Of spaghetti meatballs, chicken tikka masala, and General Tso's: How independent films have depicted 'immigrant food'

“Good food is like music you can taste, color you can smell.” Ratatouille gets us. In this series ‘Food for Film,’ we pick food films/shows that make our mouths water and our souls richer.

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Towards the beginning of directors Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s 1996 comedy  Big Night, Secondo [Tucci] has just served a meal at his restaurant to an American couple. The seated woman looks at the food on her plate, and asks if that is what she had ordered. Yes, Secondo responds, adding it is risotto, a special recipe that he and his brother Primo had brought from Italy.

The woman is still looking at her dish. “Excuse me, didn’t you say it is going to be rice with seafood?” she asks. “Yes, it is Italian arborio rice, the best,” Secondo replies. “Then with shrimp and scallop.” The woman is still not happy. “But I get a side of spaghetti with it, right?” she asks. No, Secondo says. Because risotto is rice, which is starch, and it does not go well with pasta.

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The woman and her husband insist, and Secondo has to go make a special request to his older brother who is the chef of the restaurant. But before he leaves for the kitchen, the woman asks for meatballs with her spaghetti.  

“Spaghetti comes without meatballs,” Secondo says while the woman looks at him aghast that she is not getting her favourite Italian food. “Sometimes spaghetti likes to be alone.”

Primo [Tony Shalhoub] is a purist, a curmudgeon, a food Nazi. But he finally gives in for the sake of the restaurant and its reputation.

Big Night, set in the 1950s in a quiet town on the New Jersey seashore, is the story of the two immigrant brothers who arrive in America to open a restaurant where they can cook authentic Italian food, like the large baked pasta dish Primo makes called Timpano. Shaped liked a drum, Timpano is cooked with rigatoni pasta, mozzarella and provolone cheese, meatballs, hard-boiled eggs, ricotta-stuffed shells, caramelized onions, and sausages.

Spaghetti with meatballs is not commonly eaten in Italy. In fact, the dish was created as a cheap meal by the early Italian immigrants who realised meat was inexpensive in the US, and to that they could add a generous helping of pasta with canned tomato sauce. Soon spaghetti with meatballs became the Italian national dish, but only in America.

It is just like a dish called chicken tikka masala that originated most probably in the UK, where an Indian immigrant chef [a Wikipedia entry attributes the dish to a Bangladeshi chef in the UK] experimented with what he had learned in his home country, and added a touch of what he thought the British public would like.  

Immigrants have been coming to the US for a couple of centuries. Most immigrants – especially the early arrivals made the arduous journeys via the sea for a better life in the new land. They brought with them little personal items, but most importantly, they carried their cultures and memories of the foods they cooked back home.

Many immigrants set up restaurants, first to serve their immigrant brothers and sisters, but later to bring their cuisines to the rest of the American population.

That tradition continues even now. Global cities like London and New York City have several high-end, top-rated Indian restaurants. There is even a Michelin star Indian restaurant in the tiny island of Macao, better known for its casinos. But New York City also has several no frills South Asian restaurants that cater essentially to the city’s Indian and Pakistani cab drivers. Over time, their inexpensive dishes began to appeal to other New Yorkers, students, and those who were looking for global cuisines, but at budget prices.

Films, especially small independent productions, have often captured immigrant stories and the foods they cooked. Director Ian Cheney’s documentary The Search for General Tso  [2014] tracks the origins of a very popular sweet and savoury Chinese chicken dish in America. But while General Tso is available in practically all Chinese restaurants in the US, people in China’s Hunan Province – where there was a general by the name of Tso – have never heard of the dish. Most Hunan Chinese dishes are not sweet.

The film traces early Chinese immigrants to the US who came from Guangdong Province during the mid-19th century gold rush. For the second wave of Chinese immigrants, restaurant work was the easiest they could find in the US. Some realised that if they adapted their food to American tastes, they could make a decent living. Over time, Chinese restaurants opened across the US, and could be found even in small towns where there were no immigrants from China.

