Everywhere is anywhere

This NPR story is really about gentrification and the consequences of re-urbanization. The same stuff we've been talking about for months now. But it also drives home another point inadvertently.  Take a look at what gets described as "New Oakland"

When I lived here 10 years ago, I never would have expected to find what I did in Oakland in March — a trio of mustachioed white guys playing old-timey music smack in the middle of Telegraph Avenue on a Friday night.

But, now? That kind of thing goes down on the first Friday of every month. Which is where I was, walking with hordes of people, eating food truck grub, popping in and out of hip bars and art galleries.

This event, known as "First Fridays" or "Art Murmur," takes place in a part of Oakland that once was called Downtown. But after redevelopment, it's now Uptown.

"This is very new Oakland," said Chris Riggins, who performs stand-up comedy at Art Murmur every month. "But the only issue we're having right now is getting new Oakland to accept old Oakland."

 This is from an article about New Orleans that appeared in the recent Bon Appetit magazine.

And yet in recent years, the notion of what eating in New Orleans means has become immeasurably more complicated--in the best possible way. Since Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees in 2005, the city's dining ecosystem has not only roared back but has done so deeper and broader than ever. Vietnamese food, long a staple on the city's immigrant outskirts, is now available up and down Magazine Street. Every dive bar in the exploding neighborhoods of the Marigny and the Bywater, whose once-scruffy shotgun houses are being filled by hipsters, now seems to come with a pop-up attached or a food truck idling outside. Falafel, Filipino, barbecue, and "Slavic soul food" are all accepted parts of the city's food fabric. Once proudly insular, New Orleans has grown attuned to whatever food movements are afoot in cities like New York or San Francisco, from farm-to-table to the elevation of the cheeseburger.

All of this has become part of what it means to say "New Orleans food." It is, by any measure, too much for anybody to cover in a long weekend--even two guys with the heroic constitutions of working chefs. But that doesn't mean that Hanson and Nasr aren't going to try. 

The Bon Appetit article suggests that these national trends are blending with rather than displacing what we generally think of as "New Orleans food." In some ways, I'm sure that's true. What is, "New Orleans food", after all, besides a product of perpetual cultural change and in-migration? On the other hand, it's probably more true that the trends  identified in both articles are as interchangeable in the "up and coming" section of any American city as Applebees franchises are in any American suburb. It's okay that we have these things in New Orleans just like it's okay that we have Taco Bell.  But often such events as food truck rallies and Diners en blanc are mistaken for and promoted as "only in NOLA" developments even though they clearly are not.  Sooner or later nobody will understand what that even means anymore. Talk about a branding problem.