Gastrodiplomacy isn't just for political summits and glitzy international events like the Olympics. Neighborhoods around the world are filled with immigrants who make their native cuisine, longing for a taste of home or hoping to share their food with a new audience or looking for a way to make a living. When diplomat Dan Hong discovered one Japanese spot in Athens that stood out, he decided to dive a bit deeper in a piece for Vittles.
Evan Kleiman: You were working as a diplomat in Athens when you stumbled upon a Japanese restaurant that was unlike the typical Pan-Asian spots that you normally encountered. What made this spot different and put up your radar?
Dan Hong: That Japanese cafe was a cafe called Sawyer. The first thing that stood out about Sawyer was that it was on this completely deserted road in the middle of Athens. I was walking down the road and all the shop fronts were basically boarded up, which is not uncommon in Athens. Since the financial crisis in the 2010s, there have been a lot of shops closing but on this particular road, there was nothing open, apart from this one cafe. I remember next to it, there was this shop selling these long black Orthodox priest robes. Not at all touristy. So that was the first strange thing.
Then I went inside, and it was a tiny, tiny cafe with only room for one table and a couple of chairs and no seating, no tables outside, which in Athens is extremely peculiar, because Greeks have a very strong preference for outdoor seating. Lining the walls were shelves of the kinds of Japanese products I just never seen before. In Athens generally, the only places you can get Asian groceries are at Chinese supermarkets, normally in a part of town that most people would tell you to avoid. But this one had some really unique stuff — seasonings, dried fungi, pastes, often with only Japanese labels. So not even really intelligible, certainly not to the average Greek.
Then finally, the thing that stood out was the food. So often, Greek people are very adventurous eaters, and I'm sure they would welcome a wide range of different foods from all over the world, but I have to say, the majority of foreign food in Athens always somehow tastes a bit Greek. And this absolutely did not.
When did you realize that it was a Japanese government initiative, that was basically underwriting this cafe?
I talked to the lady who worked there. I think this was the summer of 2021, when I found this cafe. I was basically saying, "You know, you did really well to stay afloat. So many of these businesses around you have had to close." She basically front and center told me that the Japanese Embassy had been supporting her, and that she got quite a lot of customers herself from Japanese diplomats. The Japanese ambassador used to like to go there. Without really understanding why the Japanese Embassy was doing this, I knew there was some kind of government intervention going on,
You ended up doing quite a bit of research on historical texts that cite politicians breaking bread before getting down to business.
What I'm clear about is that food has always been there in the theater of diplomacy. One of the oldest references I found was this ancient Greek text in which Aristotle, in his politics, talks about how food is used to basically foster a sense of community between the ambassadors of ancient Greek city states in the fourth century BC. But there are more recent examples.
Another was François de Callières, who was a kind of emissary of Louis the XIV. He's quoted as saying, "When people are a trifle warmed by wine, they often disclose secrets of importance." I think that holds true today. In my experience, having worked in diplomacy, when you're inviting people out to get to know them, to foster that relationship, you're doing it over coffee, and when it really matters, you're doing it over dinner.
When was the term gastrodiplomacy first coined?
So the first reference of gastrodiplomacy was in 2002, and it was in this article by The Economist to describe the Global Thai Program, this public diplomacy project of Thailand's specifically aimed at trying to use food and its national cuisine to build its diplomatic relationships abroad. It's not the first time that food has been promoted by the government but usually it's for the purposes of tourism or for promoting exports, never as the central way of trying to build a relationship. That was what was really unique about this example.
Could you go into greater detail in describing the Global Thai Program, its subsidies, and its effectiveness?
There was quite a wide variety of stuff that this program did. For starters, it put a lot of money behind the initiative, so you had $3 million of cheap government loans available to Thais setting up restaurants. Abroad, there was a sort of consultancy service led by Thai embassies abroad for Thai restaurants in those countries to help them navigate the business environment. They negotiated a visa with New Zealand specifically for Thai chefs to go to New Zealand. There were even reports of the ties negotiating lower import tariffs on Thai goods going into foreign countries, presumably to help their Thai chefs cook with the authentic ingredients. Then, of course, this was all backed up by a fortified communications campaign where their objective was, in particular, to move the reputation of Thailand's sex tourism to one which was more focused on gastronomic tourism.
Do you know of other countries that followed suit?
A lot of other countries have followed suit. One which I think a lot of people are aware of at the moment [is] South Korea. South Korea put about $10 million into funding their chefs to go abroad and set up restaurants but also to send them to cooking schools across the world. Nowadays, of course, it's become part of hallyu, this Korean Wave of culture, and I think that really helped them promote their food, wrapping it around all the other increasingly well known bits of Korean culture, whether it's film, TV, music.
Peru is another example. They set up this website where they had celebrities effectively waxing lyrical about the benefits of Peruvian cuisine. They got Al Gore involved, Eva Mendes, Mario Vargas Llosa, who's a Peruvian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Could you talk a bit about the sushi police and "crimes against authenticity?"
This was the one discovery that made me really want to write an article about gastrodiplomacy. In 2006, the Japanese government commissioned this task force of sushi police to go around the world and assess the quality of Japanese food abroad. There is one very famous example of the Japanese sushi police going to Paris, which is supposedly the mecca of Japanese food outside of Japan, certainly in Europe, and they found that out of the 80 Japanese restaurants they surveyed in Paris, a third of them didn't match the standard they considered to be authentic.
Did they post signs across the storefronts that they weren't authentic? What was the pushback?
After you do that, the question is sort of, "So what? You can't compel these people who live in a different country to start making this food." They tried to issue authenticity certificates, which they gave to the other two-thirds of those 80 restaurants that did match up to the standard. They also had a government website, I suppose for any tourist looking for Japanese food in Paris, and left off the ones that didn't match up to the standard. But ultimately, you know, I'm very skeptical about the efficacy of what this is doing. I mean, who takes recommendations about restaurants from the government?