Soleil Ho's New Home, San Francisco's New Food Critic
Creative Blogger Long Vo covers Soleil Ho’s first year as the SF Chronicle Food Critic. In her journey fighting for diversity in food media, Long recounts the ups and downs of her career as a chef, writer, Racist Sandwich podcast host, and now being a position of representation.
Illustration by Stephanie Kim
“The eyes are still attached to the head. Cool.” Those were my initial thoughts as I glanced at the cover of the 2019 Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants magazine. A beautiful mulberry plum squid accompanied by contrasting sunny yellow corn is featured. In this bird’s eye view of the photo, a pair of bell pepper slices and a perfect sunny side up egg lay right next to the noodles. It’s a signature dish from the Richmond District’s HoDaLa. In the Fifth & Mission podcast, they ask Soleil Ho what she thinks will be the biggest surprise for readers as she takes over the SF Chronicle’s 22nd Top 100, “Oh man...I think there are so many big surprises but I think the cover will be the biggest surprise.” “Yeah the cover was very controversial,” as the host concurs.
Though Ho doesn’t have any formal radio training, you can say that she’s worked on her voice by working in the service industry for more than a decade. She started as a server before moving up to executive chef and opening a restaurant in Mexico with her mom called Bonito Kitchen. You can hear in her voice the years of checking on guests and their experience with their food, and if what she's made in the kitchen for them is well received. So to answer the question of if there are going to be any surprises, well, you can hear the slight hesitation.
Magazine covers still matter when it comes to print trying to exist in an internet world. Last year, Vogue Magazine made headlines with their September issue: 23-year-old Tyler Mitchell became the first African American photographer to shoot a Vogue cover in its 126-year history. The magazine also gave Beyoncé full control of the shoot. In an effort to encourage "women and men to see and appreciate the beauty in their natural bodies," she "stripped away the wigs and hair extensions and used little makeup for this shoot." Since American Chefs try to hide that your meat used to be a living thing by cutting it in homogeneous squares or slices, it's a bold move for Ho’s first year as the SF Chronicle Food critic to choose a cover that shows the beauty of a full squid.
I’m reminded of one specific picture from Ho’s Instagram - a picture of a whole smoked fish, the censor bar across its eyes and a pixel blur near the "Groin Area". It’s a subtle joke that the meal is too "controversial" for Americans. In Ho’s caption of her fish picture, she writes with sincerity “I can get a whole smoked fish for lunch! I love SF.” I grin with her because I empathize how great food can be, despite cultural differences. Ho's new position as food critic brings a sense of revitalization to me. She reminds me of a forgotten foundation--my love for San Francisco through food and why I call the city home.
I first met Soleil in mid 2018 at El Rio, where the rainbow flag hangs high and proudly next to their bar name. The meetup was for podcast listeners of The Racist Sandwich, which was named a 2017 Saveur Blog Award finalist for their first season of covering race, gender, and class in food media. Within the palm trees and wooden benches with bright primary color chairs in the outdoor patio sits Soleil on the wooden deck. She’s wearing a dark lavender jacket over another thin hoodie--the standard dress code of our microclimate city. Her jacket had the Racist Podcast enamel pin, which were given out to kickstarter funders who helped raise $12,367 pledged of $10,000 goal for their second season.
I introduced myself and she was very inviting to talk to, like catching up with an old friend back in town. We talked about food deserts and theoretically if the United States would genetically modified crickets under mass consumption. Every curious question I asked, she eagerly answered with few of her insights. I found it incredible she had so much enthusiasm and energy talking to a stranger upon first interaction, especially given the busy year she had: co-writing a graphic novel on entomophagy called MEAL, becoming a recipient of the Southern Foodways Symposium’s 2018 Smith Fellowship and scholarship recipient attendee of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. That precise day I met her, she had just gotten her acceptance email for the 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism fellowship with the University of California—Berkeley for her entomology research of insects as a source of food. The report in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that eating insects could help boost nutrition and reduce pollution. In her research, she wants to explore the idea of bugs saving the world. The excitement of receiving such an honor must have jolted her adrenaline that night.
I shared my experience eating insects as it was more of a novelty form of an ant cookie. I ate it because it was a dare in high school, as the consistency was of a piece of Cookie Crisp cereal. She describes her experience with crickets like “a taste of autumn.” I had never heard anyone describe food like autumn, so simple, yet it made perfect sense. Food that tasted like autumn held the same kind of warmth that came with putting on your favorite coat and matching it with your watch. As she punctuated her description with a smile, I became a believer that insects as a food source is the way to go. That moment I got to witness her genuine love for food in person.
