Fusion cuisine combines elements of various culinary traditions whilst not fitting specifically into any. The term generally refers to the innovations in many contemporary restaurant cuisines since the 1970s.
This type of restaurant's success depends on a number of factors. Among these are:
Clientele's (or prospective clientele's) cultural diversity
Clientele's culinary sophistication and openness to new eating experiences.
These factors have made this type of cuisine accepted and popular in places like California and in large metropolitan areas. California ChefWolfgang Puck is one of the pioneers of fusion cuisine - originating from Austria and working where Asia and America meet, he truly is at the heart of the world's culinary triangle.
A menu sampling from menu of an American-European-Japanese restaurant in California might include the following items:
True cuisines are such that a scholar who understands a nation's history, geography, topography and sociology can describe that nation's cuisine by projection from this knowledge, just as a paleontologist can reconstruct the appearance of a dinosaur from a single bone.
Perhaps the silliest claim of those most deeply involved with fusioncuisine is that they and they alone are active in seeking out the freshest and best quality raw materials and preparing them in ways that will best highlight their natural flavors is exclusive to them.
Another reason to doubt that fusioncuisine is a genuine cuisine is in its very need for originality, each individual chef looking for his or her own individual expressions of just what "fusion" is about.
Fusioncuisine is the deliberate combination of elements from two or more spatially or temporally distinct cuisines.
The precise origin of the term "fusioncuisine" is uncertain although "culinary globalization," "new world cuisine," "new American cuisine," and "new Australian cuisine," all other names for fusioncuisine, have their roots in the 1970s in the emergence in France of nouvelle cuisine, which combined elements of French and, primarily, Japanese cooking (Sokolov, 1992).
As nouvelle cuisine spread to other nations, it combined with elements of the foods of the host country.