Buttermilk Graffiti

Starred review from January 29, 2018
This excellent collection of culinary travel essays by chef and TV personality Lee (Smoke & Pickles; The Mind of a Chef) takes readers across the U.S. in search of immigrant cuisine. A Korean-American kid from Brooklyn who now runs restaurants in Kentucky, Lee is an eager mixer of styles and traditions. He writes, “Show me your recipes, and I can tell who you are.” It’s a sweet and heady mélange of travelogue, in which Lee plays the eager investigator chasing down cooks to figure out how or why they cooked a dish he ate; he ends each chapter with recipes inspired by the food he’s just eaten, but capped with his own twists. Lee mixes rapturous and unfussy descriptions of the dishes he discovers—from the shockingly good Cambodian food in Lowell, Mass. (smoked ground fish in mud fish sauce, and cow intestines in a fermented fish paste), to the influence of Lebanese food in Clarksdale, Miss. (made with beef at one restaurant, the kibbeh is served raw or fried), and Clarksburg, W.Va., where immigrant Italian coal miners packed pepperoni rolls for lunch. Lee celebrates unexpected confluences of cuisines while refusing to be limited by definitions of “authenticity.”