Later that year, she went to Kushihara, Japan for her UC Berkeley Journalism Fellowship to learn about where wasps are treated as a delicacy. The fanaticism about wasps is so grand; they even get their own festival, called hebo matsuri. The town of Kushihara is in the Gifu Prefecture, located in the center in Japan with no access to the ocean. In her research, Soleil eats plenty of insects like Japanese giant hornets, which they call osuzumebachi. She describes the larvae as “meaty and rich, with an almost shrimp-like texture.”
As she's engaging with the locals in the community party and feasting on all types of wasps, she has an unfortunate realization at the end of her research: "I think the majority of people we’ve talked to in the United States would be interested in insects as a powder, which I find really sad because so much of the pleasure of eating insects is from the texture and the actual flavor.” In the recording, you can hear her disappointment in her voice. The rich history and tradition of the cultivation of wasps are overshadowed by the West's association of the insect to germs and infestation.
This close-mindedness towards food has happened before with lobster. America shunned it away as peasant food for it’s insect-like look. “Lobster shells about a house are looked upon as signs of poverty and degradation,” wrote John J. Rowan in 1876. Public opinion didn't change when word got around that lobster was tasty. Lobster did, however, gain some attention being sold as "elevated" entrees on trains for the wealthy. We still see this kind of hindering bias today--a result of the hold that old European-centric perceptions still have on American Society. I say to Soleil in an email that we don't see many fine dining Asian restaurants, primarily because some flavor complexities don't translate well to American taste.
“I think that’s so silly, don’t you?” she retorts back. “Especially since Asia invented fine dining, the culture of eating elaborate food for the pure enjoyment of it. I think it’s less of that problem and more of, there aren’t so many chefs of color in general who are given the opportunity — mentorship, connections, and most importantly, investment — to actually conceive of fine dining establishments that reflect their stories. And anyway, why should we look to fine dining to legitimize anything when it only serves the few?”
The market demand in food has gradually shifted from "elevated" to "authentic," as the term "elevated" can sometimes be perceived as pretentious. According to SearchEngine Journal, millennials want to “participate” with a brand’s marketing. They want to “align themselves with an authentic cause.” Dreams of owning houses are cars are slowly fading out, in exchange for experiences. American chefs are now exploring the world in search of new and foreign food experiences they can replicate in their own kitchens. However, the problem is that some American chefs believe they have the right to call this replicated cuisine “authentic”. Examples include Celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern (to which comes off as some sort of Evel Knievel for food in his show Bizarre Foods) who comments that Chinese food in the Midwest is served in “horseshit restaurants.” These types of chefs possess the means to authoritatively push their replicated version of authentic cuisine onto our palates.
This gatekeeping of “authenticity” plagues Asian Americans. As one Asian American story doesn’t reflect all Asian Americans, one dish doesn’t reflect all of Asia. A real caption used for a Posole Recipe on Saveur reads, “This is a dish common to parts of southern Mexico. Posole is something of a Mexican analogue to ramen; but instead of noodles, posole uses hominy.” The compatibility of ramen is a gross oversimplification that all Asian experiences are the same.
In what I consider Ho’s breakout essay “Craving the Other,” she writes a thought provoking essay on the problem with America’s obsession with Asian Authenticity: “That kind of appreciation certainly doesn’t seem to have advanced their understanding of the Asian American experience beyond damaging and objectifying generalities.”
For Asian Americans, food is a thin thread that ties us to a home we may not have grown up in. In “Go Home!”, an anthology of Asian Diasporic writers on what home means to them, a few of these stories use food to drive their exploration of home. In Esmé Weijun Wang, “Elegy,” “The idea of “gluten” is foreign to my Taiwanese relatives. Even the doctors among them don’t recognize what it means to be gluten-allergic, gluten sensitive, or gluten intolerant—which is what I became three years ago, when my immune system began to attack my body willy-nilly and with great force.” In T Kira Madden’s “Chicken & Stars,” “I lift a can of Campbell’s soup from the pile of them on the floor, Chicken & Stars, twist it around in my hand. It is easier to look at your favorite soup than it is at blood.”
