Too Hot to Handle?

Abstract

This chapter explores the Thai restaurant boom in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s to show how Thais grappled with U.S. racial, gender, and class structures through the food-service industry. The boom, coupled with new patterns of discretionary spending, turned Thai restaurants into culinary contact zones where sensory experiences reestablished racial boundaries and sustained racial thinking and practices. To distinguish Thai food from other Asian cuisines, Thai restaurateurs—along with white food critics—used race, ethnicity, and nation to produce novelty and product differentiation in the marketing of Thai cuisine. In explaining to the American public how Thais were unique from other Asians based on what they cooked and ate, they relied on taste and smell to construct Thais as an exotic non-white Other. The chapter also discusses how Thai restaurants reinforced, created, and masked gender and class divisions within the community through labor practices behind the kitchen door.