- The Intersection of regional cuisines wherein one region's tradition dominates and another region's ingredients dominate (we'll call this Fusion here)
- An eclectic combination of traditions and ingredients across regions
- The form of one region dominates, and the culinary tradition and ingredients from another dominate
In my interpretation, and due to my basic need to classify things to form a mental model (as many software architects spend their life doing), I would only consider #1 to be fusion cooking in the purest sense. As to the others, #3 seems to me to be bordering into the territory of Trompe-l'œil Cuisine, or simply, the practice of manipulating food form, while #2 is what I would call Borderless Cuisine (as that practiced by Rokusaburo Michiba, Masaharu Morimoto, and many others).
For our purposes here, let us say Fusion is the practice of having two dominant regional influences go into innovative dishes, often influenced by the traveling, family immigration, or culinary curiosities of a chef. After some initial analysis, here is the start of a codification for fusion cooking (as in primarily #1 above, though #2 is inescapable as it is so broad), listing notable chefs and the regional / stylistic fusions which are ascribed in part to them. It is horribly incomplete, and dominated by celebrity chefs, so I welcome your input to expand the list.
- East Meets West - Ming Tsai
- French & Italian - Wolfgang Puck
- French & Japanese - Hiroyuki Sakai
- French & Japanese - Tetsuya Wakuda
- French & Korean - Hiroyuki Sakai
- Japanese & American - Masaharu Morimoto
- Central American & French - Inaki Aizpitarte
- Egyptian & French - Inaki Aizpitarte
- Spanish & Southwest American - Bobby Flay (ironically "Southwest American" is itself a fusion, such as TexMex)
- Inter-Regional Mexican Fusion - Rick Bayless
It's interesting to me how some chefs are relatively strict about preserving tradition (like Mario Batali's cooking of Italian, Spanish, even Vietnamese cuisine) on the basis of being true to the tradition and creating authentic dishes, or at least dishes very inspired by a single regional theme. This makes sense, there's some honor to it, probably, and it gives the eater a sense of exploration in a geographic sense. Others are fusionists, that similarly attempt to pay homage to a region within the framework of their present environment. And at the end of this spectrum would seem to be those not caring to make regionalism a theme, meaning somewhere in there are the Eclectics, or the Borderless Cuisine practitioners.
While some have decried the evils of borderless cuisine, personally I like to seek the good in the situation, and find Borderless Cuisine (in the forms of Fusion and Eclectic Cuisines) inspiring and a celebration of life. It's mystical to be able to cook with ingredients from, or in the style of, another culture, and therein learn from those who've perfected techniques years even centuries before, people whose language I do not even speak ... Borderless Cuisine just makes the world seem smaller, if only for course of a meal.
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