When Soleil and I were discussing our feeling of “Otherness” in our Vietnamese upbringing, she shares, “My family — maybe it’s very Viet family? I’ve never asked! — calls Maggi sauce “xi dau,” and so I always assumed that Maggi was soy sauce. Whenever we went to other Asian restaurants, I would notice that their soy sauce just didn’t taste as good as the stuff we had at home. Funny, right?” When I shared this fact to one of our Gold and Great podcast guests Linh-Yen Hoang, she didn’t know this at all. “Our life was a lie,” she jokes.
Illustration prompted by Soleil Ho's article, "Craving the Other: One Woman's Beef with Cultural Appropriation and Food" Gouache, 11" x14", 2014
“Craving the Other” has encouraged others to share their own stories. Ajah Courts made a beautiful illustration (Left) inspired by the piece, and Shing Yin Khor responded with her comic zine Just Eat It: A Response to Food and Cultural Appropriation. Finding the right words to explain the pain of having “assimilated” food, she has encouraged others to find a voice to bridge their stories of otherness to art.
Ho possesses a certain magical gift to facilitate finding homes for people’s stories, especially since she’s a millennial that graduated into the Great Recession (a period in which more than eight million Americans lost their jobs, and nearly ten million homeowners lost their homes to foreclosure sales). Hustle culture, or as she puts it--diversifying with “monetized hobbies,” meant she had to chase after freelance work to help strengthen her brand, while sacrificing a sense of home and stability. There’s a saying though, that goes: “Exactly what you run from, you end up chasing.” All the hard work she put into writing every morning before work at the restaurant, into her podcast, was to help drive the needle about food diversity. In doing so, fate rewards her good work with a new home in San Francisco.
In the SF Chronicle lobby, I’m waiting for the #ChronicleChats session featuring Soleil Ho. Looking around, I mentally measure the height of the turnstile next to the security guard as it’s waist high. It’s low enough for Peter Parker to hurdle-jump over, 15 minutes past late of his deadline of pictures of Spider-Man. This whole building reminds me of the Daily Bugle; it’s as traditional looking newspaper company as it gets. After 1800, newspapers became a form of public property. It was in 1865 when the SF Chronicle released their first issue. At the time, many classical writers were dismissive of the idea of color. Color was a distraction from the true glories of art: Line and form. The thought of having Ho as a food critic back then would have drove all the 18 century J.J. Jamesons insane, headlining her “a Menace.”
Like what Ho mentioned before, food as a form of entertainment can be traced as far back to 8th century Japan, called kaiseki-ryōri (懐石料理). However, it was a French spoiled brat named Alexandre Balthasar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière in the 18th century that invented the restaurant review as “one of the founding fathers of modern gastronomic discourse.'' As cuisine was a means for people to eat together, haute cuisine acted as a form of exclusion and only the privileged had a seat at the table. This type of Eurocentric elitism pushed its way to how we see food criticism now, even though American food is a cultivation of diverse foods from all over the world.
Food media in traditional outlets, such as the New York Times, or popular websites like Buzzfeed has a history of replacing food names that are considered exotic or bizarre (like empanadas) with safe “white names” (Hand Pies) in hopes of appealing to a wider audience (read: white). The term “whitewash” also stems from the 18th century--a practice of using calcimine, kalsomine, calsomine, or lime paint to wash away the filth and disease. However there’s no amount of paint that can wash away the influence on how the internet (i.e. Foodie Culture) has shifted the way consumers look at food. An Instagram pic of your favorite celebrity holding a turkey leg at Tokyo Disney Sea or a boomerang video of your friend showing off her own branded “Gr8nola” pre workout snack goes much farther to the public than a New York Times article trying to educate you what those “Blobs” are in your tea.
As Ho was leading the charge for more diverse food stories on the internet, modern food criticism in traditional media had to start looking at itself in the mirror and self-criticize. LA Weekly’s former food critic Jonathan Gold was one of the first to start the shift of food media towards politics and ethics. He is credited with being one of the first restaurant critics to directly address “traditional” cuisine — “I hate the word ‘ethnic,’” he said in 2009. New Orleans-based self-taught cook and essayist Tunde Wey took a more direct approach when he was writing a monthly column on food and social politics for The San Francisco Chronicle, such as America’s white supremacy problem through food.
