Feature

On Fusion Cooking

“The fires of fusion are coming.” —Norman Van Aken, On Fusion Cooking 1988 Thirty years ago I wrote the words above sitting in a small, unpainted wooden building in Key West, our southernmost of the contiguous forty-eight states. The building had most recently housed a woman’s hair parlor. It was a perfect…

Feature

On Fusion Cooking

Memories

Ca L’ Isidre

The guidebook said that “this is usually everybody’s favorite restaurant”. I knew that was almost always a give a way for a place I’d dislike. It also said, “when the King of Spain had one place to dine amongst the commoners, he chose this establishment”. Strike two. We entered Ca L’ Isidre…

Memories

CAL PEP: Memories of Spain

We were told this place was tiny and would be packed. It took no reservations and seated 20. So we hustled over to be at the door when they turned the key. But to our surprise and dismay they had inexplicably opened up about five minutes before we got there and the…

Events

Three Turns One!

Join Chef Norman Van Aken & Friends November 7th to Celebrate! Celebrate Three’s FIRST anniversary with an epic dinner presented by Chef Norman Van Aken on Wednesday, November 7th benefitting Best Buddies. Enjoy a canapé and cocktail reception in the atrium followed by a 5-course dinner with wine pairing, featuring those that…

Press

Faiyaz Kara’s 55 Best Restaurants in Orlando

Courtesy: Faiyaz Kara (Orlando Weekly)

Explore the Orlando Weekly restaurant critic’s essential places to eat in 2018 2. Norman’s Fine dining is indeed alive and well, and at this perennial stalwart within the gilded walls of the Ritz-Carlton Grande Lakes, so is fusion cuisine – thanks to celebrated chef Norman Van Aken, who leaves the execution of…

A Word on Food™Series

Cookbooks

Listen on WLRN

A writer named Brook Larsen recently wrote in an online magazine named ‘Culture Trip’, “The Japanese and English borrow words from each other all the time. There is a whole subset of the Japanese language known as gai-rai-go (loan words), many of which come from English, including tabako (tobacco) for cigarettes and...

Peruvian Causas

Listen on WLRN

The first time I ever had a causa I was at the groundbreaking restaurant fellow future Mango Gang Chef Douglas Rodriguez opened. It was named Yuca for those who might not know. We were sitting upstairs and I was with a party of six or eight. Douglas was down in his kitchen...

Egg Sandwiches

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When I was about 8 years old I made friends with the three brothers who lived with their mom and dad in a neatly kept home across the creek from us. Back at our house I was the single male between two girls. The much needed boyish shenanigans were calling me. And...

Food Touristas

Listen on WLRN

A number of years ago we were in Italy for a long delayed and much needed family vacation. I’m sure I probably looked just like so many others I was amidst as we ambled around the markets and then ate in the cafés and trattorias. iPhones had yet to be invented so...

My Book ClubSeries

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by Annie Dillard “Then one day, walking along Tinker Creek, thinking of nothing at all, I saw it —- the tree with the lights in it. It was the same backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost, only charged and transfigured, etc cell buzzing with flame … It was less like seeing...

Look Homeward Angel

by Thomas Wolfe I was saved from what fate I shall never know when a woman came to live with us when I was ten years old. She was my maternal grandmother. “Nana” was what we knew her name to be. It was ordained by others in the family long before I...

Ninety Two in the Shade

by Thomas Mc Guane I returned to live in Key West in the very year another resident of Key West released this book. I originally arrived to the last island out of America in ’71 and fell under it’s spell. It was like falling in love with a woman. But I couldn’t...

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@NormanVanAken

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#fusion #newworldcuisine

Norman Van Aken is known internationally for introducing “fusion” into the lexicon of modern cookery and considered to be the founding father of New World Cuisine.

“If the map of the world were a tablecloth, and I could choose a place at that table, I would sit at the Southern tip of Florida, at the nexus of North America and the Caribbean. My plate would touch Cuba, the Florida Keys, the Yucatan, the West Indies, the Bahamas, and South America. And, if time could tell, I would listen to the tales of voyagers, discoverers, traders and mystics who, in searching for “the Indies”, the Great Kahn and the riches of China, discovered something much more valuable and enduring, A New World of Culinary Treasures. Almost instantly, the cuisines of the Old World began to merge with foods of the new one; This evolutionary and inexorable fusion lies at the heart of New World Cuisine.”

— Norman Van Aken, July, 1993