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Summer is here! I have been walking as if my legs will fall off if I stop. I spent all of yesterday outside at Prospect Park and purchasing from almost every random vendor that appeared near my group. I’m currently listening to two cars genuinely honk back and forth at each other, one short honk after the other, a car-versation.

I’ll try to keep it short today on something I love talking about: crappy food!

The night I moved to New York, I was recovering from food poisoning and hoping to eat a real meal for the first time in days. My mom, family friends, and I grabbed dinner at La Pecora Bianca in Bryant Park.

For my non-New Yorkers, La Pecora Bianca is a wannabe-upscale, Italian sit-down chain in Manhattan. The dimly lit interior is modeled in a fantasy of who I assume is a former member of The Wing with circular lights and velvety Glinda-and-Elphaba-colored furniture. You can get a negroni sbagliato with prosecco in it, truffle fries on the side of your caesar salad, and a bunch of pastas and meats. For dessert, the tiramisu for two is powdered in the design of the restaurant’s sheep logo.

This restaurant would make a killing in a midsized city; it also makes a killing in New York. It’s nothing special. It’s the truest neutral of a place, an approachable restaurant in a city with millions of better, cheaper, more approachable Italian restaurants. It was the perfect first meal back into eating food and realizing I always had access to great food now. I didn’t know it on my first night in the city (I think I rated it a 9.7 on Beli), but this is one of the most controversial — and often hated — restaurants in New York in the same vein as Rice to Riches and Jack’s Wife Freda.

I like to think I’ve elevated my taste since moving here, eating way better food almost all the time. However, I will always love and defend La Pecora Bianca. To quote The Infatuation, whose reviewer understands the dilemma of this place:

So when my friend Megan started crapping on this crappy restaurant over the weekend, I had no choice but to defend my New York orientation friend. I yelled! Although I agree with her claim that La Pecora Bianca is mediocre, my retort is…what if you want something mediocre?

To illustrate how I don’t judge La Pecora Bianca with the same rubric as I do other Italian restaurants, I repeated a claim I often find myself defending at work: sometimes I crave pizza, and sometimes I crave Domino’s. Although Domino’s is pizza, it scratches different itches than its higher-quality relatives. I spend one of my earliest newsletters defending chain restaurants and their greatness. La Pecora Bianca serves a different purpose than an old joint in deep Brooklyn, and I am happy to enjoy it all.

I walked home from that interaction through three boroughs, going from Manhattan to Brooklyn through Queens. Part of that walk was spent listening to a surprisingly prescient episode of Code Switch called “Why tacos are as ‘American’ as apple pie.” The episode begins at Taco Bell, one of the host’s favorite restaurants.

He and two producers discuss its joyful crappiness and discuss whether Taco Bell is Mexican food or not. The host sounds a lot like how I defend La Pecora Bianca, calling his beloved chain a different beast and, therefore, not Mexican food but having the shape of other things kind of like a platypus.

You know who does think it’s Mexican food? A Mexican guy who wrote a book on the history of tacos.

Gustavo Arellano wrote Ask a Mexican, a popular column in the early 2000s in which people anonymously asked all kinds of questions they were too afraid to ask. He published a book called Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America a decade ago and was one of the main subjects of this podcast episode.

He claims that every taco white people eat is a victory for Mexican people, a statement that caused quite a stir in the comment section, and that Taco Bell serves as a gateway drug for people to eventually want better Mexican food. I don’t think I agree with him, since I think Taco Bell is imitation Mexican, sort of. It’s beyond inauthentic, as most national chain food ends up, especially one founded by a non-Mexican white guy. I would call Chipotle slop bowl food before calling it Mexican.

Arellano’s argument is that Mexico is big, and traditions change. Conquistadors were fascinated by Mexican food the same way white Americans are today. Colonizers had rules and guidelines for the people they colonized, wanting them to swap out their corn for wheat to live a more Christian, stronger life. We love Mexican and Tex-Mex and Cali-Mex and find differences between all of them. If the essence is there — and especially if access to better is limited — authenticity has a wider definition.

He goes on to say that authenticity doesn’t have a fixed definition and is often what people associate with what their grandma cooked, and not every grandma cooked the same things. He takes issue with people who want to call things inauthentic rather than those who want to widen the umbrella. I think he has a really positive, hopeful view of what kinds of food we elevate. I agree with it in theory but not always in practice. One of the Spotify commenters said That’s like saying the slaveowners became less racist after eating soul food.

Dissenters refute his thesis, basically saying that if everything is authentic then nothing is. If Taco Bell is in the same category as someone’s grandma’s cooking, that waters down how special grandma’s passed-down recipes are. For cultures that are used to persevering against erasure, authenticity is a medal. The episode’s interviewees also touch on how food is an easy vehicle for discrimination, from bean-related slurs towards Mexican people and I know it smell crazy in there comments on Indian restaurant TikTok pages. To preserve culture through food is a privilege even when outsiders want sterilized, digestible (pun intended) versions of a people’s cuisine.

I don’t think that inauthentic has to be a bad word, though. There are plenty of delicious fusion restaurants that show how some cultures’ foods mix so harmoniously that it expands how you want to define authentic. One of the next meals I ate with my fam after moving to New York was Shalom Japan, whose name explains everything you need to know.

And even mediocre, inauthentic meals don’t have to be supervillains. I’d side-eye anyone that doesn’t eat Mexican food aside from Taco Bell, but I see a late-night Taco Bell run as part of a balanced diet. We all have our crappy faves we have compassion for, our exceptions to the rules. Why? It’s there when we need it or was there when we needed it previously. These tend to be greasier, cheaper, or more nationalized (at least in my experience — tell me what your exceptions are!) than their better counterparts. We call them something separate from their authentic cousins because we don’t want to slander something we love; we protect these places from haters. We find good in the bad.

As long as we know to separate the imitation from the OG, I think we should enjoy everything we think is delicious. Life is too short to not love what we eat.

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