About this Event
Foreign Flavours: the power of food
Food is often a key part of diasporic identities. Recipes, ingredients and flavour memories are able to travel, shared and experimented with. But recreating dishes in new spaces can be tricky with different ingredients and equipment. These new spaces can create complex relationships with nostalgia, memory and home. Food also works as a way to create belonging and connectivity, and can be a useful way to look at difficult topics from the history of colonialism, labour and power dynamics between the global north and south.
Food is a necessity, it is also luxury, labour, trade, businesses, brands, livelihoods and agriculture. It cannot exist without the care of human hands to nurture into existence, prepare for consumption, or be served to you in a restaurant. Our foods have travelled the world and shaped culture communities. Foods from East and South East Asia have become mainstream in the West – from rice to soy sauce and kimchi – and flavours have become ‘trends’ driving media articles on the ‘rise of Filipino food’ or ‘our obsession with matcha’. Our foods have been appropriated, assumed to be cheap, called dirty, or fetishised. But how can we think about food beyond cliches, trends, exoticism or the fallacy of ‘food brings us together’?
Chinese And Any Other Asian ends on a chapter about food, therefore it felt appropriate to finish this Sunday Salon series with a focus on food and a meal.
Anna Sulan Masing invites three writers who use food as ways into topics and exploring themes. They all use food, not as a way to bring us together, but to challenge the way we think about the world, ideas of connectivity and identity.
Our guests for this very special event are:
Stephanie Sy-Quia's Amnion won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She is a keen gardener and linocut printer, as well as a fourth generation printer.
Budgie Montoya is a Filipino-born, London-based chef and the founder of Sarap and Alpas. His cooking is shaped by memory, migration, and identity, drawing from his journey growing up in Australia, working in Western kitchens, and reconnecting with his roots through food. Known for bold, soulful flavours and a deep love for storytelling, Budgie brings a fresh, personal take on Filipino cuisine to the table.
Katie Goh is a writer and editor. Her award-nominated essays, journalism and criticism have appeared in publications including Port, the Guardian, Gutter, Wasafiri, i-D, Dazed and gal-dem, and she is an editor for Extra Teeth literary magazine. Her book of essays The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters was a Reviewer’s Choice for The Big Issue’s Independent Books of 2021 and shortlisted for the inaugural Kavya Prize in 2022. She grew up in the north of Ireland and lives in Edinburgh. Her debut book Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange was published in 2025.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Spiritland King's Cross, 9 - 10 Stable Street, London, United Kingdom
GBP 54.88
