I was eating Korean food the other day and thought about how you probably make more decisions eating Korean BBQ than any other cuisine.
Korean BBQ is the maximum assembly cuisine – a Korean BBQ table is raw materials and a fire. You can choose what banchan to nibble on at the start of the meal, decide what meat you want to grill, grill it yourself,, decide how to assemble your ssam, whether lettuce or perilla leaves, maybe add some ssamjang, layer in kimchi or radish or garlic. Even with bibimbap, you mix it yourself and decide how much gochujang you want.
Let’s apply the high agency meme to food – where would you put different cuisines on a spectrum of low to high agency?
Hot pot is maximum agency. You choose and cook everything yourself. One of my favorite feelings is standing in front of the DIY sauce station and picking out my plate of fish cakes, mushrooms, and vegetables.
Tacos are medium high agency, you get to choose what kind of taco, and then what salsas to complete it.
Vietnamese is medium agency, pho or banh xeo arrives incomplete - you add herbs, lime, chili, sauce.
Ethiopian is medium agency, tearing off pieces of injera and assembling each bite is fairly high agency. There’s no individual plate, it’s a communal experience
Thai food is medium to low agency, it comes - tom yum or a curry is a finished dish where the chef has assembled their balanced sweet, sour, salty, spicy, umami in a bowl.
French haute cuisine is low agency, it is authoritative. Dishes arrive plated, sauced, garnished, complete. The chef knows better than you, even the kitchen hierarchy is structured in this way – the brigade executes the chef’s vision and the job of the diner is to just appreciate it.
Italian to me is low agency (at least in the US), you get your pastas and mains and that’s it. I guess you can tell them when to say stop for parmesan or pepper.
Japanese cuisine is a wider so there’s both low and high agency parts to it. But one end of the extreme is omakase/kaiseki, you respectfully relinquish your food choosing duties to the master chef. They are far more skilled than you, they’ve been mastering the craft for decades, and that’s part of the fun and joy of this kind of dining. On the other end, izakaya/conveyer belt sushi is max agency, you get to choose from an insanely large menu or make decisions every 5 seconds as a plate of sushi rolls past you.
Chinese and Indian cuisine are both too wide for a single answer. But any family style oriented cuisine like Chinese food is by default medium agency, because you assemble your own plate. And the degree of agency is directly correlated with the number of people you’re eating with. More dishes, more options. In some ways, this is a cuisine optimized for group gatherings around an 8-10 person round table. The table format also molds to the style of cuisine (and molds the social interaction dynamic around it).
I was talking to my Bourdain Steves project in Claude about this idea and it pointed out that the spectrum of food often correlates with how hierarchical the broader culture is, that “highly stratified societies tend to put more authority in the chef, and cuisines that grew out of communal traditions tend to put the authority in the eater’s hands” (hah)
I really like what Ben Leventhal (Founder of Blackbird, and formerly Resy and Eater) said at the USV annual meeting last year:
“Restaurants are still largely misunderstood and undervalued as entertainment assets”
So much of the modern mall-based Chinese dining feels like it has leaned into collaborative “restaurant as an interactive entertainment experience”. From the viral Hai Di Lao noodle pull and dance, to newer versions of bbq and skewers restaurants, these restaurants have a different kind of convivial atmosphere where you cook your own food or watch it be prepared in front of you.
What will matter after AI takes over the world? Restaurants. We all gotta eat.
Maybe the one important area to maintain our agency is to prepare our own food, instead of outsourcing it and being detached from the source of the labor.
Some memorable food experiences recently:
Fun article!
Note on Indian. Indian can be high agency. let’s say you have 1 bread and 3 curries. That means you have 27 variations of different bites you can have. Add a pickle or another side dish into the equation and it just escalates from there.