![]() The vetting process includes a surprise visit by a representative of the Thai government to test the restaurant’s food. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Thailand started coaxing native chefs to open businesses outside the country with the help of loans from the state-owned Export-Import Bank and, since 2006, the Ministry of Commerce has issued Thai Select certificates to restaurants high and low around the world “to guarantee the authentic Thai taste,” with awardees ranging from the Orchid House mini-chain in Lagos, Nigeria, where diners may lounge on velvety sofas beneath hanging ferns, to the more utilitarian Krua Thai in Reykjavík, Iceland, which maintains a wall of neon Post-it reviews scrawled by customers. SOUTH KOREA WAS not the first to deploy what has become known as gastrodiplomacy (although “gastrowarfare” might be a better term here, given the country’s apparent end goal of surpassing and eclipsing other cuisines). ![]() ![]() This puts them at “the top of the hierarchy of taste,” Ray writes - although still far below Japanese sushi (median meal price: $235).īut what is the point of the South Korean government actively promoting Korean food to other countries, beyond the obvious: boosting agricultural exports and enticing tourists to come sample dishes in their place of origin? How does it profit the Korean nation - materially, psychologically, spiritually - if more non-Koreans learn to love kimchi? In the United States alone, there are now anywhere from 2,000 to 7,000 Korean restaurants (the higher estimate comes from the marketing research firm IbisWorld) and, according to data analyzed by the New York University food studies scholar Krishnendu Ray, four times as many Korean restaurants merited inclusion in the Michelin Guide to New York in 2022 compared to 2006, with a median meal price of $63, just a dollar less than at French restaurants. But the number of Korean restaurants overseas did increase exponentially, from 9,253 in 2009 to 33,499 - just slightly shy of the target - in 2017, with a clientele that was more than three-quarters non-Korean, as reported by the Korean Food Promotion Institute. Proposed benchmarks - to be achieved by 2017 - included quadrupling the number of Korean restaurants overseas, with those already existing to be sent a recipe manual encouraging standardization of Korean food name spellings (e.g., “kimchi” versus “kimchee” versus “gimchi”), the easier for befuddled foreigners to remember.ĭespite, or perhaps because of, the forthright English lyrics (“For me to stay fly, I gots to eat good”), the Wonder Girls’ song was not a hit. ![]() How exactly this would be measured was unclear. “WE GOT STRAWBERRY, ginseng, love that kimchi,” the Wonder Girls, a now disbanded K-pop group, half-sing, half-cheer on their 2011 single “ K-Food Party.” “Keep the skin so beautiful and full of energy.” This was hardly a spontaneous ode to the ingredients and dishes of their motherland South Korea’s Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries had recruited the young women as global ambassadors, part of a government-sponsored campaign announced three years before with the mission of elevating Korean food to the highest ranks of the world’s favorite cuisines.
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