The feeling of excitement and curiosity in the air as everyone was waiting in the lobby for the #ChronicleChats event to start. The Chronicle Center opens its ivory white doors to the beginning of Ho’s inaugural start in traditional media. Editor-in-chief for the San Francisco Chronicle Audrey Cooper, who is one of three women editors-in-chief working at America's top 25 circulation daily newspapers, stands in front of the audience and gives her preamble on why this moment of change will be so significant, “I am a big believer in the fact that our criticism at the Chronicle fulfills a really important role in this community in which good criticism begets good art, begets good food, begets goods practices. When we thought of a list of our dream candidate, I thought we get one boxed checked or two boxes checked. But we checked every damn box.” Cooper is quite the opposite to the imaginary J.J. Jameson I concocted in my head. Cooper welcomes both Ho and her Food editor Paolo Lucchesi as they start the evening of conversation. She opens up with her relationship with food growing up:
“I come from a South Vietnamese Family. So food was bonding with my family. Especially with my grandparents because they really don’t speak English. So the way we talked was talking about Vietnamese food. At the same time, my mom was a single mother. We were living in NYC and ordering out was the easiest to do. I still remember the delivery phone number 212 373-fast, and they knew our order too.” Everyone laughs on how quickly she recites the phone number. “A lot of times my mom would keep all the delivery menus, and fan them out in front of my sister and I and ask 'What do you want to eat today?’ Italian, Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, we would always have options.”
Given his long history of being a food editor since 2005, Lucchesi is at the forefront of another monumental shift in in the San Francisco Food scene in his career. During his time as the Editor of “Eater” in 08, Lucchesi broke the news of Mission Street Food’s first night in the truck in 2008. Now as Food Editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, he gets to assist Ho’s new career from internet to print.
I couldn’t help but smile with her. Ho’s dream was coming true. From the second she started her podcast, she had fought long and hard for this moment. The podcast consisted of a small scrappy team of Zahir Janmohamed, Juan Diego Ramirez, and Stephanie Kuo. Ho and her team created a space where they could talk about being POC’s in the food industry that is predominantly white cis-male. Not having any previous podcast experience and feeling like they would have fizzled out after 7 episodes, they created a conversation that was much needed for food media. Now she is at the helm of having a full staff to support her.
Lucchesi pushes the conversation forward and asks Ho about her approach to her reviews. She says, “as far as the evaluations I will be aiming more for qualitative evaluations, being more idea driven rather than numerical driven.”
The moment she announces taking away Chronicle stars, complete shock and audible gasps fill the crowd. I hear a loud “What?” from an audience member as the audience clamors. There is a brief moment of silence, so quiet you could hear the sound of a monocle falling in someone's champagne glass. As Lucchesi tries to move the conversation forward, a woman blurts out and interrupts him, "Wait, are you saying you're going to eliminate stars?" An immediate “Yes” comes out of Ho’s mouth and the crowd laughs and applauds. Immediately the interrupting woman tweets online: “SOLEIL HO IS ELIMINATING STARS FROM HER RESTAURANT REVIEWS AT THE @sfchronicle ... at a talk with @hooleil & @lucchesi rn in the post @michaelbauer1 era cc @Eater @eatersf.”
Audrey Cooper retweets back in solidarity: “Lol: The restauranteurs are breaking the news from our #ChronicleChats events tonight starring our new critic @hooleil and the amazing @lucchesi. This is pretty meta.”
The stakes are higher now and the pressure is on to perform. Change is scary for some people as they think she's going to jump out of the screen and kick their forks out of their hands. With every step she takes, Ho is under extra scrutiny. What a juxtaposition to be in as the first WOC with a unique voice, but still fall under the pressures to be the model minority and not wanting to mess up your opportunity for future POC’s. “While working for a mainstream news organization,” Ho tells me in an email, “I need to be very careful about ethical issues in my interactions with the people and establishments I write about. People keep trying to send me free food because I’m incredibly Googleable and I find that very stressful! Just let me pay for it please! Otherwise I can’t write about you at all!”
Ho’s commitment to the job is rewarded as the Chronicle has supported almost every idea she’s had. “I’ve been doing some weird shit, like writing a review as a stage play and doing columns about my fear of getting killed in a mass shooting. I’m very lucky in that my editor is willing to roll with even my wackiest ideas.”
