On Tuesday afternoons, my 6-year-old son comes home from school expecting tacos.
So I make them.
In my kitchen, the filling isn’t seasoned ground beef. It’s chicken tikka. I marinate the chicken in yogurt, ginger, garlic and spices before cooking it until the edges char and the meat stays succulent. Instead of serving it with rice or roti, I tuck it into store-bought tortillas, scatter shredded cheddar over the top and call it dinner.
My son relishes it. To him, it isn’t an Indian take on a Mexican tradition that has become part of American life. It’s simply what his mother makes.
But I often find myself returning to a question that has long shaped conversations about immigrant food: What makes something authentic? The answer, I’ve realized, begins to fall apart even in my own kitchen. These tacos aren’t traditional, but they are an honest reflection of where my family finds itself today: Indian parents raising an Indian American son whose tastes have been shaped as much by Taco Tuesday culture as by the food of his grandparents.
As the United States recognizes its 250th anniversary, those questions extend far beyond my kitchen. They surface in neighborhood restaurants and inside immigrant-owned kitchens across Pittsburgh. They arise when parents decide which language to speak over a meal, when chefs swap hard-to-find ingredients for what grows nearby, or when restaurant owners rewrite recipes because diners expect something different.
Yet a bowl of noodles, a plate of pork belly or a cherished family recipe can still answer some of our most enduring questions:
Who am I? Where do I belong? And if recipes evolve with every generation, what are we really trying to hold on to?
Chicken parm unknown in Italy
Andrew Garbarino, chef-owner of Garbarino’s in East Liberty, traces his family’s American story back to the early 1920s, when his great-grandparents arrived through Ellis Island, opened Garbarino Brothers Market in New York and later helped establish a family restaurant on Long Island after World War II. His grandfather and great-uncles would later serve in the U.S. military during World War II, reinforcing the family’s commitment to the country they had chosen to call home.
“I’m first and foremost an American,” he said. “I’m incredibly proud of my Italian heritage. But I’m even more proud of my family for what it took to come here and become Americans.”
That dual identity defines Garbarino’s restaurant, which “isn’t an Italian restaurant in the traditional sense. It’s a New York-style red-sauce joint” — a cuisine born not in Italy but in immigrant neighborhoods across the United States.
“Identity is often a story we tell ourselves about who we are.”
Nick Rogers, University of Pittsburgh sociologist
He didn’t fully understand that distinction until he visited Italy as a teenager. Convinced that “chicken parmesan was as Italian as Rome itself,” he spent the trip searching for it.
“I couldn’t find it anywhere,” he said. “We deliberately sought out very traditional restaurants because I wanted authentic Italian food, and not a single place had chicken parmesan on the menu.”
The discovery didn’t disappoint him, but it did bring a realization that his family’s cooking had never been a perfectly preserved expression of Italy, he said.
“Italian-American food is its own cuisine,” he said. “Today, I look at old recipes and ask myself how I can honor them while also making them my own.”
That evolution is hardly unique to Italian-American food.
“There are other things people turn to — music, photographs, old letters,” said Nick Rogers, a University of Pittsburgh sociologist whose research includes food, identity and social polarization. “But food seems to be an especially powerful vehicle for connecting people to their past.”
People often talk about cuisines as though they have always existed in the same form, Rogers said. But even the foods most closely associated with a country are products of migration, trade and adaptation. Tomatoes reached Italy from the Americas only after the 16th century, eventually becoming central to its cuisine. Pasta, too, was shaped over centuries through Mediterranean trade and cultural exchange.
“We tend to mythologize cuisines as being much older than they really are,” Rogers said. “They’re more dynamic and they evolve more than we generally give them credit for.”
The same, he said, is true of identity. Part of identity, Rogers said, involves locating ourselves within something larger than our own lives. “Identity is often a story we tell ourselves about who we are.”
A menu built from memories
Born and raised in Philadelphia to parents from Hong Kong, Pittsburgh restaurateur Roger Li grew up on both sides of the culinary equation. At home, his parents spoke Cantonese and preserved family traditions through shared meals and weekend dim sum. In their American Chinese restaurants, he watched those same traditions evolve to suit American tastes.
“Back in the ’70s, ’80s and even ’90s, a lot of traditional Chinese food wasn’t as widely accepted,” Li said. “Restaurant owners had to adapt to survive. They tweaked recipes so the food would be more approachable.”
General Tso’s chicken became the best-known example of that adaptation. Sweet, crispy and heavily sauced, it was designed for diners who had little familiarity with regional Chinese cuisines. Li remembers cooks guarding their sauce recipes so closely that they mixed them in secret, sometimes disappearing into walk-in coolers before returning with buckets of sauce.
