If Marvel Studios was a restaurant group that opened various restaurants
and they started opening a bunch of different Asian fusion cuisine/Asian-inspired restaurants.
They’ve seen success in the other restaurants they’ve opened. Every single restaurant they’ve funded so far has been headed by a white male executive chef.
(Scuttlebutt has it eventually there will be a Wakandan restaurant opening at some point. There’s been some black pastry chefs who have been featured in their existing restaurants. There’s also a famous chef who is a woman who has worked as a sous chef in the two Avengers Restaurants, and the Captain American Restaurant and Iron Man Restaurant, but she hasn’t been given a chance to open her own restaurant as of yet.*)
More recently, they’ve opened restaurants for white chefs who went to Asia and learned how to master making xiaolongbao or omakase and other specialties…with some Asian American cooks and dishwashers in the back.
And then people pointed out, “You know what, the way they’re funding these restaurants is messed up. When it is an Asian cuisine-inspired restaurant, they only ever seem to to fund them when the chef is white. This new restaurant concept and branding is part of a systemic problem and doesn’t sit well with me. I am critiquing the concept and the branding and their bias for only sponsoring white chefs, even when the cuisine is from Asia.”
And you’re like, “Oh, but you have to wait until the restaurant is open and eat every single dish at the restaurant before you can critique it at all.”
People are critiquing the concept of the restaurant, the branding, and the focus on chef Finn Jones, who by all accounts is not that great of a chef (or great at promoting his restaurant.) Not the food.
*She wasn’t having any luck getting Marvel Restaurant Group to give her her own restaurant, so she went to Dreamworks Restaurant Group and started her own robot-themed sushi restaurant inspired by a restaurant from Japan. This restaurant will be opening later this month. When people pointed out that Dreamworks Restaurant Group also only seems to also sponsor white chefs in their chain, will they ever given Asian chefs a chance, etc…. fans defended the decision saying things like “well, yanno, shellfish sushi is racially ambiguous” and “this sushi is made by robots, so it has no ethnicity” and “when I look at photos of the restaurant from Japan I really can’t tell that the sushi was meant to be Japanese.”