However Ho’s efforts to persuade others to have a different perspective on food, there are others waiting online to detract her efforts. In a recent column, Susan Dyer Reynolds from the Marina Times writes a column piece, singling Ho out as she puts in her headline “With rambling diatribes on cultural appropriation, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Soleil Ho makes a mockery of food criticism.”
Reynolds' column caters to a neighborhood that has the second to worst diversity rating in San Francisco (The Diversity Index can be viewed as a measure of segregation, ranging from 0 (no diversity) to 100 (complete diversity) Marina falls second to last with a score of 34.8, next Chinatown scoring 24.8.) In 1935, The Federal Home Loan Bank Board asked Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to look at 239 cities and use a colored grade to create "residential security maps," marking which neighborhoods were appropriate to invest in. San Francisco was one of those 239 cities and consequently, low income families, immigrants, and residents of color were turned down for bank loans. The Marina District was an area restricted as they wouldn’t give loans in fear of anything that “constitutes a menace.“ As Ho tries represent other voices in food media, Reynolds sees her intentions differently.
Reynolds goes into Ho personally, critiquing her work and questioning her position as a food critic, claiming she “Wants” to be different. Reynolds cherry picks lines from her review and draws immediate conclusions “She wrote scathingly of critical darling Chez Panisse.” However she ignores Ho’s more nuanced criticism of still saying it’s fine restaurant but “along with ideological purity came a lack of forward momentum” hoping to better the restaurant.
In Reynolds’ response to the Ho’s Le Colonial review, “It takes her 1,099 words to get to the food. In fact, only 142 words out of a rambling 1,983 talk about the meal. The rest of the article is devoted to why the restaurant shouldn’t exist.” This “rambling” that Raymond is referring to is Ho explaining the problematic history of French colonization of Vietnam in the 1920’s. This is a period that not only exploited the Vietnamese financially, but American soldiers as France charged American soldiers rent for trench space. Despite Reynolds glaring omissions of context, Ho still leaves her solution open ended: “it’s not my intention to demand that restaurants that outlive their political correctness be automatically thrown into a wood chipper. All I ask is that we, diners and restaurateurs alike, try harder to not let beauty deceive us into believing untruths.” Still, the reactionary online comments share the same tone of criticism without reading her whole essay, “@NadineColbert, “Le Colonial has colonial decor, it doesn’t say that it supports colonialism. Are you suggesting that all colonial buildings around the World should be demolished? India’s Parliament is colonial, Demolish it?”
With all the times I have spent with Ho in public, there have always been fans eager for her time as they wait for us to finish talking. I wave them over to say hi to her, as I’m just hanging out. One by one, each fan introduces themselves and shares a story of how Ho has been an inspiration. They ask curious questions of career advice and even share how they have felt “Othered” too, being in a society where they are the outsider.
I find it infuriating and sad how sometimes there are only people that only look at her work as an attack on them. In a strange turn of events, Reynolds offers this piece of wisdom to her audience when she herself was criticized for a column piece: "While some are simply inane, others can be downright vile. For every thoughtful, intelligent comment there are thousands of pointless, ignorant ones – and an alarming number that are just plain scary.”
In a piece Sam Anderson wrote for The New York Times “Flavors of Space-Time,” he says “It’s hard to talk about flavor. Tasting something is such a direct neutral jolt; words will always seem clumsy and vague.” Soleil Ho’s writings are amazing pieces of work themselves. In a weird way, why would you look at a food without biting into it?
Her critics seem to rush into "Intentional Fallacy," the mistake of attempting to understand the author's intentions when interpreting a literary work. It’s beating the idea that someone else’s opinion might prove us wrong by throwing our opinion first. As national correspondent at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses this issue, “The thing with fiction is, unlike argumentative pieces, you can’t see [titles like] “The Case for Reparations” and then go ahead and write your [reaction] piece based on the headline, which is what people would do.”
Soleil has a way of immersing the reader into a world of fresh perspective, as they follow her into the restaurant review. However a lot of her prose have single sentences can shine alone. In her top 100 review of Beit Rima, her simple line of analogy “beef and chicken kebabs and a Gaza-style lamb shank as tender as a mother’s goodbye kiss,” stands out as poetry more convincing than any Drake punchline. “I think, honestly, the way I recall memories is through images like that,” as she emails me back about my comment about her writing. “A kind of poetry, yes. I have a hard time remembering most things, which is troublesome for writers in general but for food critics it’s a really tough one. What helps me is metaphor.”
