Thinh Lab

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Trained as an organic chemist. Ended up in corporate America anyway. Vietnamese, New Yorker by choice, overthinker by nature. This is where I put the thoughts that don't fit in a spreadsheet. Science taught me how to question things. The city taught me everything else.

  • The Culinary Parallels: French is Japanese. Italian is Chinese. Spanish is Korean.

    An essay on parallel food cultures — and what happens when you zoom out far enough that the map starts to look familiar.

    The French-Japanese comparison has been made so often it’s practically a truism in culinary circles. But what if that same logic — applied with more geographic ambition — reveals two more pairs hiding in plain sight?

    Food writers have long noted that French and Japanese cuisines share a common soul: the obsession with technique, the reverence for the single perfect ingredient, the belief that mastery is a decades-long project, and the elevation of the chef to a near-spiritual figure. Both cultures gave the world its dominant restaurant formats. Both codified their traditions into formal schools of learning. Both are languages unto themselves.

    But this essay isn’t about that pair. That case has been made, exhaustively, and it’s airtight. This is about what happens when you extend the analogy outward — when you ask whether French-Japanese is not just a coincidence between two singular nations, but the first clue in a larger pattern. A pattern that, once you see it, is difficult to unsee.

    If France is Japan, then who is China? And who, on the other side of the map, is Korea?

    The answer, I want to argue, is Italy and Spain respectively. And the case for each is surprisingly robust.

    Pair One: France is Japan

    We don’t need to linger here long. The French-Japanese parallel is so well-worn that some of its greatest practitioners have openly acknowledged it. Joël Robuchon spent years between Paris and Tokyo precisely because he felt at home in both cities’ culinary philosophy. Countless Japanese chefs have done their formative apprenticeships in French kitchens — not out of imitation, but out of recognition.

    The resonances are deep and structural. Both cuisines are organized around rigorous technique as a form of identity: the knife cuts matter, the sauce reductions matter, the precise temperature of the plate matters. Both cultures built restaurant formats the whole world subsequently adopted: the French gave us the tasting menu and the brigade system, the Japanese gave us the counter omakase and the concept of the chef as singular artist. Both have UNESCO-recognized food cultures. Both center on seasonality as a near-religious principle.

    This pair needs no argument — only acknowledgment as the foundation for the comparisons that follow.

    Pair Two: Italy is China

    The dominant framework for understanding Chinese cuisine in the West has always been the wrong one. For decades, “Chinese food” was treated as a monolith — a single tradition, perhaps divided between Cantonese and Sichuan at most. This is like understanding European painting by looking only at Dutch still-lifes. The more you actually learn about Chinese food, the more the single category dissolves into something almost incomprehensibly plural.

    China’s eight great culinary traditions — Cantonese, Sichuan, Hunan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Shandong, Anhui — are not variations on a theme. They are separate and often mutually unrecognizable philosophies. Cantonese food is light, precise, and obsessed with the freshness of the ingredient. Sichuan food weaponizes heat and numbing spice in ways that would horrify a Cantonese grandmother. Hunan food is aggressively sour. Jiangsu is sweet where Shandong is salty. These are not the same cuisine in different moods. They are different cuisines sharing a script.

    Italy is the same. Each region is so singular in its food obsession that the very idea of “Italian cuisine” is, to an Italian, a mild insult.

    In Emilia-Romagna, pork is practically a religion: mortadella, prosciutto di Parma, Parmigiano-Reggiano, fresh egg pasta rolled by hand to a specific thickness measurable in millimeters. Cross into Liguria and the fat-of-choice becomes olive oil, the pasta becomes trofie, and pesto replaces everything. Go south to Naples and the pizza theology diverges so sharply from Rome’s that the two camps have been arguing in print for decades. Sicily feels, in its food, more North African than Northern Italian — couscous appears on menus, sweet-sour agrodolce flavors dominate, and the Arab culinary inheritance is unambiguous.

