Fusion cuisine is big. Fusion cuisine is smart. Fusion cuisine is gimpy and obtuse and lazy and ridiculous. It's gastronomy 101 for the overeducated, travel-sick, and hopelessly romantic white jacket—and a sin like blasphemy against the church of flavor.
Joshua Huston
Chef Jerry presents an international orgy of flavor.
Location Info
Details
Pinto Thai Bistro and Sushi Bar 408 Broadway E., 724-0559, pintobistro.com. 11 a.m.–10 p.m. daily.
Related Content
More About
Fusion cuisine is just one of those things—like writing terrible poetry, moving to New York, or getting tattoos of cartoon characters—that seems like a good idea, maybe even an important idea, when you're young.
For chefs, it's almost a rite of passage—a thing you do because you feel like you've invented it, because it feels like everything else has already been done. Young chefs like fusion because they're in love with ingredients and technique and live in daily, quaking fear of canon. They do it because there's always a moment when it seems like a tofu pot pie with tamarind syrup or duck-liver-mousse gyoza with balsamic reduction is a good idea—because until you taste it one or a hundred times, everything seems like a good idea.
But like so many things, fusion becomes less attractive and seems less wise the older you get and the longer you do it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, fusion remains a bad idea. In order to do it right, you either have to be very bold or very talented or very smart or all three—this in an industry where most chefs are none of the above, and some of them can be flummoxed by the simple interaction of a lemon and a knife if either the lemon or the knife look different than it did in the cloistered halls of culinary school.
You have to have an idea of where the cuisines you're fusing naturally come together—what traits they share, what flavors they have in common. You have to do your addition, subtraction, and division with the care of a rocket scientist planning a trip to Planet Weird. It's so easy to go wrong. Botch a fraction somewhere and that's it. You're tumbling off into deep space all alone, and no one in the neighborhood can figure out why you wanted to open an Indo-Bulgarian restaurant in the first place.
Yet without fusion cuisine, there would be no innovation, no experimentation. Traditional cuisines would molder and calcify until all there was to eat was the same stuff our grandparents ate aboard the QE2 or at Sunday dinners down on the farm. The food world needs people to be stupid and daring, because without the kind of pure-science experimentation that goes on under the umbrella of "fusion cuisine," that 100th dish out of 100 will never be conceived.
Fusion gives rise to the next generation of chefs and traditions. In that way, it's the culinary-world equivalent of half-drunk, Saturday-night casual sex with a stranger: It's not always a good idea, not always wise, but every now and again, it's how great discoveries are made.
At Pinto Thai Bistro and Sushi Bar, the fusion starts with the name, goes crazy on the floor, and ends only a night later, with me standing front-lit and chilled before the refrigerator eating the last of the leftovers right out of the box. It is many kinds of restaurants in one: a Thai restaurant involved in some kind of high-speed collision with a fast-moving sushi bar, with the inevitable tangle resulting in, on the one hand, a mashup—pure panang curry, pad see eiw, and tom kha existing in discreet spaces, but rubbing up close against yakisoba with bonito, kanikama crab stick nigiri, futomaki, miso soup, and gyoza. On the other, in the places where the wreckage becomes too entangled, Pinto does pure fusion, offering complete geosocial oddities like Samurai Pad Thai, Japanese curry stew, red mango maki with fruit salsa and mayonnaise, and New York cheesecake topped with lychee syrup. No map can define the boundaries of Pinto's catch-me-if-you-can menu. It is as international as some kind of psychotic Foreign Service lawn fete, as diverse as the line for the U.N. men's room after chili night in the canteen.
Open for nearly three months on Broadway in the former home of the falafel favorite Ali Baba, Pinto announces its definitions boldly—couching all the Thai and Japanese food, the odd Latino influences, a bit of French, a bit of Chinese and Americanism and modernism and flat-out, careless, anti-traditional odd-ism—in a room that seems to mock all this breezy internationalism with pale wood paneling, recessed lights in sherbet hues, white chairs, white tables, and white plates. Reading the name, seeing the contortions of the menu, one might expect bamboo and pictures of sharp Ginza neon, Le Chat Noir posters, prints of the Eiffel Tower, Buddhas, maneki neko good-luck cats, and maybe an armadillo wearing a cowboy hat. The effect of all this lack can be jarring.
The Pinto Signature Maki is Pinto the restaurant defined by food. Listed among the sushi, coming from the short, overstocked sushi bar, it is, from the outside in: tuna tartare with an honest kick of spice; planks of soft, buttery avocado and crisp cucumber; nori; a jumble of rice (pressed less expertly than I'd hoped, but nicely prepared); cross-cut yellowtail with a lovely texture and fresh, oily flavor; plucked leaves of cilantro; carefully sliced, quartered, and peeled triangles of lime; and massive piles of jalapeno slivers, mounded on like I'd won some sort of contest.
