The Flavor That Was Always There, Waiting to Be Named
There is a moment in every cook’s life when they taste something that rewires their entire understanding of flavor. For me, it happened in a cramped Bangkok kitchen where my friend’s mother was preparing dinner. She reached for a small jar of amber-colored paste—bagoong, the Filipino fermented shrimp condiment—and used it the way someone else might use salt. A teaspoon stirred into a broth. A dab folded into a vegetable dish. Each time, the food didn’t taste fishy or overwhelming. It tasted more like itself. More alive. This is the moment Western chefs are having right now, collectively, in restaurant kitchens from Portland to New York. And they are finally beginning to tell the truth about where this knowledge comes from.
For decades, Southeast Asian fermented condiments occupied a peculiar place in the Western culinary imagination. They were there, certainly. They appeared in recipes and on shelves in Asian markets, passed hand to hand through immigrant communities who understood their power. But they existed outside the formal conversation of Western cuisine, the one that happened in prestigious kitchens and cooking schools, in food magazines and television studios. The flavors were borrowed quietly, almost apologetically, without acknowledgment of their deep cultural roots and sophisticated techniques. That silence is breaking now, and what is emerging is a genuine reckoning with where our food comes from and who deserves credit for teaching us how to cook it.
When Excellence Becomes Impossible to Ignore
Numbers tell the beginning of a story, even if they don’t tell the whole story. Among the fifty restaurants named to the Eater Young Guns 2025 List, fermented shrimp pastes—bagoong, belacan, and their regional cousins—appeared on menus at fourteen establishments. Three years ago, in 2022, that number was three. The presence of these ingredients on menus of the nation’s most celebrated emerging restaurants signals something more than a trend. It suggests a shift in what excellence means, in what flavors Americans are now prepared to taste and celebrate.
At the same time, the Culinary Institute of America added a dedicated Southeast Asian Fermentation module to its Culinary Institute of America ProChef Program in September 2025. This was not a casual addition. It was the first standalone regional fermentation curriculum addition the school has made since Korean fermentation was incorporated in 2019. The decision to formalize Southeast Asian fermentation as a core teaching subject means this knowledge is no longer considered peripheral or exotic. It is foundational. It matters enough to teach. Institutions don’t make decisions like this without recognizing that the knowledge they are codifying has already proven its worth.
Sales data from the Asian American Grocers Association tells yet another part of the story. Imported Southeast Asian fermented condiments—fish sauce, shrimp paste, tamarind concentrate—grew 44% in United States specialty retail in 2025. These numbers represent not just restaurants but home cooks, the people who cook dinner without an audience, who are searching for these flavors because they tasted them somewhere and want to understand them better. The appetite is real. The market is responding. But the more important conversation is happening in the space between these numbers, in the kitchens where chefs are beginning to name their sources.
The Conversation About Who Taught Us
At the Madrid Fusión culinary congress in 2025, chef Margarita Forés, a James Beard Award winner who has spent her career honoring and advancing Filipino cuisine, presented a paper that positioned Filipino patis fish sauce as a direct flavor competitor to Japanese dashi in Western kitchen applications. This was not a small gesture. Dashi, the Japanese fermented seafood stock, has long held a position of prestige in Western culinary consciousness. It appears on menus of high-end restaurants without explanation. Its origins are honored in how it is discussed and taught. Forés’ work brought patis into that same conversation, not as an alternative but as an equal, demonstrating that the fermentation knowledge of Southeast Asia deserves the same respect, the same careful study, the same honoring of provenance that Western chefs have extended to Japanese, French, and Italian techniques.
This matters because food knowledge is cultural knowledge, and cultural knowledge carries with it a responsibility to remember where it comes from. When Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that shaped much of how the Western culinary world thinks about fermentation, published its 2021 Fermentation Guide, it cited Southeast Asian techniques in 8 of its 12 foundational fermentation chapters. The reference material was there. The knowledge was documented. But in the years since that publication, the industry discourse has centered increasingly on a troubling question: Have Western chefs adequately attributed these cultural origins? Have we said the names of the people, the places, the generations of knowledge-keepers who developed these techniques?
The answer, for the most part, has been no. But that is changing. Chefs are beginning to trace their ingredients back to their sources. They are learning the names of regional variations and the families who perfected them. They are understanding that when they use bagoong from the Philippines or belacan from Malaysia, they are not simply adding a flavor to their dish. They are inviting centuries of culinary wisdom into their kitchen. That wisdom deserves a name.
What Fermentation Teaches Us About Food and Honesty
There is something honest about fermentation as a technique. You cannot rush it. You cannot fake it. You must work with time and patience and the knowledge of what you are doing. A good fermented condiment took someone’s grandmother and her grandmother before her to develop. It took observation and adjustment and failure and the kind of attention that only comes when you are feeding your family, when the stakes are personal and real.
When American chefs began to take Southeast Asian fermentation seriously, they were not just adopting new techniques. They were beginning to understand something about cooking itself. They were learning that excellence does not originate in Paris or Copenhagen or Tokyo alone. It originates wherever people have paid careful attention to their ingredients and their processes long enough to unlock the deepest flavors those ingredients contain. It originates in home kitchens and markets and the hands of people whose names we may never know but whose knowledge we benefit from every time we cook.
The rise of Southeast Asian fermentation in American restaurant kitchens is encouraging not because it represents the conquest of a new flavor frontier, but because it represents something more humble and more difficult: an acknowledgment that we have been learning from cultures other than our own, often without properly saying thank you. The work ahead is to continue that acknowledgment with specificity and respect. Credit sources. Learn the regional differences. Understand that bagoong is not the same as shrimp paste is not the same as belacan. Recognize that when we cook with these ingredients, we are in conversation with people across time and distance who knew something we needed to know.
Cooking Toward Something Better
What strikes me most about this moment is that it is still unfolding. The conversation is not finished. The curriculum continues to develop. The restaurants keep opening, the chefs keep tasting, the home cooks keep experimenting. When you cook with these fermented condiments, you become part of that conversation. You taste what your predecessors tasted. You understand, in a real and immediate way, why someone’s grandmother kept a jar of this paste in her kitchen, why she understood that a small spoonful could make everything better.
If you have never worked with Southeast Asian fermented condiments, I invite you to start. Taste them first, before you cook with them. Understand them as flavor on their own terms, not as exotica but as excellence. Learn their names and where they come from. Then use them the way they have always been used: with respect, with attention, with the understanding that you are learning something ancient and true. Your kitchen will smell amazing. Your food will taste more like itself. And you will be part of a longer conversation than you knew you were joining.