    The principle of regional sovereignty

    What unites Italy and China is not the content of their regional cuisines, but the structure of the relationship between region and food. In both cultures, the region is the unit of culinary identity — not the nation, and emphatically not the individual chef. A Bolognese cook is not trying to be creative. She is trying to be correct — to honor a tradition that predates her by centuries and belongs to a place, not a person. This is the same logic that governs a Chengdu cook’s relationship to mapo tofu.

    Both nations are also empires of pasta. Italy’s pasta forms number in the hundreds, each tied to a specific region, occasion, or sauce logic. China’s noodle traditions are similarly staggering: hand-pulled lamian from Lanzhou, knife-shaved daoxiao mian from Shanxi, thin rice noodles from Yunnan, thick wheat noodles from Beijing. The idea of a “noodle” covers as much ground in both traditions as the idea of a “wine” covers in France — it is a category containing multitudes, and the multitudes do not consider themselves the same thing.

    Both cultures are also fermentation obsessives. Italy’s pantry of aged cheeses, cured meats, and oil-packed vegetables is mirrored in China’s world of doubanjiang, preserved eggs, fermented tofu, and pickled mustard greens. In both cases, the slow transformation of the ingredient over time — by salt, by mold, by oil, by pressure — is considered not a matter of necessity but of sophistication.

    Neither Italy nor China has a true national dish, because neither nation’s food culture operates at the national level. You are from somewhere specific, and you eat that specific place’s food, and that food is the right food, and other people’s regional food is fascinating but ultimately foreign. This is the fundamental grammar both cuisines share.

    Pair Three: Spain is Korea

    This is the comparison I find most surprising and most compelling — partly because Spain and Korea feel, on the surface, so dissimilar. One is Mediterranean and Catholic, sun-drenched and architecturally baroque. The other is East Asian and Confucian, four-seasoned and architecturally spare. And yet their food cultures rhyme in ways that feel almost conspiratorial.

    The red pepper question

    Begin with the ingredient that colors both cuisines — literally. In Korea, it is gochugaru: coarsely ground dried red pepper that stains everything it touches and defines the visual identity of the table. Kimchi is red because of it. Tteokbokki is red because of it. The Korean table without its characteristic deep crimson hue is almost unthinkable.

    In Spain, the equivalent ingredient is pimentón — smoked, dried, ground red pepper in sweet and hot varieties — which plays an identical structural role. Chorizo is red because of it. Cocido madrileño is red because of it. Pulpo a la gallega is finished with it. Pimentón’s production in Spain has remained artisanal since the 16th century: peppers smoked slowly over holm oak for two weeks before stone-grinding — a level of care that mirrors the serious regional differentiation of Korean gochugaru varieties.

    Both cultures received their chili peppers from the Americas at roughly the same historical moment — the 16th and 17th centuries — and both proceeded to reorganize their entire cuisines around this new ingredient with a speed and totality that suggests the cultures were waiting for it. No other European or East Asian tradition adopted the chili pepper with the same ardor. The pepper found its people in Spain and Korea, and those people have never looked back.

    The table as theater

    Korean meals are communal in a way that is structural, not optional. The banchan system — in which a table is covered with small shared plates of fermented vegetables, seasoned sides, and pickles — means that a Korean meal is never a single plate. It is always an arrangement, a landscape, a shared field from which everyone eats together. Every Korean dining table looks like a party is taking place. Individual portions are, in traditional Korean dining culture, slightly beside the point. The table is the unit.

    Spanish tapas culture operates on the same logic. The Spanish bar, el bar, is not merely a place to eat — it is a place to graze collectively, with small plates circulating among company and conversation filling the gaps. Tapas are not appetizers in the Western sense; they are a mode of sociality in which food is the medium rather than the point. A Spanish dinner with friends is not a sequence of individual plates but a shared field of croquetas, jamón, gambas al ajillo, and boquerones. In both cultures, eating alone is a mild tragedy. The table is a social contract, and the food is its language.

    The stew gospel

    Both Spain and Korea are serious stew civilizations. A culture’s relationship to the slow-cooked, broth-heavy, communal pot reveals something deep about its values — patience, warmth, the willingness to let time do the work.

