Tag Archives: Asian America

Mixing Rice, Making Self: Chef Edward Lee’s Theory of Bibimbap

By R. Claire Bunschoten & Ben D. Lee

On the Netflix show Culinary Class Wars, Korean American chef Edward Lee makes food to make identity. In the semi-final round of the South Korean cooking competition show, chefs are tasked to create a dish communicating their life story. Signature dishes abound: elaborately crafted songshu guiyu and painstakingly refined pasta vongole speak of hard won skill. Lee, however, offers a twist on a Korean classic when he prepares for the judges a “modern-style” bibimbap to communicate his Korean American identity in the form of a deep fried ball of rice reminiscent of arancini, encased in a layer of Ahi tuna, and topped with caviar. The result of his efforts are mixed.

Bibimbap, which literally translates to mixed rice, is a humble yet prominent mainstay of Korean cuisine dating back at least to the sixteenth century. Comprised of a bowl of warm white rice topped with an artful arrangement of vegetables (namul), some beef, and often an egg yolk, all is then mixed together by the diner with a condiment of gochujang (fermented red pepper paste) or soy sauce to one’s own taste before eating. Scholars of Korean foodways such as Hae-kyung Chung note that bibimbap has “a distinctive flavor that combines ingredients to create new flavors while allowing those ingredients to stay true to their core.” In this way, bibimbap is a dish of transformation; although bibimbap’s ingredients are discrete at the start, the mixing at the heart of its name (bibim from the verb bibida, “to mix”) produces a unified dish.1

A bowl of bibimbap. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Chef Edward Lee’s creation plays with bibimbap’s essence: its mixedness. Lee reconceptualizes the bibim at the center of his bibimbap both materially and rhetorically. Perhaps most obviously, his interpretation of bibimbap has the dish take a new shape which does not require mixing. The judges, when first presented with Lee’s bibimbap, ask if the dish must be mixed before eating. “No,” Lee responds, “Just cut into it.” Skeptical, judge chef Anh Sung-jae wonders aloud: “비빔이 없으면 비빔밥이 아니지 않나요? If there’s no bibim it’s not bibimbap, right?” In doing so, Anh identifies the key tension of Lee’s interpretation; Koreans understand the bibim of bibimbap in its verb form where mixing is a process, Lee however seems to understand bibim as a mixed state of being. In a later interview Anh explains that he disagrees with Lee’s interpretation of bibimbap because it “misrepresents what that iconic Korean dish actually is.” Indeed, as Mun et al concur, “Bibimbap is a food that is eaten by mixing bap, namul, and jang in one bowl.” To require a knife and fork to cut into bibimbap is antithetical to Korean convention. Yet Lee’s liberty with bibim and understanding it as an equivalent to the U.S. English usage of “mixed” extends to the chef’s narrativization of this dish as key to his identity.2

With the dish set in front of the judges, Lee explains: “저는 비빔인간 입니다. I am a bibimingan.” Drawing on the bibim of bibimbap and ingan meaning person, Lee appends the two concepts to assert that he is a mixed person. As he continues to describe his struggles with his identity to the judges–”Am I American? Am I Korean?”–he turns to bibimbap as emblematic of his experience. “Bibimbap at first sight has many different colors and ingredients, but they’re all mixed to create one unique flavor.” Lee casts his culinary training, experiences in the United States, and Korean heritage as the ingredients of his life, seemingly disparate and distinct yet all critical to his sense of self. He continues in English, “When I look at bibimbap, I see myself. It kind of reflects my life and identity as a Korean American person. I am bibimbap.” 

By reinterpreting a dish with Korean roots with aspects of his multi-cultural upbringing and culinary training, Lee crafts his identity through his take on bibimbap. While this narrativization of the dish for the television program presents bibimbap as a reflection of Lee’s identity, making food (as a chef or otherwise) draws on the breadth of Lee’s creativity and embodied knowledge. Bibimbap as a food, as cultural code, becomes a means of materially making identity. After all, Edward Lee is not bibimbap. Although bibimbap allows Lee to materially and rhetorically articulate his experience of the Korean diaspora, people are not food. Yet, Lee is not alone in using food as a metaphor for racial and ethnic identity. 

