My wife Amy and I recently dined at a Brooklyn restaurant in tune with the establishment's hipster neighborhood's atmosphere. The Mexican-Thai hybrid, small plate menu included some excellent, imaginative dishes and a roster of sipping tequilas and mezcals. However, while we were dining, a question kept gnawing at me. The various offerings were concepts based upon an independent approach to ingredients rather than one anchored in national, regional, or local cooking. In effect, the restaurant provided stateless cuisine, in which its Mexican and Thai elements were deconstructed and transformed into something quite different from preparations one could reasonably expect to find in, say, Oaxaca or Chiang Mai.
Why stateless? Well, the restaurant's food was disengaged from the psychological and practical motivations that form the foundations of those countries' respective cuisines. What my wife and I enjoyed at the Brooklyn restaurant struck us as unconnected to either country's homestyle cooking, vendor food, or even their internationalized dishes. The people in those nations are disinclined to fiddle with their traditional fare. Their food is the equivalent of their culinary passport, with the name of their country proudly embossed in gold on the document's front cover.
Stateless cuisine, on the other hand, abhors passports. It demands an identity that defies borders and appeals to worldly tastes. In that way, the kitchen wizards at the Brooklyn restaurant share the perspective of those super-rich characterized as "stateless." The term, in this case, means these golden few simply live where they please, have assets where needed, and feel disinclined to anchor their outlook and preferences to a particular region.
Like it or not, we now live in a world where soulless data is often the ultimate, border-free currency. The super-rich are among those riding this conceptual wave. Unconsciously, our tastes (and those of the super-rich) drift into tangible manifestations of this reality. It's not difficult to envision how the shifting of formerly anchored culinary choices into a suggestion of those sensibilities leads to the development of a supra-national dish --"stateless" cuisine. This food, and its reflection of an unarticulated
zeitgeist, seems a smooth fit for the self-conscious hipster community where the Brooklyn restaurant was located. You didn't have to be super-rich to dine there; you just had to engage with an outlook that is at once curious, borderless, confidently self-contained, and disconnected from historical and social context.
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