    Korea’s jjigae tradition is extensive and beloved. Doenjang jjigae, kimchi jjigae, sundubu jjigae — these are the comfort foods, the homesick foods. They are served boiling hot, often in communal stone pots, and they anchor the table. Korean food culture is so stew-centric that when the country’s first astronaut went to space, the South Korean government spent nearly a decade engineering freeze-dried versions of traditional stews and kimchi for her to bring along. Eating was not optional — it was emotional sustenance.

    Spain’s stew tradition is equally deep and equally regional. The cocido madrileño — a multi-course chickpea stew from Madrid — is practically a civic institution. The fabada asturiana of Asturias (white beans, chorizo, morcilla, slow-cooked pork) is its northern equivalent. The Basque marmitako, a fisherman’s tuna and potato stew, occupies a similar cultural position on the Atlantic coast. Every Spanish region has its own defining stew, and those stews are treated not as rustic relics but as proud culinary patrimony.

    The pork question

    It would be incomplete not to mention pork. Spain’s devotion to the pig is famous: the ibérico tradition, the cold cuts carried in suitcases when Spaniards travel abroad, the morcilla and butifarra and longaniza — the sheer variety of the Spanish pork canon is staggering. Korea’s relationship with pork is equally fervent: samgyeopsal (grilled pork belly) is practically the national pastime, and the range of preparations — braised, grilled at the table, folded into stews — is encyclopedic. Both nations have built serious gastronomic traditions around the animal, and both nations’ tables would be almost unrecognizable without it.

    What the Pattern Tells Us

    These parallels are not about influence. Italy did not inspire China and Spain did not inspire Korea. These cuisines developed in isolation across vast distances, over many centuries. What the parallels reveal is something more interesting: that certain culinary philosophies are not culturally specific but structural — and that those structures can emerge independently in very different places.

    The French-Japanese mode is the philosophy of precision and perfection: the single flawless component, the immaculate technique, the chef as the keeper of a discipline. The Italian-Chinese mode is the philosophy of place: food as geography, tradition as the highest authority, the region as the unit that matters. The Spanish-Korean mode is the philosophy of abundance and sociality: bold flavors and shared pots, the table as a communal event rather than a series of private plates.

    None of these philosophies is better than the others. They are different answers to the same question: what is food for? The French and Japanese answer is that it is for beauty and mastery. The Italian and Chinese answer is that it is for memory and place. The Spanish and Korean answer is that it is for company and warmth.

    All three answers are right. That’s why all six cuisines are magnificent.

  • If You Can Make It Here: Vietnamese Food and the New York Stage

    There is a particular feeling that comes over me when I eat at a good Vietnamese restaurant in New York City. It is not hunger satisfied, exactly. It is closer to pride — the complicated, almost embarrassed kind that sneaks up on you before you can name it.

    It took me a while to understand why it felt so different from eating Vietnamese food anywhere else in the world.

    The Diaspora Bowl

    A well-executed Vietnamese meal shows up in the most unexpected places. I have eaten good pho in Madrid — genuinely good, careful, aromatic — and felt something like recognition: yes, this is remarkable. The Vietnamese immigrant who opened that restaurant, I imagined, must feel a particular kind of gratitude every time someone orders, every time the broth hits right.

    My parents lived in Accra for a stretch, and there was a pho restaurant there that I visited. It functioned less as a restaurant than as a social club — expats gathering around steaming bowls, the familiar scent of star anise and charred ginger doing the work that language sometimes cannot. That place was not really about food. It was about the ache of being far from home, and the extraordinary comfort of a bowl that smells like childhood.

    These restaurants serve a sacred purpose. They are lifelines. But they are not, primarily, about the food itself.

    What California Did to Pho

    Then there is California — and California is a different story entirely.

    Vietnamese food in California does not need to prove its authenticity. The community is too large, too established, too vocal for anything less. You will not survive in Little Saigon on mediocrity. In that sense, California is a benchmark.

    But something else happened there, something stranger and more interesting. The pho grew.

