In every global city, there is a moment when a cuisine stops feeling foreign.
At first, it belongs to a neighbourhood, a diaspora, a handful of restaurants and the people who know what to order without needing the menu explained to them. Then one dish crosses over, followed by another. Ingredients appear in supermarkets. A chef opens somewhere more ambitious. A bakery becomes fashionable. A condiment escapes the cuisine altogether. Travel, television, music, social media and friendship give people a way in, and slowly the food enters the city’s shared vocabulary.
Japanese food is perhaps the clearest example of what happens when that process becomes complete. Twenty or thirty years ago, many diners outside Japan encountered it through a relatively narrow vocabulary of sushi, tempura, teriyaki and miso soup. Those foods became gateways, but they did not remain the whole story. Ramen bars introduced different broths and regional styles, izakayas taught a different kind of Japanese sociability, omakase made trust in the chef part of the experience, while matcha, yuzu, miso and koji travelled so far beyond the Japanese restaurant that they now appear on menus which do not identify themselves as Japanese at all.
At that point, diners stop asking simply whether they like Japanese food. They begin asking which Japanese food, which ramen, which sushi counter, which region, which level of intimacy, luxury or informality. That, to me, is one of the clearest signs that a cuisine has become part of a city’s cultural vocabulary: not when everyone knows its most famous dish, but when people begin to recognise its internal differences.
The first dish is never the whole story, but rather it is the door.
A cuisine is not new. The audience is.
This is why I struggle with phrases such as “new cuisines” or “lesser-known cuisines”.
Lesser-known to whom?
Filipino food is not new to Filipinos. Burmese food is not new to Myanmar. Georgian food is not new to Georgians. West African food is certainly not new to West Africans. What changes is visibility: which diners are encountering the food, which restaurants are being written about, which chefs are being given institutional attention, which dishes are becoming gateways and which audiences have suddenly decided to pay attention.
A recent Tatler Asia article, for example, looked at Filipino, Burmese, African and Hawaiian cuisines gaining wider attention in Singapore. The observation is useful, but Singapore itself is already a city built through food encounter, migration and trade. What may be changing is not the existence of those cuisines, but the kind of visibility they are receiving within particular dining circles. The same is true almost everywhere.
A cuisine can be ordinary in one city, diasporic in another, fashionable in a third and almost invisible in a fourth. Filipino food may feel newly visible to some diners in London, but it has long been woven into everyday life in Manila, Los Angeles, Toronto, Dubai and parts of Singapore. Indonesian food occupies a very different cultural position in Amsterdam than it does in London. Sri Lankan food has one trajectory in London and another in Toronto or Melbourne.
There is no single global timetable, and every city produces its own culinary succession because every city has received different people.
London, and the permission to become specific.
London is the city where I think about this most, because London eats through migration, neighbourhood, class, aspiration and fashion simultaneously.
A cuisine can exist here for decades before the wider dining scene decides that it is worth paying attention to. The food may already be present in family restaurants, neighbourhood cafés, market stalls, grocery shops and community spaces; what changes is the audience around it. This is why even the word discovery can feel uncomfortable. Who, exactly, is discovering whom?
West African food illustrates this particularly well. When Chishuru and Akoko received Michelin stars, it did not mean West African cooking had suddenly arrived in London. The food, knowledge and communities were already here. What changed was institutional recognition.
More importantly, recognition can create permission for specificity. Nigerian, Ghanaian, Senegalese and other traditions begin to be discussed through their own histories, ingredients and techniques rather than being compressed into the vague category of “African food”. The same shift has happened repeatedly in other cuisines. “Chinese food” becomes Sichuan, Cantonese, Hunanese, Xi’an or Yunnanese. “Indian food” becomes Kerala, Bengal, Punjab, Goa, Hyderabad, Gujarat. A broad label begins to fracture, and usually that is a sign that diners have learned enough to see more.
Specificity brings respect.
That instinct is very familiar to me because of my own background. I grew up in Rome, where even something as apparently simple as whether pecorino or Parmigiano belongs on a dish carries meaning, but my food identity was never only Roman. I remained tied to my southern roots through polpette fritte, gattò di patate and dishes that travelled through family rather than restaurants, while my northern side came with frico and a completely different set of flavours, textures and memories. None of these sat neatly inside one generic idea of “Italian food”. They belonged to different places, relatives, habits, rituals and emotional registers.
Once you grow up understanding that “Italian food” contains Rome, Naples, Friuli, Sicily, Emilia, Puglia and countless other worlds that do not collapse neatly into one another, it becomes much harder to accept labels such as “African food” or “Asian food” without asking which region, whose family, which migration, which technique and which memory.
Diaspora food is never transported intact.
There is a romantic idea that diasporic food travels unchanged, as if a cuisine could be packed into a suitcase and opened somewhere else in exactly the same form. It never works like that.
Diasporic food is reconstructed in the new city. It is shaped by memory, the ingredients available locally, the tastes of the new audience, the chef’s own mixed identity, commercial pressures, immigration histories, labour, rent, nostalgia and the constant question of what can be changed without losing the centre of the food.
This is why I have always found the idea of authenticity difficult. Anthropologically, cuisines are not static objects waiting to be preserved intact. They are living systems shaped by migration, trade, class, scarcity, substitution, aspiration and generational change. Techniques and histories matter enormously, as does the question of who gets to tell the story and who profits from it, but I am less interested in whether a dish can be certified as “authentic” than in whether it is rooted, knowledgeable and honest about its lineage.
