When Evelyn Garcia and Henry Lu opened Jun, they never considered dubbing their restaurant “fusion.” To them, dishes like fried chicken made with funky shrimp paste and brisket paired with peanut curry just made sense. The menu was born from their culinary training, personal cravings, and Houston’s global pantry. Plus, it helps that their palates are similar, favoring Southeast Asian and Latin cuisines.

“[In] Houston, we have so many different cultures, it becomes easy to create fusion food or bring things together,” Garcia says.

Still, “fusion” remains a loaded, misunderstood term that’s frowned upon in the culinary world. But in Houston, chefs are transforming it into something more cultural, contextual, and personal, sometimes, without even realizing it.

Cultural anthropologist Mario Montano says that nearly all culinary innovation stems from food revolutions, whether that be early agriculture or modern migration, meaning everything we eat today, by definition, is fusion.

Garcia, born in Houston and of Salvadoran and Mexican descent, sees fusion defined as something being forced—an act of merging two disparate things. What happens in her kitchen is more organic. For Garcia and Lu, the latter from New York and of Chinese descent, cooking is a dance, a choreography of incorporating elements into their dishes that reflect their heritage and lived experiences, rather than following traditional recipes to the letter.

To Ope Amosu, chef-owner of ChòpnBlọk, “fusion” is a misrepresentation of most chefs’ efforts. He refuses to even say the word, he says, instead deeming it the big, bad “f-word,” a term more synonymous with careless cultural blending.

When done right, he says, “it’s [about] understanding similarities in the ways things have been created, or, in many cases, similar origins that have, over time, taken their own individual paths. Then, using this approach to share that story and sometimes bring those two individual paths together.”

For Nick Wong of Agnes and Sherman, a new Asian American diner in the Heights, the word elicits thoughts of “Westernized” cuisines and questionable dishes that emerged in the 1990s (i.e., wasabi mashed potatoes). But he recognizes that fusion can also include some of the most revered cuisines, including modern Vietnamese, which features a heavy influence from the French colonial era. Take a banh mi: The sandwich marries Vietnamese cold cuts and pickled vegetables with a crusty French baguette.

Still, Wong hesitates to use the f-word to refer to what he and other chefs are doing in Houston. Like Montano says, it’s more of a natural evolution, sometimes based on survival or necessity.

“You see a lot of immigrant communities moving here from somewhere else and [saying], ‘Hey, I can’t find this specific wheat, or I can’t find this rice, or I can’t find this starchy thing,” Wong says. “This is the analog, right? For a lot of folks that grew up in those sorts of households…you have that deep, almost intuitive sense of what would go [well] together, and then, from that, springs a lot of other culinary things.” 

Whatever it’s called, Houstonians excel at creating dishes rooted in the city’s identity. Diversity and immigration play a significant part, with some of the largest Nigerian, Vietnamese, and Latin communities in the country. Geography is another factor. Local farmers can grow a broad range of ingredients year-round, and as a port city, Houston often has better access to even more diverse foods and options, including seafood. This means that chefs who claim to serve “authentic” cuisine but source their foods locally or from the region are veering from a cuisine’s origins, and thus, contribute to fusion.

Pondicheri chef-owner Anita Jaisinghani, known for her modern and often health-conscious take on Indian cuisine, has been open about how her views on fusion have evolved. Long before publishing her James Beard Award–nominated cookbook Masala, Jaisinghani says she “bristled” at the mention. The word seemed like a term thrown at chefs expected to “stay in [their] lane.” “If I don’t make Indian food, don’t call it fusion,” she says. “Call it creative.”

Jaisinghani sees that nearly every cuisine is influenced by various forces, whether they be colonization, migration, trade, or necessity, she writes, and now she embraces the word’s complexity. Unafraid to experiment and stray from tradition, she’ll use brussels sprouts and asparagus when they’re in season, and she’ll opt for a local red snapper rather than trying to secure hilsa, a type of fish she ate while growing up in India. She’s also not afraid to push back on the critics. In Masala, she references a rebuttal to a food local writer: “Asking me to cook Indian food in America without using local ingredients is like asking me to live here but not breathe the air.”