The food kept evolving. As the film finally reveals, several decades later in 1972, Chef TT Wong created the General Tso chicken dish in New York City’s high-end Shun Lee restaurant. Chef Wong’s creation was partly inspired by a somewhat similar dish served by Chef Peng Chang-kue in the Peng Yuan Hunan restaurant in Taipei in the late 1960s.  

Other films narrate stories of immigrants in America where families and friends gather together over meals.    Director Wayne Wang’s film Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart  [1985] is a lovely story about a Chinese American widow in San Francisco who wants to make a trip back to China so she can pay respect to her ancestors. A fortune teller has predicted that she will die before she turns 65.

Her brother-in-law Tam [played by the marvelous Chinese-American actor Victor Wong] regrets that the woman did not teach her daughters how to make authentic Chinese food.  

“Do you know how to make Chinese sausage?’ he asks his two adult nieces. “No more Chinese sausage. Pork in shrimp sauce. Your favourite dish? No more. Duck Won Ton? No more. No more roast duck. No more shark fin soup.”

As it happens, the fortune teller has made a mistake in her calculations, and the mother comes back joyful that she will live longer, and can continue to cook for her daughters.

Chinese food in New York also becomes the focal point of The Wedding Banquet  [1993], a comedy directed by Ang Lee, where a gay Taiwanese American gets into a sham court marriage with a Chinese woman to help her get a green card. But he also wants to placate his parents who have been trying to find him potential brides in Taiwan.  

His parents arrive in New York for the wedding, and are disappointed with the bland court ceremony. Quite by chance, the protagonist’s father runs into an old friend who now runs a Chinese restaurant in New York. An elaborate wedding banquet is arranged where hundreds of guests eat, drink, and embarrass the bride and bridegroom. The traditional ritual from the home country — a celebratory banquet with waiters hopping tables as the bride, groom, and guests get inebriated, plays out for the immigrants in their new country. But there is a twist. The groom is more keen to kiss his American boyfriend than his bride.

In Jon Favreau’s Chef [2014], an out-of-work chef Carl (Favreau), buys a food truck after he eats at a Cuban restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana neighbourhood with his 10-year-old son and ex-wife (Colombian actress Sofia Vergara playing a Cuban).  

With the help of a former colleague and his son, Carl starts to make Cuban sandwiches on the food truck. As Carl explains, a traditional Cuban sandwich has two slices of ham, three of cooked pork, two slices of cheese, two pickles [a Jewish delicacy where cucumber slices are marinated in vinegar], large helping of mustard on the bread, liberally brushed butter on top of the sandwich, and then pressed in a grill.  

The sandwiches become really popular. Cooking and running the food truck brings Carl closer to his son, as well as his ex-wife who he remarries.

A blend of food and the Indian immigration story is told with a sweet touch in director’s David Kaplan’s Today’s Special  [2009]. Based on a one-man stage play by Aasif Mandvi [who also co-wrote the screenplay], the film narrates the journey of Samir [Mandvi] a sous-chef in an expensive Manhattan restaurant who quits his job after an argument with his boss, and is exploring the idea of joining a cooking school in Paris. But his plans gets derailed when his father has a heart attack, and Samir is forced to take over the family’s rundown Indian eatery Tandoor Palace, located in Jackson Heights in the Queens borough of New York City.

With the blessings of his mother [Madhur Jaffrey] and a mysterious cab driver [Naseeruddin Shah], who claims to have cooked for the British royalty in Bombay, Samir manages to save the restaurant, and even gets a glowing review in The New York Times. And he also finds a girl for himself, which is a relief to his mother who was worried that he would “end up with a widow.”

The fate of brothers Primo and Secondo in Big Night and their restaurant Paradise is a lot more uncertain. Their main competitor Pascal [a terrific Ian Holm] deceives them into the idea of throwing a party which will be attended by jazz musician Louis Prima. Primo cooks all his favourite dishes, the guests drink expensive wine and dance to Rosemary Clooney singing ‘Mambo Italiano.’ But eventually, everyone leaves when Prima is a no show.

But this much is clear. While their restaurant may have to close, Primo and Secondo still want to chase their American dream. And somehow, they will continue to cook Italian food for Americans.

Read more from the series  here.

Aseem Chhabra is a US and India based author and director of the New York Indian Film Festival.