{"id":239893,"date":"2026-07-10T03:00:38","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T03:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/239893\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T03:00:38","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T03:00:38","slug":"immigrant-chefs-prove-authenticity-is-as-evolving-as-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/239893\/","title":{"rendered":"Immigrant chefs prove authenticity is as evolving as America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source is an independent nonprofit newsroom serving the Pittsburgh region.\u00a0Sign up for their free newsletters.<\/a><\/p>\n

By Aakanksha Agarwal, Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source
July 6, 2026<\/p>\n

On Tuesday afternoons, my 6-year-old son comes home from school expecting tacos.<\/p>\n

So I make them.<\/p>\n

In my kitchen, the filling isn\u2019t seasoned ground beef. It\u2019s chicken tikka. I marinate the chicken in yogurt, ginger, garlic and spices before cooking it until the edges char and the meat stays succulent. Instead of serving it with rice or roti, I tuck it into store-bought tortillas, scatter shredded cheddar over the top and call it dinner.<\/p>\n

My son relishes it. To him, it isn\u2019t an Indian take on a Mexican tradition that has become part of American life. It\u2019s simply what his mother makes.<\/p>\n

\"AWriter Aakanksha Argawal pours cups of hot haldi doodh for her and her son, July 2, 2026, in her Oakmont home. The sweet, spiced milk is a comforting tradition, often adapted for fancy American coffeeshop menus, that she enjoys sharing with her son. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg\/Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source)<\/p>\n

But I often find myself returning to a question that has long shaped conversations about immigrant food: What makes something authentic? The answer, I\u2019ve realized, begins to fall apart even in my own kitchen. These tacos aren\u2019t traditional, but they are an honest reflection of where my family finds itself today: Indian parents raising an Indian American son whose tastes have been shaped as much by Taco Tuesday culture as by the food of his grandparents.<\/p>\n

As the United States recognizes its 250th anniversary, those questions extend far beyond my kitchen. They surface in neighborhood restaurants and inside immigrant-owned kitchens across Pittsburgh. They arise when parents decide which language to speak over a meal, when chefs swap hard-to-find ingredients for what grows nearby, or when restaurant owners rewrite recipes because diners expect something different.<\/p>\n

Yet a bowl of noodles, a plate of pork belly or a cherished family recipe can still answer some of our most enduring questions:<\/p>\n

Who am I? Where do I belong? And if recipes evolve with every generation, what are we really trying to hold on to?<\/p>\n

Chicken parm unknown in Italy<\/p>\n

Andrew Garbarino<\/a>, chef-owner of Garbarino\u2019s<\/a> in East Liberty, traces his family\u2019s American story back to the early 1920s, when his great-grandparents arrived through Ellis Island, opened Garbarino Brothers Market in New York and later helped establish a family restaurant on Long Island after World War II. His grandfather and great-uncles would later serve in the U.S. military during World War II, reinforcing the family\u2019s commitment to the country they had chosen to call home.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m first and foremost an American,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m incredibly proud of my Italian heritage. But I\u2019m even more proud of my family for what it took to come here and become Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

That dual identity defines Garbarino\u2019s restaurant, which \u201cisn\u2019t an Italian restaurant in the traditional sense. It\u2019s a New York-style red-sauce joint\u201d \u2014 a cuisine born not in Italy but in immigrant neighborhoods across the United States.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIdentity is often a story we tell ourselves about who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nick Rogers<\/a>, University of Pittsburgh sociologist<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t fully understand that distinction until he visited Italy as a teenager. Convinced that \u201cchicken parmesan was as Italian as Rome itself,\u201d he spent the trip searching for it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t find it anywhere,\u201d he said. \u201cWe deliberately sought out very traditional restaurants because I wanted authentic Italian food, and not a single place had chicken parmesan on the menu.\u201d<\/p>\n

The discovery didn\u2019t disappoint him, but it did bring a realization that his family\u2019s cooking had never been a perfectly preserved expression of Italy, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cItalian-American food is its own cuisine,\u201d he said. \u201cToday, I look at old recipes and ask myself how I can honor them while also making them my own.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That evolution is hardly unique to Italian-American food.<\/p>\n