What people don’t know behind the scenes when writing about food is that metaphors have the power to persuade thought. In a study, published by PLoS ONE in 2011 and conducted by Lera Boroditsky and Paul Thibodeau, looked at the power of metaphors. The participants had people read about crime. Half of the respondents read about the crime through descriptions of animal metaphors—e.g. a “wild beast preying on a city”—and the other were given a disease metaphor, e.g. a “virus infecting the city.” When asked for solutions to solve the city’s problem, those who received the animal metaphor suggested, “catching and jailing criminals and enacting harsher enforcement laws.” Conversely, the disease metaphor recommended, “investigating the root causes and treating the problem by enacting social reform to inoculate the community, with an emphasis on eradicating poverty and improving education.”
So what is her secret with metaphors? “I’m like the aliens from the “Darmok” episode of Star Trek: TNG who only speak through allusions to other things. So in my writing, you’ll find a lot of montages with pop culture, shit I read on the internet.” One of my more favorite lines she writes, is in her review of San Leandro restaurant Top Hatters Kitchen: “The servers are the Marge Simpson kind of nice who speak to you in gentle purrs, patiently explaining “shiso” and “pork cotton” to newcomers.” Anyone who knows me well knows that I'm deeply invested in the Simpsons fandom, and that when I'm in writing mode, the only responses from me will be Simpsons gifs.
In preparation for her new role, she tells the Grub Street she’s been reading works such as Wesley Morris, Ruth Reichl, and Hanif Abdurraqib. “Through their writing, Morris and Abdurraqib taught me to not be afraid of vulnerability; to be ok with putting a bit of myself on the page. The stereotype about Millennial writers is that it’s always first-person, it’s always about the “I,” but fuck that, I am here and eating the food and I am not some omnipotent giant head, so who “I” am and what I’ve been through do in fact matter to the story.”
Bringing it back to the Le Colonel review, the criticism she received was unfair as they glossed over some crucial points. In her opening statement, she puts a part of her history in the review:
“My name used to give me a lot of grief. France was always an object of fascination for my mother, as a place of unparalleled sophistication and elegance, of haute cuisine and couture. Once I learned more about the history of France in Vietnam, I had trouble reconciling the France in my mother’s mind with the one that had transformed her country into Indochina. My name was a constant reminder of that relationship.” Sometimes putting the “I” in our work can be a painful experience, and it's a shame to call this “rambling.”
The word nostalgia derives from a 17th-century medical student describing the anxieties Swiss mercenaries had when fighting away from home. Our “Keep Calm and Carry On” culture teaches us to be over-optimistic and “move on” from the bad experiences. There is some sense of cathartic healing though when we reminisce. It explains why old veterans get together over beer and recount the war, or when we meet up with friends hungover to recount what happened the night before. Food is the catalyst that brings people together to our KollabSF music events at SOMA StrEat Food Park. Boba, lumpia, and dumplings are just some of the nostalgic treats that bring in groups of friends as they recall the last time they had what they are eating. Though these events are fun for most, I can’t help myself and watch others at these events and feel left out. For the most part, it’s because I didn’t grow up with these foods. However, deep down, it's because I can’t recall any food memories as a child.
I’ve asked around about everyone’s food memory and they can answer within two minutes. They are so specific to detail, the mention of a specific food paints a scene precisely down to the strokes. For me to recall any memories, they are vague pieces and bits of footnotes. I can recall Maggi Sauce, chopsticks and those red melamine bowls, but they were just random items that my white friends didn’t have. I dig further in my psyche and can’t find giddy memories of eating with the other students in the cafeteria. I don’t have memories of my grandmother cooking Bun Rieu.
Vox’s Netflix show The Mind, Explained, looks at the science behind memories. Your memories are continuously morphing and reshaping through time. They are never permanent. So what’s the point of having memory that’s technically not real? In the scientific case of Henry Gustav Molaison, it answers so many questions about the brain that it helped invent neuroscience. His severe memory impairment, which resulted from experimental neurosurgery to control seizures, was the subject of study for five decades until his death in December 2008. In one of the studies, one doctor asked: What do you think you’ll do tomorrow? Henry Molaison:
“...”
“Whatever is beneficial.”
It seemed to scientists that he had lost his past, he can no longer imagine looking ahead. Researchers discovered that when the brain is remembering the past, its identical to when people are trying to imagine the future. When you let your mind wander, you switch between remembering and imagining.