Like Jaisinghani, local chefs from around the world make their mark in Houston, using their expertise to educate not only their peers but also diners on the possibilities of food and flavor. When crafting dishes, Garcia and Lu riff on their favorite ingredients. Jūn rice cakes are a perfect representation of this: The dish plays on the comfort of an American classic, macaroni and cheese, using tender, chewy Korean tteok covered in yellow bean béchamel, mushrooms, and spiced panko. At Agnes and Sherman, Wong experiments with plates like spicy al pastor fried rice with chunks of pineapple, and a wedge salad dotted with cured
Chinese sausage and Taiwanese doughnuts in place of croutons.

Abbas Dhanani, the chef behind Burger Bodega, pushes culinary boundaries with his successful collaborative pop-ups that use burgers as a starting point and invites chefs from different walks of life to put their twist on the fast-food staple.

“We see [the burger] as a blank canvas to where somebody can come in and
add their own touch to it, whether it’s their style of cooking or their ethnicity,”
Dhanani says.

Alex Au-Yeung, the late founding chef of Malaysian restaurant Phat Eatery, gave Dhanani the ingredients to transform one of his best-selling dishes—beef rendang—into a smashburger. The result? A juicy, saucy burger with a sweet, sourdough bun, curry aioli, papaya slaw, and a side of curry fries. Chef Lucas McKinney of Gulf Coast seafood restaurant Josephine’s capitalized on Houston’s crawfish season, using meaty mudbugs to create patties that were piled on buns slathered with Viet-Cajun butter. Amosu of ChòpnBlọk got in on the fun, too, incorporating a shrimp patty topped with African salad cream and suya spice.

While Amosu’s restaurant isn’t categorized as fusion, he acknowledges the influences that shape his cuisine. Before opening ChòpnBlọk, Amosu traveled to West Africa to research the origins of regional recipes. That’s when he learned the dishes he thought were exclusive to his family’s home country of Nigeria were influenced by neighboring territories and originally featured different ingredients. He used that newfound knowledge to create dishes that transcend borders and regions, delving into cultural memory and diverse cooking preferences.

Diners at ChòpnBlọk’s Montrose location can now find some of those dishes, reengineered by Amosu. There’s a Senegalese-style peanut butter soup that nods to a similar dish in Nigeria, and Aunty Mawa’s Maafe, a collaboration with Ivory Coast chef Mawa McQueen that features waakye fried rice, Senegalese peanut curry, plantains, and seasonal vegetables.

Other dishes at ChòpnBlọk have fewer roots in deep tradition and more in modern inspiration. The restaurant’s Black Star bowl was inspired by a TikTok video of an influencer making Marry Me Chicken, a creamy chicken dish featuring sun-dried tomatoes and caramelized onions. Amosu says the dish reminded him of Senegalese chicken Yassa, made with onions, lemon, and Dijon mustard. That dish evolved into one of ChòpnBlọk’s most popular dishes: Yassa
curry served with waakye fried rice, Ikoyi shrimp, and plantains.

Regardless of the source, Amosu’s goal is to set the stage for the African diaspora, enabling it to become more mainstream in other cultures across the world. He says he sees a growing number of chefs following a similar path, showcasing their cultural interpretations through their own recipes, even if it is categorized with as tainted a term as fusion.

Maybe one day, the world will find another word to describe this undefined category of cross-cultural mash-ups. Until then, Garcia says fusion works well for a city like Houston, where the restaurant scene is fueled by creative and culturally diverse people who are ready to experiment. She likes to think about what the Houston food scene will be like in five years.

“It’s amazing now,” Garcia says. “But I can just imagine people seeing how well our concepts are doing and being accepted, [and] how more prominent chefs and creatives will be [motivated] to keep going and create more things for our city.”