In 1978, actor Peter Ustinov was working in Kenya on the film Ashanti. Bored with the unit caterer’s food, he and some friends, hoping to find a restaurant, set out to cross the border into Tanzania.
The frontier police had other ideas, particularly since none of the film people had visas.
“But we’re not staying,” Ustinov pleaded. “Just long enough to eat at a restaurant.”
The guard jumped on this. “Which restaurant?”
Ustinov had a brainwave. “The Chinese restaurant, of course.”
Satisfied, the guard lifted the barrier and waved them through.
Ustinov’s guess was inspired. If a town anywhere in the world has an ethnic restaurant, it is almost certainly Chinese.
The explosion of Asian food across the Anglo-Saxon world was a phenomenon of the early 20th century. One of the first Chinese restaurants in Europe opened in London’s West End just after World War I. Its proprietor, Bool-yun “Brilliant” Chang, used it as a front for smuggling drugs into Britain. By the late-1920s, Asian food was still sufficiently rare to attract the following summary in a 1927 guidebook for American visitors to Paris:
CHINESE RESTAURANT.
Rue de Carmes. Off rue des Ecoles. See dozens of Chinese men with white girls. A Chinese dinner. A clean place, interestingly decorated. A great novelty.
The Chinese were pioneers in adapting their traditional cuisine to Western tastes, followed by Indian restaurants or, more often, Pakistani and Sri Lankan. Within a few years, most of the Western world was eating Vietnamese nems (spring rolls), Japanese sushi and Korean grilled beef with kim chi (pickled cabbage with chili). Benelong in Paris served a grilled fillet of kangaroo, and in Los Angeles, Wallaby Darned offered authentic Down Under meat pies.
The incursion of Mexican food into North America has the logic of geography. Harder to explain is the popularity in Britain of Indian food, an invasion so complete that the nation’s favorite meal is no longer fish and chips or roast beef with Yorkshire pudding but chicken tikka masala, an Indian dish of chicken in a creamy tomato and yogurt sauce. Even more puzzlingly, France’s traditional steak frites (steak and french fries) is now under threat from the couscous of North Africa, Belgian stewed mussels and even the American hamburger.
London could also boast the West’s first Indian restaurant. Veeraswamy opened in 1926, just off Regent Street, next to the theater district of Shaftesbury Avenue. Many retired English military men and civil servants were nostalgic for the curries of India. The presence of a doorman in traditional Indian dress reassured them they would be served only authentic dishes, correctly spiced, but not every restaurant was so conscientious. As Indian cooks moderated the use of chili, Chinese chefs altered traditional dishes to accommodate Western taste, and avoided contentious ingredients. In Dublin, a health inspector closed a Chinese restaurant after finding the remains of a German Shepherd in its kitchen. It reopened when the owner testified that this delicacy was never wasted on Irish clients but reserved for family and friends.
Certain Asian dishes achieved instant popularity. They included tandoori, for which pieces of meat marinated in yogurt and spices were cooked in a clay oven or tandoor, and Chinese dim sum. As these dumplings, steamed and served in bamboo baskets, became a popular choice for lunch, restaurateurs omitted to mention that, in China, they were generally eaten at breakfast.
The ability to ingest highly spiced food became a test of masculinity. Attending a literary festival in Wales, Australian poet Les Murray was taken by some local writers to an Indian restaurant. Ignoring “the kindly brown waiter wringing the hands of dissuasion,” he ordered the most incendiary dish on the menu, chicken vindaloo. Spiced with cumin, mustard seed, cinnamon, cloves, turmeric, paprika and, naturally, cayenne pepper, this is not for amateurs, but Murray, ignoring the waiter’s advice—“Oh, vindaloo, sir! You sure you want vindaloo, sir?”—trusted a palate seasoned, so he thought, by long experience. His poem Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil documented its effects:
Fair play, it was frightful. I spooned the chicken of Hell In a sauce of rich yellow brimstone. The valley boys with me, Tasting it, croaked to white Jesus.
Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, 200,000 refugees poured into France, some with their fortunes intact, others penniless. Impoverished grand duchesses became vendeuses or governesses while onetime counts took jobs as doormen or cabdrivers: By 1939, Paris’s Union of Russian Cabdrivers had 3,000 members.
