Medina-Huang Kitchen

Founded in 2010 in Los Angeles, Medina-Huang Kitchen is a small food business conceptualized as a queer, anti-racist intervention into multicultural capitalist culture of consumption. Through peanut sauce pop-up shops, events catering, and gallery appearances, Medina-Huang Kitchen uses ethnic ambiguity, embodied gender-nonconformity, and diasporic queer kinship as an entry point to question white liberal notions of authenticity and social expectations of “ethnic foods.” As a project of survival, Medina-Huang Kitchen began as an economic endeavor to circumvent restrictive immigration circumstances and, through the process, transformed into a performance-based food business.

Medina-Huang Kitchen’s main product line, peanut sauce, was invented as an attempt to unsettle the Orientalist fantasy of authentic Thai food, as well as disrupting the romanticized cisheteropatriarchal family ideal inherent to the marketing of cultural difference generally. Neither a recipe passed down through generations nor a “traditional” family business, Medina-Huang Kitchen makes visible the labors of survival and centers the struggles of queer of color self-building. Through the ethnic ambiguity of the name of the business and intentional branding practices, Medina-Huang Kitchen uses confusion as a tactic to resist the colonial mechanisms of attaching static, marginalizing signifiers to taste, visual representation, and non-white cultural difference.

*Please note that Medina-Huang Kitchen is currently on hiatus—but please check out our performance/photography/recipe archive in the meantime!*

History of Medina-Huang Kitchen

In recent years, Thai cuisine has steadily gained popularity and become a worldwide phenomenon. Thai food, along with other markers of Thailand such as gold-leaf temples and tropical beaches, situates Thailand on the map of desire and fuels the Orientalist fantasy of the ever-exotic Asian culture. Oftentimes, Thailand is known exclusively as a culinary heaven, in contrast to its relative invisibility a decade ago. Nevertheless, in the face of these contemporary conditions of racialization and the questionable visibility of Thai culture through food, I started a peanut sauce business—producing and distributing a condiment that is most often associated with Thai cuisine.

The peanut sauce recipe that I developed (and, subsequently, the business that I founded) is culturally specific, in terms of it being produced as part of my diasporic queer experience. Neither a recipe passed down through generations nor a “traditional” family business, the peanut sauce that I make is a culmination of my journey from a kitchen-phobe to culinary experimenter and the evidence of expanding/strengthening queer support networks. Without my queer families in Los Angeles and the Bay Area who continuously support me in various ways, the peanut sauce business would have not taken shape. My peanut sauce company is certainly a family business, but one that challenges the traditional notions of family and lineage: queer and diasporic. It is part of the process of self-building and sustainable living under capitalism.

If peanut sauce is a condiment that connotes authentic Thai food, the fact that I am making and selling it unsettles this assumption. As an ethnic Chinese person growing up in Thailand, I was already an outsider to Thai culture, particularly Thai cuisine, to a significant degree. In addition, like “Thai iced tea,” peanut sauce was not specifically invented in Thailand but is a product of cross-cultural culinary development in Asia. Ironically, the word “peanut sauce” and the condiment recognized as such have no equivalent in Thai (the dipping sauce for satay dishes is simply called “satay sauce”). This means that “peanut sauce” is a term that is only culturally intelligible in the Western—specifically American—context. Authenticity is one of the major aspects of contemporary globalized culture that my peanut sauce business questions.

— History of Medina-Huang Kitchen (2010)