s cajun red beans and rice on nachos and chorizo and queso on popcorn.
Pastrami tacos and tandoori spaghetti make sense to me but I don’t really want to try the rest.
cheeseburger arancini are good (“rice balls” are a good blank drawing board to combine with many different and unusual ingredients) - same with pizza (but those creations aren’t really new, e.g. we had big mac pizza in Boston 5+ years ago
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Big Mac Pizza. Pastrami tacos. Masala cheesesteaks…
… I know stoner thinking when I see it.
Seriously. For all the discussion of authenticity and appropriation and who gets to cook what (all worthy topics), I genuinely wonder if growing societal acceptance of cannabis use has allowed some of these folks to actually follow through on their "“dude… know what sounds AWESOME right now?” thoughts, knowing that there’s a whole cadre of like-minded potential customers who only need to hear “Chorizo queso popcorn” in order to start throwing money their way.
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We all have our whack secret food combinations, don’t we? Hard to fight your palate. Culinary fusion confusion is ongoing. Blame such proselytizers as Guy Fieri and such shows as Chopped. Love the part where these dishes prepared with dissonant ingredients are actually judged by a chef hierarchy that would never use the same…
In addition to that, YouTube is full of stunt cooking. There is also this awful trend on Facebook on gross out cooking. It the most obvious money grab ever since they purposely make the videos long to plug in as many ads as possible…. TikTokers are now using them for reaction videos. 
https://www.instagram.com/reel/ChNKl-EOpaE/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=