In the New York Times, food writer Francis Lam looks at American-born chefs who become famous for cuisines outside their own ethnicity, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Pok Pok's Andy Ricker is front-and-center as a "high-profile ambassador for a cuisine in which he has no family roots." Ricker explains how his foreignness helps him learn traditional recipes from Thai chefs: "They know I'm not their competition... They go: 'You're white! How the hell can you possibly do this?' So they get psyched to show me how they make something." [NYT]
