Buttermilk graffiti

Part travelogue, a smattering of memoir, a handful of recipes, but mostly an immigrant story anthology told through food.
Gorgeous ambience, serious nostalgia, taken through the author's past as we're taken through different people's pasts, different group's and town's histories, and different cuisine. 
Striving for understanding, the author is conflicted, ever-questioning about straddling a divide of preserving cultural cuisine and revolutionizing it, at the risk of appropriating and/or eventually wiping out tradition, while acknowledging that no culture's cuisine stays the same throughout time. 
Despite the subtitle, this narrative champions less the ‘melting pot' model of assimilation where everything blends together and becomes unrecognizable in its origins; a better metaphor would be a dish where different cultural influences combined together, help bring out the distinct flavours in each, rather than one overwhelming  the other or both surrendering to a pre-established ‘taste'. 
Lee seems like a friendly, inquisitive guy who both experiences/has experienced racism/prejudice/suspicion as a Korean-American, and recognizes where he needs to interrogate his own preconceptions/possible racism when it comes to other ethnicities encountered in his epicurean explorations. 
Surprised how many times I burst out into delighted giggles, in large part thanks to the author's self-effacing humour, humble non-sequitors.
⚠️ Fellow vegans beware: while there are vegetables, fruits, breads, pasta/noodles and pastries described with relish, this an omnivorous account including many animal parts, and a chicken meeting an untimely end. 🫣