The problem begins when authenticity becomes another word for purity, as though there were once a single correct version of a cuisine that existed outside movement and change. Food has never worked that way. Even many dishes we think of as ancient traditions are themselves the product of earlier migrations, substitutions and encounters.
Respect, to me, does not mean freezing a cuisine in one imagined past. It means understanding what is being carried forward, what is changing and why.
You can see that process differently in different cities. In Seoul, foreign foods are absorbed into Korean ideas of texture, gifting, beauty, social life and urban speed; French pastry, Italian food, American bagels or Australian-style brunch do not arrive untouched. New York tells another story, because there diaspora itself is infrastructure: cuisines enter through neighbourhoods, family businesses, grocery shops, schoolchildren and everyday labour long before they are declared fashionable by restaurants or critics. Lima complicates the idea of fusion again, because Nikkei and chifa remind us that culinary mixing can eventually become history rather than trend. Different cities translate food differently because their migrations are different.
So which cuisines are next, and where?
This is where the question becomes more complicated than declaring one cuisine “the next Japanese”.
There cannot really be one next cuisine, because there is no universal dining audience.
In London, I would pay attention to the growing specificity around West African, Sri Lankan, Filipino and regional Indian food. In Singapore, Filipino and Burmese restaurants may be reaching audiences beyond the communities that have long known them. In New York, Filipino and regional African cooking occupy their own relationship between neighbourhood familiarity and wider prestige, while in Melbourne, Sri Lankan, Filipino and Indonesian traditions sit within a completely different migration history. Indonesian food in Amsterdam begins from yet another place.
What matters is not deciding which cuisine has “won” the next trend cycle.
The moment diners stop asking whether they like a cuisine and begin asking which expression of it they prefer. The moment restaurants no longer have to lead with the safest gateway dish. The moment a chef can become more regional, more personal or more complicated without worrying that the audience will be lost.
Japanese food has already travelled a long way through that process. Korean food is perhaps one of the clearest examples of another cuisine moving through it now, helped not only by restaurants but by music, television, beauty, fashion and tourism. Food never travels through flavour alone. It travels inside a much larger cultural imagination. Other cuisines will follow entirely different routes.
Some will enter through migration. Some through television. Some through a single restaurant. Some through tourism. Some through a condiment or pastry or drink that becomes familiar before the cuisine around it does. Sometimes people arrive through trend and stay for the culture. That does not necessarily diminish the discovery. Curiosity can begin superficially and deepen.
What this means for Kurami.
Kurami inevitably belongs to this world because we create and cook in London, a city whose appetite has already been shaped by migration.
Mediterranean food sits naturally at our centre because it belongs to my own language of eating, but what surrounds it is global, not only because London is global, but because our own team is. The people cooking, developing and preparing Kurami bring their own memories, family dishes, habits, techniques and references into the kitchen, and those inevitably find their way, subtly, to our clients’ tables. Londoners are already accustomed to moving between Italian comfort, Japanese precision, Korean heat and acidity, Middle Eastern herbs, Mexican flavours and the many other influences that become part of a city’s appetite through travel, migration and everyday life. For me, that is one of the most natural things about food: it travels through people before it ever becomes a trend.
The challenge is not to collect cuisines as references and turn them into decoration, but it is to let influence travel with enough knowledge and care that it still carries something of where it came from.
For me, that is also the most generous version of culinary discovery. Not saying that the world has suddenly found a cuisine which was quietly waiting to be discovered, but understanding that what feels new to one diner may have been ordinary, intimate and beloved somewhere else for generations.
Perhaps that is when a cuisine truly stops feeling foreign: not when everyone knows its most famous dish, but when a city has learnt enough to recognise that there was never only one version of it to begin with.
And perhaps the better question is not which cuisine will the world discover next?
It is which city is learning which food language now?
FAQs
How does a cuisine become popular in a city?
Usually through a combination of migration, restaurants, gateway dishes, travel, media, social networks and repeated exposure. As familiarity grows, diners often move from knowing a few famous dishes to recognising regional styles, techniques and different restaurant formats.
Why did Japanese food become so globally popular?
Japanese food expanded internationally through accessible gateway dishes such as sushi and tempura, followed by specialist formats including ramen, izakaya, yakitori and omakase. Ingredients such as matcha, miso, yuzu and koji then entered the wider global culinary vocabulary.
Which cuisines are becoming more visible in London?
West African, Sri Lankan, Filipino, regional Indian, Georgian, regional Chinese and other diasporic traditions are receiving increasing attention, although many have existed within London communities for decades.
Why can calling a cuisine “new” be misleading?
Because a cuisine may be newly visible to one audience while already being deeply established elsewhere. Its novelty usually describes the audience encountering it, not the cuisine itself.
Is fusion food inauthentic?
Not necessarily. Many cuisines have been shaped by migration, trade, colonisation and adaptation for generations. The more useful questions are whether the food understands its lineage, respects the traditions it draws from and is honest about what has changed.
What does Kurami mean by global food culture?
Kurami is London-made and Mediterranean-inspired, but exists within a city whose appetite is already global. The aim is not to borrow cuisines superficially, but to allow flavour and technique to travel with context, care and respect.
Sources & further reading.
Tatler Asia, How these lesser-known cuisines are getting more popular in Singapore
Eater Chicago, Lincoln Park’s New Restaurant Explores Migration Through Historic Spice Routes
Michelin Guide, The Best African Restaurants in London
The Guardian, London’s West African eateries with Michelin stars
