Presentation slides and video clips from the conference presentation "Street Food, Asian American Style: Oppositional Taste in Post-Millennial U.S. Food Culture", presented at the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies conference, Universitas Airlangga, Surabaya, on Saturday 8 August 2015.

1. Street Food, Asian
American Style
Oppositional Taste in Post-Millennial U.S.
Food Culture
Martin Roberts
University of Derby, U.K.
mroberts1@gmail.com
@mroberts711
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference
Airlangga University, Surabaya, Indonesia
8 August 2015

2. I knew I’d call it Momofuku, which translates from Japanese
as “lucky peach”. That’s where the logo came from. It’s
also an indirect nod to Mr. [Momofuku] Ando: I owed him
for a thousand meals-in-minutes and besides, it’s a fucking
killer name. Maybe the best first name ever. The restaurant
was, for me, a fuck-you to so many things. Me—a Korean
American—making Japanese ramen was ridiculous on its
face. Me—a passable but not much better cook—opening
up a restaurant while my peers, guys I worked with who
were so much more talented than me, were still toiling
under other regimes, paying their dues, learning. It is no
accident that Momofuku sounds like motherfucker.
—David Chang, Momofuku (2009): 28, my emphasis.

3. [T]he word chef can in fact be a derogatory term. What a joke,
what a meaningless term it is these days: a fool in a black
chef’s jacket who has no fucking clue about anything. But when
you work in a kitchen, your boss is your chef, and you call him
or her that. When they deserve it, it’s an honor to call them that.
When I meet with or talk about my mentors, I’m likely to call
them “chef”: like me and Uncle Choi, I recognize there’s a si-fu
and a kung-fu, and I don’t want anybody to think that I don’t
know the difference (Momofuku, 217-218).
—David Chang, Momofuku (2009): 217-218.

15. don’t be a fucking hooliganthank you grasshopper