Food is often used to mark racial, ethnic, and cultural differences. In English specifically, these food metaphors also often transmit and perpetuate racist attitudes.3 Food metaphors might be applied to individuals or groups–e.g. “banana” to discuss East Asians who act “white”–but also to describe processes of immigration and assimilation more broadly as in the much critiqued metaphors of the (fondue) melting pot, salad bowl, and stew.4 This latter type of metaphor to describe immigrant and multicultural relations persists beyond the U.S. and Anglophonic world. For example, some South Koreans turn to bibimbap and jjamppong (a “spicy mixed-up seafood noodle soup,” with origins in Chinese foodways) as metaphors for mixing multiple ideas and objects. While both dishes communicate ideas of mixing, jjamppong denotes a seemingly indiscriminate mix of different kinds of ingredients into one dish whereas bibimbap emphasizes an intentional process of bringing disparate concepts together.5

That said, it is worth noting that Edward Lee’s use of bibimbap differs from these food metaphors. Lee’s assertion of “I am bibimbap” does not make generalizations about groups or attempt to tidily reconcile multicultural relations, but honors Lee’s own lived experience and expression of his bibim identity through his making of bibimbap. Although the bibimbap metaphor may not have been received positively on a universal level by the show’s judges, Lee offers a refreshing approach for thinking about Korean diasporic subjectivities and their broader position in society as cross-cultural mediators. As a Korean American man born and raised in New York City who received training in the world’s cuisines, and embraces the regional influences of Washington D.C. and Louisville, Kentucky where he lives, there appears a capaciousness in the material and symbolic affordances of bibimbap. That is, even as Lee takes cheffy license to stray from traditional definitions of bibimbap, his interpretation of this dish remains a celebration of mixedness. And, arguably, Lee’s bibimbap and concept of bibimingan demonstrates the way this chef uses food to make sense of his subjectivity, both ideologically and on the plate. Mixing, as a culinary instruction so key to bibimbap, is made into a way of being.  


R. Claire Bunschoten studies food and its relations to power. Her work often grapples with food’s material-semiotic and sensorial qualities as they relate to concepts of identity in the twentieth century United States. She is at work on her first book project which investigates vanilla as a flavor, fragrance, and racial signifier in the United States. She holds a PhD and MA in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BA from Bard College. Her writing has appeared in Food and Foodways, Aeon, Social Text, and more. 

Ben D. Lee was raised in Christchurch, New Zealand as a 1.5-generation Korean New Zealander, whose studies took him to Australia and the United States. He is a medical anthropologist with a PhD in Occupational Therapy, embodying bibimingan in an academic context. Ben studied the lived sensory experiences of people living with schizophrenia and left academia in May 2025 for a career in consulting.


  1. Hae Kyung Chung, “The Meaning and Symbolism of Korean Food Culture,” Asia Review 5, no. 1 (2015): 97-121. (in Korean, translation by B.D. Lee) ↩︎
  2. Eun-Gyung Mun, Young-Eun Lee, and Youn-Soo Cha, “The Globalization of Bibimbap: Focusing on the Diversity of Modernization of Bibimbap,” Journal of Ethnic Foods 10, no. 1 (November 1, 2023): 39. ↩︎
  3. Irene López-Rodríguez, “Are We What We Eat? Food Metaphors in the Conceptualization of Ethnic Groups,” Linguistik Online 69, no. 7 (September 26, 2014). ↩︎
  4. Xaviera (Mei Mei) Xiao, “Ingredients of Discourse: Analyzing the Language of Food in Discourses of Multiculturalism,” Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7, no. 2 (2017): 1–9. ↩︎
  5. As some food metaphors mark racial difference and inferiority in the U.S., there are some potential negative connotations in jjamppong’s characterization as an indiscriminate mix especially considering its origins in China. We look forward to scholars exploring this further in work on Korean food metaphors. ↩︎

Danny Bowien’s Post-Authentic Asian America

By Leland Tabares

In a recent interview, James Beard Award-winning chef and restaurateur Danny Bowien admits that if he were to create authentic diasporic Asian food, he would be making “Hamburger Helper” and “buttery canned vegetables.”

A Korean adoptee of a white middle-class family who grew up in Oklahoma, Bowien shows the relationship between food and diasporic identity to be messy when it comes to authenticity. For instance, he never tasted Korean food until he left Oklahoma for San Francisco at the age of nineteen and never formally trained to cook Chinese food prior to opening his now famous Mission Chinese Food restaurant. Discourses on authenticity do not readily account for ethnic narratives like Bowien’s. Indeed, he considers himself “the least authentic chef.” Influenced by his unique background, Bowien sees the current culinary world as what he calls “post-authentic,” defined more by “credibility” than “heritage.”