Wealthier émigrés funded orphanages for Russian children, homes for the aged and an Orthodox cathedral. Publishers issued Russian-language books and newspapers. At the Albatros studios in suburban Montreuil-sur-Bois, Alexander Kamenka produced films with Russian actors and technicians. Scores of restaurants opened across France to accommodate those who could still afford caviar, champagne and a shashlik of lamb doused in brandy and carried to the table impaled on a sword, and in flames. Those without money kept to the shadows, nursing a vodka and weeping as the balalaikas throbbed and another exile sang of the nation and the friends they would never see again.
Stories of Paris’s Russian community provided Hollywood with plenty of new stories, the cinema reflecting a society not unlike that of Hollywood itself, where one could adopt any persona that one could make convincing. In one notable misstep, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, richest of the studios, produced Rasputin and the Empress, a fanciful reconstruction of the fall of the Romanovs and the baleful influence of the monk Grigori Rasputin on the susceptible czarina and her ladies-in-waiting, one of whom, based on Princess Irina Romanova Youssoupoff, he rapes. Her lawsuit alleging invasion of privacy and libel yielded a judgment of $127,373 in the English courts and an out-of-court settlement in New York, reportedly for $1 million. Thereafter, every Hollywood film bore the disclaimer, “This motion picture is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.”
Other films inspired by the Russian exiles were no less melodramatic. In Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command, Emil Jannings plays a former general, now working as a movie extra, who finds himself acting in a film of his greatest military triumph, directed by the former Bolshevik whom, while a general, he sentenced to death by firing squad. In Midnight, written by Billy Wilder, penniless chorus girl Claudette Colbert, dumped in a rain-swept Paris with nothing in her purse but a pawn ticket for her luggage, wakes up in a suite at the Ritz, registered as a Hungarian aristocrat, the Countess Czerny. Both Anatole Litvak’s Tovarich and Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, also part-written by Wilder (and both set in Paris), wrung a bitter laugh from the émigrés’ plight. In Tovarich, adapted from Jacques Deval’s play, Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert, entrusted with the Russian crown jewels, live in poverty in Paris rather than betray that trust. Taking jobs as butler and lady’s maid, they charm and educate their bourgeois employers.
Food, a secondary motif in Midnight—to demonstrate the eccentricity of her supposed husband’s family, Colbert confides, “His grandfather sent me, as an engagement present, one roller skate, covered with Thousand Island dressing”—emerges full-blown in Ninotchka to highlight the cultural differences between Greta Garbo’s humorless commissar and the suave playboy who seduces her. When, in a Paris restaurant, Garbo orders raw beets and carrots, the proprietor, offended, says, “Madame, this is a restaurant, not a meadow,” while at the conclusion, three Russian bureaucrats, Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski, weaponize food by opening a restaurant.
NINOTCHKA. You mean you are deserting Russia?
KOPALSKI. Don’t call it desertion. Our little restaurant … that is our Russia … the Russia of borscht, the Russia of beef Stroganoff, blinis with sour cream …
IRANOFF … the Russia of piroshki … people will eat and love it.
Greta Garbo with Sig Ruman, Alexander Granach, and Felix Bressart in Ninotchka, 1939
Just as none of the actors playing Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski was actually born in Russia, the restaurant they open is not in Paris but Istanbul. Having lived in France, Billy Wilder would have known that, of all European nations, it is the least welcoming to foreign food. A restaurant may advertise Chinese or Japanese or Indian cuisine, but the food it serves will have been altered out of all recognition to suit French tastes. The French version of chili is indistinguishable from baked beans. And a French curry? Over some things, it is more diplomatic to draw a veil.
Even McDonalds failed in its first attempt to introduce hamburgers to the French. The second, instigated by a Frenchman, varied the burger recipe to take account of local tastes. More importantly, it opened its restaurants not in working-class areas but on such fashionable thoroughfares as the Champs-Élysées. Once the jeunesse dorée embraced the Big Mac, success was assured.
Furious, McDonalds’ U.S. management employed every dirty trick to shut down the French franchisee. They succeeded on a technicality. The beef in the French patty contained less fat, the frites were thinner and crisper, and beer joined shakes on the menu—offenses against a contract that required the McDonalds experience to be identical no matter where it was bought. A few years later, McDonalds started up again in France with great success: with less fat in the meat and beer on sale (as in the Netherlands, Austria and Germany as well).