    There is a concept called pho xe lua — locomotive pho — from Saigon in its heyday, before 1975. The name refers to the sheer size of the bowl, an extravagance even by Vietnamese standards. California took that concept and kept going. What you get now is not an oversized bowl but something closer to a bathtub of noodles and meat. The American instinct for excess found a willing collaborator.

    I have seen this do something peculiar to people. Vietnamese friends who spent years in California, when they return to Vietnam and order pho for breakfast — the way pho is meant to be eaten, a quick warm and nourishing start to the morning — find themselves vaguely unsatisfied. The simplicity that was once the point now feels like something missing. California pho has quietly rewritten their sense of what the dish is supposed to be.

    This is not a criticism. It is something more interesting: it is documentation of a new thing being born. California pho is no longer a Vietnamese dish being served in America. It is a Vietnamese-American dish — shaped by immigration, by nostalgia, by the peculiar alchemy of a community anchoring itself in a new country. It belongs to both cultures and answers entirely to neither. It is its own thing now.

    Beyond the Bowl: The New Wave

    What is happening in New York is different from all of this.

    The restaurants arriving now are not leading with pho. They are leading with bun dau mam tom — fried tofu and vermicelli with fermented shrimp paste, a dish whose pungent, confrontational smell is the whole point. They are serving tiny clam salads. Vietnamese hot pot. Banh cuon, the silky steamed rice rolls. And banh xeo — the sizzling crepe, made from rice flour and turmeric, savory and crisp, a dish that carries the ghost of French culinary influence and transforms it into something entirely Southeast Asian.

    This is not comfort food for a diaspora. This is a full argument, made in flavor, for the range and depth and sheer deliciousness of a cuisine that has been shaped by a thousand years of geography and history — French colonialism, Chinese influence, the relentless drive for balance that runs through all of Southeast Asian cooking.

    The Vietnamese kitchen is a record of everything that has ever passed through Vietnam. These restaurants in New York are making that record available to anyone willing to sit down and pay attention.

    Why New York Is the Stage That Matters

    I want to be honest about something: there is an element of personal pride in all of this, and I am not entirely comfortable examining it too closely. But I think it is worth trying.

    New York is, in a specific and irreplaceable way, a competitive cultural stage unlike any other city in the world. It is not simply that there are many cuisines here. It is that those cuisines are all operating at the top of their game, all vying for the attention of a city that has access to everything and is impressed by nothing easily.

    You are competing, in real time, against the full subcontinental range of Indian cooking. Against the fire and complexity of Korean food. Against the extraordinary variety of Chinese regional cuisines. Against Nigerian food that is hearty and deep and alive with history. Against Jamaican food, Italian food, French food — all of it present, all of it practiced by people who grew up making it.

    To succeed in that environment on the basis of pure authenticity — to win not by adapting to local taste but by refusing to — means something. It means the food is extraordinary on its own terms. It means it can hold the room.

    London comes close, but it carries its own historical weight, its particular relationship between empire and the cuisines it imported. The dynamic is different, more complicated, less clean. New York’s multiculturalism was assembled differently — immigrant by immigrant, neighborhood by neighborhood, without quite the same asymmetries.

    When Vietnamese food wins in New York, it wins on a genuinely level playing field. And that is rare.

    Made It

    I said I was not looking for validation, and I meant it. Vietnamese cuisine does not need New York’s approval to be what it is. The pho eaten for breakfast at a plastic table in Saigon at six in the morning is perfect whether or not a food critic in Manhattan has written about it.

    But there is a difference between needing validation and feeling the particular satisfaction of watching something you know to be extraordinary get recognized as extraordinary by a room full of people who know their food.

    Part of me, eating bun dau in a restaurant in lower Manhattan, thinks: this is street food. This is nothing. My grandmother made this.

    And another part of me thinks: we made it in New York.

    Those two thoughts can be true at the same time. The food is humble and it is also, apparently, capable of stopping the most culinarily spoiled city in the world in its tracks. There is something deeply satisfying about that — not because Vietnamese cuisine needed the endorsement, but because it is always good to watch the truth become obvious to everyone in the room.