Friday Food Porn: Amalgamation Nation

Photo courtesy Joshua Huston

"Fusion cuisine is big. Fusion cuisine is important. Fusion cuisine is smart. Fusion cuisine is gimpy and obtuse and lazy and ridiculous--gastronomy 101 for the over-educated, travel-sick and hopelessly romantic white jacket--and a sin like blasphemy against the church of flavor.

Fusion cuisine is one of those things--like writing terrible poetry, moving to New York or getting tattoos of cartoon characters--that seems like a good idea, maybe even an important idea, when you're young.

For chefs, it's almost a rite of passage--a thing you do because you feel like you've invented it, because it feels like everything else has already been done. Young chefs like fusion because they're in love with ingredients and technique and live in daily, quaking fear of canon. They do it because there is always a moment when it seems like a tofu pot pie with tamarind syrup or duck liver mousse gyoza with balsamic reduction would be a good idea. Because until you taste it one or a hundred times, everything seems like a good idea."

From "Thai Me Up," this week's review of Pinto Thai Bistro and Sushi Bar--the new Broadway fusion restaurant and mutt-Asian one-stop for yakisoba, tom yum and tekka maki.

Photo courtesy Joshua Huston

"The Pinto Signature Maki is Pinto (the restaurant) defined by food. Listed among the sushi, coming from the short, overstocked sushi bar, it is (from the outside in), spicy tuna tartare with an honest kick of spice, planks of soft, buttery avocado and crisp cucumber, nori, a jumble of rice (pressed less expertly than I'd hoped, but nicely prepared), cross-cut yellowtail with a lovely texture and fresh, oily flavor, plucked leaves of cilantro, carefully sliced, quartered and peeled triangles of lime and massive piles of jalapeno slivers, mounded on like I'd won some sort of contest.

The Pinto Signature Maki is overwhelming, confused, aggressive with belligerent flavors all slugging it out, a little bit childish, joyous in its higgledy-piggledy mish-mash of Japanese and Thai and Mexican ingredients, original and strange.

It is also really, really tasty for about six bites, at which point something like oral jet lag sets in and the whole thing just becomes tiresome. It is a whiplash kind of thing, the difference between bold and exasperating coming in the space between bites and making you wonder what, exactly, it was you liked so much about it in the first place."