Growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, dining out with my parents often meant eating at Asian restaurants. My parents traveled extensively in Asia when I was very young and fell in love with the flavors of the food, especially the cuisines of Japan and Thailand. There were barely a handful of Asian restaurants in Chattanooga back then, and we tried them all. None of them were terribly good, but the dishes all sounded exotic and, according to my mother, eating Asian food was healthy. “You never see fat people in Asia,” she would tell me. And I listened. When I moved to New
Read more →