Ellis Island Kickoff

The Panel

How has immigration shaped the American menu? Why do some immigrants’ dishes become part of the all-American repertoire? How is immigration changing the flavors in the Melting Pot today? Are tacos the next pizza? Is Vietnamese bánh mì the next hamburger?

At the One Big Table Across America event on Ellis Island this November 4, a panel of distinguished writers, chefs, and scholars will address these and other questions:

Calvin Trillin is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and the Nation’s deadline poet. His books include nonfiction, novels, memoirs, collections of humor, and books of comic verse. He began writing about eating while doing a series for The New Yorker called “U. S. Journal,” and found that doing stories about, say, Cajuns eating crawfish at the festival in Breaux Bridge or people in Cincinnati arguing about the best place to obtain “authentic Cincinnati chili” provided a way of writing about America in a lighter vein.  Eventually, he incorporated the material  into three books: American Fried, Alice, Let’s Eat, and Third Helpings, books that were recently combined into a single volume,  titled The Tummy Trilogy. A fourth book about eating, Feeding a Yen, was published in 2003. Trillin does not cook, has never reviewed a restaurant, disclaims any expertise, and has written about failing a blind test to distinguish red wine from white wine. (“The sun was in my eyes,” he said.) His adventures as “a cheerful glutton” have given him a well-placed seat at the nation’s table and a closely observed view of the changes that have occurred over the past four decades in his preferred style of dining,  which he calls  “vernacular eating”—that is, eating that is tied to a place.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, long before words such as multiculturalism or immigration were part of the local vernacular, Molly O’Neill is the author of four cookbooks, including The New York Cookbook, and of a memoir, Mostly True.  She was the editor of American Food Writing, an anthology published by the Library of America. A multiple James Beard award winner, O’Neill hosted the PBS series Great Food and was, for over a decade, the food columnist for The New York Times’s Sunday magazine. She spent the last ten years traveling around the U.S. gathering recipes and food stories from American cooks to create the acclaimed One Big Table: A Portrait of American Cooking. Despite such demands as eating the occasional fried grasshopper, Rocky Mountain oyster, lutefisk, old drum, and Big Mac, she is continuing to locate, document, and preserve American recipes and food stories.

Aarti Sequeria, born in Bombay and raised in Dubai, earned her journalism degree from Northwestern University and worked in journalism and international relations before studying at the New School of Cooking in California. After launching a food blog and online cooking show, Sequeria won the Food Network’s Next Food Network Star award in 2010. About to enter its second season, her Food Network show, Aarti Party, draws on her Indian heritage to put approachable and delicious twists on all-American classics. And that, along with the joy she takes in being a first-generation American, has turned Ms. Sequeria into a star.

Born and raised in Mexico City, Iliana de la Vega earned international acclaim at her restaurant—El Naranjo, in Oaxaca—before moving to the United States in 2007. A founding  member of  the Culinary Institute of America’s Latin American Advisory Council, she lectures and teaches Latin American cooking  between travels to  continue her  research into Latin American culinary techniques and its cultural influences. Along with her husband, Ernesto Torrealba, she owns the El Naranjo Mobile, a food trailer in downtown Austin that has been hailed as serving the best Mexican cuisine in the United States.

George Chew began cooking in law school when his wallet could not support his appetite for fine dining. He has continued to cook and hone his skills in the kitchen while serving as a federal judge. He has several recipes in Grace Young’s latest cookbook, Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge. His famous ribs are the best dish ever not to win the national One Big Table potluck cooking contest (the recipe, though, does appear the book).

The panel’s moderator, Sam Roberts, has been The New York Times’s urban-affairs correspondent since 2005. Before that, he was deputy editor of the paper’s Week in Review section and an urban-affairs columnist, writing Metro Matters—which appeared on the front page of metropolitan section and gave him a ringside seat to immigration in New York. He is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The Brother, about the Rosenberg atom spy case, which was published in 2001 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; A Kind of Genius; and Only in New York.; and the editor of America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York. He is the host of The New York Times Close Up (an hour-long weekly news and interview program on New York 1, the all-news cable channel, produced in association with The New York Times and which he inaugurated in 1992) and of Political Points, a weekly podcast on the Times website.

The Menu

Maggie Smith Hall’s Minorcan Fromajardis (St. Augustine, Florida)
Behroush Sharifi’s Saffron Kebabs (New York, New York)
Norma Naranjo’s Tamales (Ohkay Owingeh, New Mexico)
Waterman’s Tiny Maine Lobster Rolls (South Thomaston, Maine)
Sue Wespy Ceravolo’s Wood-Fired Spicy Oysters (New Orleans. Louisiana)
Peter Nguyen’s Saigon-Biloxi Shrimp (Biloxi, Mississippi)
Helena Litke Longhofer’s Midday Chicken (Lindsborg, Kansas)
Jam Santichat’s Thai Beef Satay (Austin, Texas)
Dan Huntley’s Pulled Pork and Red Slaw Sliders (York, South Carolina)
Susmita Sharma’s Shami Sliders (Seattle, Washington)