Is Fusion Food Authentic? An Honest Answer

Every few weeks someone at the counter asks the question politely, and every few weeks someone online asks it less politely: is any of this authentic? A hummus with ikura on it. A Levantine raw-lamb dish dressed with wasabi ponzu. A Lebanese chicken with yuzu in the toum. Surely one of the two traditions is being short-changed.

It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer from the kitchen that is doing it, rather than a defensive one. When we wrote up how Japanese and Middle Eastern cooking actually fit together, we promised the authenticity argument its own post instead of smuggling it in. This is that post. The mechanics live over there; this one is about the word.

What people usually mean by “authentic”

When a diner says a dish is not authentic, they almost always mean one of three different things, and it helps to pull them apart.

Fidelity to an origin. The dish is made the way it is made in the place it comes from. This is the dictionary sense and the one most arguments start with.
Fidelity to a person’s memory. The dish tastes the way it tasted at a grandmother’s table, a particular stall, a first trip abroad. This is the sense that produces the angriest reviews, because it cannot be argued with.
Sincerity. The cook knows what the original is, and every change is a decision rather than an accident or a shortcut. This is the sense we think actually matters, and we will come back to it.

The first sense sounds the most objective. It is also the one that falls apart fastest once you look at where “original” dishes came from.

The dishes nobody calls fusion, and should

Start on the Japanese side, because it is the side people assume is most fixed.

Tempura is the obvious case. The technique of frying in a flour-and-egg batter was picked up in Nagasaki from Portuguese missionaries towards the end of the sixteenth century, and the name is usually traced to the Latin tempora, the fasting periods when Catholics ate fried vegetables and fish instead of meat. It then spent the Edo period turning into something recognisably Japanese: a thinner batter, outdoor stalls, and eventually a place among the city’s classic dishes. Four hundred years later nobody calls it Portuguese food.

Japanese curry is younger. It first appears in Japanese cookbooks in 1872, most likely brought in by the British Royal Navy as “curry powder”, and it was filed as yōshoku — Western-style food — because it arrived from the West. The navy put it over rice and thickened it with flour so it would not slop about at sea. It is now as domestic as a dish can get.

Ramen began life described as “Chinese noodles”. The pattern is the same each time: a foreign idea arrives, local cooks bend it to local ingredients and habits, and a few generations later it is held up as the tradition that newer cooking is betraying.

The Levantine side is no different. Our matbucha is a dip of stewed tomatoes and peppers, and both of those plants are native to the Americas; they reached the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa only after 1500. A great deal of what anyone would call classic Middle Eastern food rests on ingredients that were, historically speaking, recent imports.

None of this is a gotcha. It is simply what cuisines are. They are not sealed containers; they are long, slow arguments between whatever was local and whatever turned up.

So why does modern fusion get a harder time?

Partly because it is fast. Tempura had a few centuries to settle down; a restaurant menu has a few months. Partly because of timing: the word “fusion” was popularised in the late 1980s — the chef Norman Van Aken is usually credited with putting “fusion cooking” into circulation in a 1988 talk in Santa Fe — and by the 1990s it had become a label for a lot of expensive, confused plates where two cuisines were thrown together because the combination had not been tried yet.

And partly for a reason worth taking seriously. A good deal of fusion cooking has been criticised for treating one cuisine as the raw material and another, usually European, as the thing that “elevates” it. That criticism is fair, and it is the one we find most useful as a check on ourselves. If our menu only ever used Japanese or Levantine ingredients as exotic garnish on a French plate, it would deserve it.

The test we actually use

Here is the honest answer, then. Fidelity to origin is the wrong test for a menu like ours, because by that test we fail on purpose and so does most of the food history above. Sincerity is the right one, and it can be checked. Three questions, which we ask of our own dishes:

1. Do we know the original well enough to leave it on purpose?

Our kibbeh nayyeh is a real Levantine preparation of raw lamb and wheat, and it keeps the wheat. What it changes — shio kombu, a wasabi ponzu vinaigrette in place of the usual lemon and oil — changes on purpose, and we have written down exactly what and why. The founders came to this food through Middle Eastern cooking first, at Artichoke, and that thread is a matter of record rather than a marketing line. You cannot depart deliberately from something you do not know.

2. Is each borrowed ingredient doing a job the dish already had?

The garlic-yuzu toum is the cleanest example. Classic toum already has a sour element; we swapped the citrus. The dish did not gain a new ingredient so much as a different answer to an old question. Where a borrowing is doing no job at all — there only to be photographed — it fails the test, and a kitchen should take it off.

3. Do we tell you what we changed?

This is the one most fusion menus skip. It is also the cheapest to get right. Our menu says “chickpea hummus, macadamia tahini, ikura”; it does not pretend that is how hummus is made in Beirut. When we wrote about tahini and wasabi, we said plainly where our versions depart from the standard ones. Being honest about the departure is what separates a reinterpretation from a counterfeit.

Where we would fail our own test

It would be convenient to stop there. The more honest move is to point at the weak spots.

Dairy is one. Traditional Japanese cooking has almost no cultured dairy, so our labne, our tzatziki and our milk pudding are Levantine dishes with a Japanese accent, not a meeting in the middle, and we would rather say so than claim a balance that is not there. The other is that a lot of the technique underneath the plates is neither Japanese nor Middle Eastern at all — it is butter-and-cream French, because that is how most professional cooks are trained. Our structural post calls that the third cuisine nobody puts on the sign, and it is the part of our cooking most exposed to the “European elevating” critique. We think the fair defence is that it is used as a tool rather than a frame, but you are entitled to judge that at the table.

What that means for you as a diner

If you want the dish exactly as it is made in its home kitchen, go to a restaurant that is trying to do that; there are good ones in Singapore, and our guide to Japanese food in Singapore will point you at them. If you want to see what happens when two traditions are asked the same question, that is what a fusion restaurant is for, and the useful question to ask of one is not “is this authentic?” but “does the kitchen know what it is changing, and does it tell me?”

Ask that of us too. Our guide to Japanese fusion restaurants in Singapore applies a similar test to other kitchens, and what makes an izakaya authentic makes the same argument about the format rather than the food.

Come and argue about it

Habibi-san is at 29 Hamilton Road in Jalan Besar, open Tuesday to Sunday from 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. We serve pork and alcohol, so we are not halal. Every dish mentioned here is on the menu, which prints exactly what is in each one, and you can see the room and the grill in the gallery. The table is the right place to disagree with us, and you can book one here.

Sources

Tempura, Japanese curry, ramen and the history of the word “fusion”: the Wikipedia articles Tempura, Japanese curry and Fusion cuisine, read 26 September 2026. Menu wording: the Habibi-san food menu PDF, checked unchanged the same day.