\"ASpices sit on the kitchen counter of writer Aakanksha Argawal\u2019s Oakmont home. Argawal pinches spices from metal pots that she is readily refilling, never measuring, but recalling from her years growing up cooking beside family. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg\/Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source)<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are other things people turn to \u2014 music, photographs, old letters,\u201d said Nick Rogers<\/a>, a University of Pittsburgh sociologist whose research includes food, identity and social polarization. \u201cBut food seems to be an especially powerful vehicle for connecting people to their past.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

People often talk about cuisines as though they have always existed in the same form, Rogers said. But even the foods most closely associated with a country are products of migration, trade and adaptation. Tomatoes reached Italy from the Americas only after the 16th century, eventually becoming central to its cuisine. Pasta, too, was shaped over centuries through Mediterranean trade and cultural exchange.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe tend to mythologize cuisines as being much older than they really are,\u201d Rogers said. \u201cThey\u2019re more dynamic and they evolve more than we generally give them credit for.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same, he said, is true of identity. Part of identity, Rogers said, involves locating ourselves within something larger than our own lives. \u201cIdentity is often a story we tell ourselves about who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born and raised in Philadelphia to parents from Hong Kong, Pittsburgh restaurateur Roger Li<\/a> grew up on both sides of the culinary equation. At home, his parents spoke Cantonese and preserved family traditions through shared meals and weekend dim sum. In their American Chinese restaurants, he watched those same traditions evolve to suit American tastes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ARestauranteur Roger Li stands for a portrait at the bar at The Parlor Dim Sum, his Cantonese restaurant in Lawrenceville, on Wednesday, July 1, 2026. Li grew up in Philadelphia, where his parents spoke Cantonese and preserved family culinary traditions from their native Hong Kong. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg\/Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source)<\/p>\n

\u201cBack in the \u201970s, \u201980s and even \u201990s, a lot of traditional Chinese food wasn\u2019t as widely accepted,\u201d Li said. \u201cRestaurant owners had to adapt to survive. They tweaked recipes so the food would be more approachable.\u201d<\/p>\n

General Tso\u2019s chicken became the best-known example of that adaptation. Sweet, crispy and heavily sauced, it was designed for diners who had little familiarity with regional Chinese cuisines. Li remembers cooks guarding their sauce recipes so closely that they mixed them in secret, sometimes disappearing into walk-in coolers before returning with buckets of sauce.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ARestauranteur Roger Li cooks up some his wok fried ginger chicken noodle dish at The Parlor Dim Sum on July 1. Li built the menu at his restaurant around the Cantonese food of his childhood. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg\/Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source)<\/p>\n

Rogers cautions against dismissing dishes like General Tso\u2019s chicken as inauthentic. \u201cFood is always in a push and pull between the forces of authenticity and the forces of assimilation,\u201d Rogers said. \u201cWhat often results from that tension is the creativity that it takes to find a balance point between honoring what came before and honoring the tastes of a new geography.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Li opened The Parlor Dim Sum<\/a> in Lawrenceville four years ago, he wasn\u2019t interested in adding to Pittsburgh\u2019s plentiful American-Chinese menu options.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Instead, he built the menu around the Cantonese food of his childhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe dishes that my grandmother, my mother and my father took me to eat growing up are the dishes I wanted to serve,\u201d Li said.<\/p>\n

\"ALi\u2019s wok-fried ginger chicken noodle dish served at The Parlor Dim Sum, his Cantonese restaurant in Lawrenceville on July 1. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg\/Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source)<\/p>\n

Yet even there, adaptation remains unavoidable.<\/p>\n

One traditional pork belly dish repeatedly came back to the kitchen because diners assumed it should be served hot, not at room temperature as it often is in Cantonese cuisine. Li eventually changed the preparation \u2014 not because the recipe had changed, but because his audience had not.<\/p>\n