Bowien’s notion of the post-authentic becomes legible through a recent collaboration with the Arizona Beverage Company. The New York-based company, known for their AriZona Iced Tea line and intentionally gaudy 1990s aesthetic, partnered with Bowien to create a special one-time menu using AriZona beverages as the primary ingredients. This brand deal was organized in 2019 as a pop-up event held at the Brooklyn outfit of Mission Chinese Food.

Image Credit: AriZona Iced Tea

The “Great Buy” menu—a reference to AriZona’s “Great Buy! 99 Cents” tagline—featured two entrées, a dessert, and a cocktail. They included, respectively: Mucho Mango Fried Rice, Smoked Green Tea Chicken Noodles, Grapeade Ambrosia, and Green Tea Ginsenger. The 99-cent price point for the dessert paid homage to the tall 99-cent AriZona Iced Tea cans popularized in the 1990s and early-2000s.

Image Credit: AriZona Iced Tea

To many in the culinary establishment, the notion that a chef would monetize his menu is antithetical to the profession’s values around creative freedom. Celebrity chefs like Tom Colicchio, Michael Symon, and Marco Pierre White have partnered with brands like Coke, Lay’s, and Knorr. But none had brought a sponsored product into their restaurants. Famed food writer Pete Wells of The New York Times equated the event to Bowien selling a brand “access to [diners’] heads.” Bobby Flay publicly condemned Bowien, saying that he would “never take a product and force it into [his] menu” because such an act desecrates the “sacred” nature of a chef’s menu.[i] The backlash to Bowien’s collaboration would appear to have damaged his credibility, a devastating irony for a chef who places credibility at the forefront of the post-authentic. But Bowien remains as popular as ever.

What the collaboration makes visible has less to do with Bowien and more to do with the culinary establishment. It reveals how industry norms gatekeep minoritized chefs who prepare nontraditional foods, demonstrating how access to credibility is unequally distributed. As I have written elsewhere, Bowien represents an emerging generation of misfit chefs whose nontraditional approaches to professionalism literally and symbolically mis-fit within the industry. Acts of mis-fitting expose how industry norms render some chefs unfit for professional belonging. Professional norms thus play direct roles in the formation and regulation of culinary authenticity and identity. Bowien realizes as much when, in response to the criticism, he explains, “I believe in breaking the system that says a certain type of cuisine or price point should be frowned on.”

Bowien’s notion of the post-authentic then does not do away with identity, as if identity no longer matters. In fact, he indicates that identity is essential to the post-authentic: “Identity definitely interests me. I feel like today it’s all about identity.” Rather than using terms like inauthentic or nonauthentic, terms that might signal a refusal or avoidance of engaging with authenticity, Bowien employs post-authentic to highlight the important (and often damaging) ways that the restaurant industry’s professional norms—norms that place value in Western Anglo-European food traditions—not only contribute to the production of authenticity but also commodify and exploit minoritized cultures in the process.

By monetizing his menu, Bowien asserts control over the means of commodifying his Asian Americanness. In the fashion world, streetwear culture popularized brand collaborations between industry elites and smaller independent businesses. Bowien draws inspiration from these collaborations because they challenge the ideologies that separate so-called high and low culture. “Look at fashion,” Bowien explains, “how brands are doing collaborations with other brands. There’s this old guard that says you have to be haute couture or you’re not one of us: you have to do your haute couture first, then you can do your street-wear line. I’ve played that game [in the food world] and tried to do what made everyone else happy, but I wasn’t happy.”[ii]

Bowien’s collaboration with AriZona turns the tables back on the culinary establishment to insist that a menu composed of mass-produced commodities and branded content not only emblematizes an authentic contemporary American dining experience, but also illustrates the degree to which culture industries—from fine dining to advertising—produce and regulate notions of authenticity. For Bowien, the post-authentic is a critical accounting of these processes of cultural regulation by capitalist industries. Rather than refuse to participate, Bowien leans in to assert his own agency and individualism amid the system: “I believe that what I’m doing is good. I want to be myself.”[iii]


References:

[i] Qtd. in Wells, Pete. “This Menu Is Brought to You by Arizona Iced Tea,” 7 May 2019.

[ii] Qtd. in Birdsall, John. “Chef Danny Bowien doesn’t care that you have a problem with his Arizona Iced Tea deal,” 10 May 2019.

[iii] Ibid., Birdsall.