Rogers cautions against dismissing dishes like General Tso’s chicken as inauthentic. “Food is always in a push and pull between the forces of authenticity and the forces of assimilation,” Rogers said. “What often results from that tension is the creativity that it takes to find a balance point between honoring what came before and honoring the tastes of a new geography.”
When Li opened The Parlor Dim Sum in Lawrenceville four years ago, he wasn’t interested in adding to Pittsburgh’s plentiful American-Chinese menu options.
Instead, he built the menu around the Cantonese food of his childhood.
“The dishes that my grandmother, my mother and my father took me to eat growing up are the dishes I wanted to serve,” Li said.
Yet even there, adaptation remains unavoidable.
One traditional pork belly dish repeatedly came back to the kitchen because diners assumed it should be served hot, not at room temperature as it often is in Cantonese cuisine. Li eventually changed the preparation — not because the recipe had changed, but because his audience had not.
Other dishes followed the opposite trajectory. When Li first began serving whole fish, customers often asked servers to remove the head before bringing it to the table. Today, it’s one of the restaurant’s best-selling dishes, which Li attributes to Pittsburgh’s growing diversity and diners’ increasing willingness to embrace the unfamiliar.
The exchange goes both ways, Rogers said. “Americans change the cuisines that immigrate to us, but those cuisines also change us. Foods that begin as immigrant traditions increasingly become American traditions.”
That raises a larger question, Rogers said: What even counts as American food? Hamburgers trace their name to Hamburg, Germany. Pizza arrived with Italian immigrants. Even French fries carry another country’s name. “Is anything indigenous to a country that’s only 250 years old?”
He points to salsa. Half a century ago, many assumed American diners wouldn’t embrace that level of spice. Today, salsa outsells ketchup in the United States.
Changing ingredients, enduring traditions
For chef Jamilka Borges, co-owner of Lilith in Shadyside, where she and co-owner Dianne DeStefano draw on their Puerto Rican and Sicilian heritages, belonging has never been defined by crossing an international border. Yet leaving home made Borges feel “more Puerto Rican than ever.”
“A lot of people know Puerto Rico is part of the United States,” she said. “But they don’t really understand how complicated that relationship is.”
Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. Borges’ grandfather served in the U.S. military. So did her father. Yet people living on the island cannot vote for a president unless they move to the mainland. Puerto Rico elects a resident commissioner to Congress, but that representative cannot cast votes on final legislation.
Rogers said that ambiguity shapes identity in ways many Americans overlook. “Puerto Rico is in this sort of twilight, limbo legal state,” he said. “It is both American and also conspicuously other. We still, in very visible ways, keep Puerto Rico at a legal and political distance.”
Distance also sharpened Borges’ own memories of home.
She grew up in Puerto Rico’s central-eastern region surrounded by mango and citrus trees. Her grandmother raised pigs, and meals reflected whatever had been harvested that day. Her mother grated fresh coconut by hand to make sweets and popsicles. After her parents divorced and the family moved closer to the coast, the food changed again — more seafood, crab, octopus and conch — revealing to Borges just how regional Puerto Rican cooking really was.
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When Borges moved to Pittsburgh in 2007, many of the Puerto Rican ingredients she relied on were difficult to find. She began substituting similar peppers, shopping at Asian markets and incorporating Western Pennsylvania produce such as kohlrabi, garlic scapes and sunchokes into her cooking, she said.
Rather than distancing her from Puerto Rico, those adaptations became part of how she expressed it.
Pasteles, the labor-intensive traditional Puerto Rican holiday dish, now sometimes includes Pennsylvania squash when traditional ingredients aren’t available, adjusting the recipe while preserving its spirit.
“My food is a combination of respecting tradition while also understanding where I am today,” she said. “It’s about honoring ingredients from Puerto Rico while also respecting Western Pennsylvania. Food is adaptation, and continuity.”
Back in my own kitchen, I still make chicken tikka tacos, with a hefty sprinkle of cheddar on top. But I refuse to think of that meal as a compromise.
One day, my son may cook it for children of his own.
Or he may replace the taco with something else entirely, or pair it with ingredients I can’t yet imagine. Like every generation before him, he’ll inherit traditions that have already been shaped by migration, memory and circumstance. And like every generation before him, he’ll decide which parts to carry forward.
Aakanksha Agarwal is a wine, travel and lifestyle writer from India. Formerly a Bollywood stylist, she now resides in Pittsburgh, can be reached at aakanksha.agarwal1988@gmail.com.
This story was fact-checked by Feixu Chen.
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