Other dishes followed the opposite trajectory. When Li first began serving whole fish, customers often asked servers to remove the head before bringing it to the table. Today, it\u2019s one of the restaurant\u2019s best-selling dishes, which Li attributes to Pittsburgh\u2019s growing diversity and diners\u2019 increasing willingness to embrace the unfamiliar.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The exchange goes both ways, Rogers said. \u201cAmericans change the cuisines that immigrate to us, but those cuisines also change us. Foods that begin as immigrant traditions increasingly become American traditions.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That raises a larger question, Rogers said: What even counts as American food? Hamburgers trace their name to Hamburg, Germany. Pizza arrived with Italian immigrants. Even French fries carry another country\u2019s name. \u201cIs anything indigenous to a country that\u2019s only 250 years old?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He points to salsa. Half a century ago, many assumed American diners wouldn\u2019t embrace that level of spice. Today, salsa outsells ketchup in the United States.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Changing ingredients, enduring traditions<\/p>\n

For chef Jamilka Borges<\/a>, co-owner of Lilith<\/a> in Shadyside, where she and co-owner Dianne DeStefano<\/a> draw on their Puerto Rican and Sicilian heritages, belonging has never been defined by crossing an international border.\u00a0Yet leaving home made Borges feel \u201cmore Puerto Rican than ever.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AChef Jamilka Borges at Lilith in Shadyside, a restaurant she started with Dianne DeStefano, photographed on July 1. The two chefs and co-owners draw on their Puerto Rican and Sicilian heritages to build a menu with locally-sourced food. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg\/Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source)<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people know Puerto Rico is part of the United States,\u201d she said. \u201cBut they don\u2019t really understand how complicated that relationship is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. Borges\u2019 grandfather served in the U.S. military. So did her father. Yet people living on the island cannot vote for a president unless they move to the mainland. Puerto Rico elects a resident commissioner to Congress, but that representative cannot cast votes on final legislation.<\/p>\n

Rogers said that ambiguity shapes identity in ways many Americans overlook. \u201cPuerto Rico is in this sort of twilight, limbo legal state,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is both American and also conspicuously other. We still, in very visible ways, keep Puerto Rico at a legal and political distance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Distance also sharpened Borges\u2019 own memories of home.<\/p>\n

She grew up in Puerto Rico\u2019s central-eastern region surrounded by mango and citrus trees. Her grandmother raised pigs, and meals reflected whatever had been harvested that day. Her mother grated fresh coconut by hand to make sweets and popsicles. After her parents divorced and the family moved closer to the coast, the food changed again \u2014 more seafood, crab, octopus and conch \u2014 revealing to Borges just how regional Puerto Rican cooking really was.<\/p>\n

When Borges moved to Pittsburgh in 2007, many of the Puerto Rican ingredients she relied on were difficult to find. She began substituting similar peppers, shopping at Asian markets and incorporating Western Pennsylvania produce such as kohlrabi, garlic scapes and sunchokes into her cooking, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rather than distancing her from Puerto Rico, those adaptations became part of how she expressed it.<\/p>\n

Pasteles, the labor-intensive traditional Puerto Rican holiday dish, now sometimes includes Pennsylvania squash when traditional ingredients aren\u2019t available, adjusting the recipe while preserving its spirit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AWriter Aakanksha Argwal pours hot haldi doodh for her son, July 2, in her Oakmont home. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg\/Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source)<\/p>\n

\u201cMy food is a combination of respecting tradition while also understanding where I am today,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s about honoring ingredients from Puerto Rico while also respecting Western Pennsylvania. Food is adaptation, and continuity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in my own kitchen, I still make chicken tikka tacos, with a hefty sprinkle of cheddar on top. But I refuse to think of that meal as a compromise.<\/p>\n

One day, my son may cook it for children of his own.<\/p>\n

Or he may replace the taco with something else entirely, or pair it with ingredients I can\u2019t yet imagine. Like every generation before him, he\u2019ll inherit traditions that have already been shaped by migration, memory and circumstance. And like every generation before him, he\u2019ll decide which parts to carry forward.<\/p>\n

Aakanksha Agarwal is a wine, travel and lifestyle writer from India. Formerly a Bollywood stylist, she now resides in Pittsburgh, can be reached at aakanksha.agarwal1988@gmail.com.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This story was fact-checked by Feixu Chen.<\/p>\n

This article<\/a> first appeared on Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source<\/a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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