There are a few moments when I am alone and my brain recalls a memory I borrowed from my sister. I remember her talking to someone about when we were kids and she would walk me home from school to our sponsor family’s house and pick up our sandwiches. Since that’s all I know about the story, I have to fill in the details with assumptions and other people’s stories. When I read Soleil’s essay “Why Is Vietnamese Food in America Frozen in the 1970’s?” I’m able to piece together some of my past. My parents must be South Vietnamese because they would buy basil, sliced chiles, and hoisin sauce. The way they want their food to be as close as they can remember, must have made it hard for them to put trust in a family to give us food that they don’t recognize. They loved me enough to put their pride away to have a family help feed me and my sister. I have to fall upon this tough memory, one that isn’t mine, because there are times I struggle with empathy for others.
When Ho first moved to SF, we reconnected over a celebratory lunch, and we spoke about craft and the scary future in front of us. I said something crass and cynical, something to the extent of,“POC’s have suffered so long, will things truly change?” She said honestly, “What good does that kind of thinking do?” In that moment of my pessimism, I was negating all the work and hope she has for this world, a world that includes me. In a Reddit AMA about the SF Chronicle, Lucchesi writes about what's not known about Ho: “I don't think people truly understand/appreciate how hard Soleil works. A restaurant critic sounds like a dream job, and maybe sometimes it is, but Soleil is tireless, always out and about.” Maria Popova states clearly that “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism,” as she made me rethink my statement. Ho proving me wrong however, doesn’t make me a bad person, it shaping me to become a better one. The same message applies in her review about Le Colonial: the intention wasn’t about proving people wrong to hurt them, it was telling a narrative to show how it can hurt others.
In Angry Asian Man’s Column Angry Reader of the Week, he asks her what she’s about, “I'm all about facilitating conversations and subtly sharing methods for examining and critiquing the world around us in the spirit of wanting everything to be better. Or at least, validating the feelings of folks who've felt alienated from the culture in the same ways that I have.” To no one's fault but of the circumstances, I still haven’t found a place here in Kollab. For all the trauma and sad stuff I always end up writing about, there are days I just want to talk about fun commonalities like everyone else. Soleil, however, continues to inspire me with her voice and gives me the direction to find my own.
“So is today a cheat day for you?” the man at the register quipps at me.
“Nah, I have cheat hours throughout the day!”
We both laugh in unison.
He’s used to serving me in the morning as I work right next to the small corner breakfast and lunch shop, the Sentinel. Sometimes I get their oatmeal that is a slightly rose color because all the seasonal fruit they mix in. This day is different as I try their sandwich for the first time in the 11 years I’ve walked by this place. Since it’s listed in The top 100, I thought I’d give the BBQ pork loin sandwich with carrots, cabbage, and caramelized onions a try. He hands me my sandwich through the small window where you can see the kitchen. This makes me realize that I’d always imagine our sponsor family hands me my sandwich through a dutch door with the bottom half closed. We trade weekend plans as he’s ready for his Saturday pick-up soccer game. He gives me an extra muffin for being work neighbors. I sometimes wonder if the sponsor family gave us extra treats for my sister and me.
What makes this year’s selection of best restaurants different than the other years before is putting restaurants that can be considered “community spaces that anchor neighborhoods,” including my good friends at the Sentinel. For all the changes and influx of people that come and go, I never realized there was a sandwich place that would be considered a best eats near me this whole time. This is what she meant about food representation.
I walk back to work and into my boss’s office, hands full of food wrapped in paper. He’s a muscular guy, biceps that have the volume of three Sential sandwiches but weigh as much as a Thanksgiving ham. I know he’s going to hesitate trying a bite of my sandwich, given the fact we do work in a gym. I try to convince him that it just got rated a top 100, so he humors me with a bite. He chews and his body language tells me he agrees with Ho’s choice. My boss and I have had a rough relationship this year. He’s seen me at my worst moments fighting my severe depression that has impacted my job as of late. This is one of my few attempts that I’m making amends, now with food.
As Ho put this list together, she comes to understand top restaurants as “those that nourish us in ways beyond simply feeding our bodies whether through artistic vision, community engagement, nostalgia or kindness.” For me, her work and activism has nourished my past as I hope she stays as our food critic for many years into the future.
Thank you Soleil,
Cảm ơn đã làm tôi cười.