In Part I of this series, we explored how global flavors have become more American. In this second installment of “Global Flavors: The World on a Menu,” we look at the drivers behind trends in global flavors, the dialectic of authenticity vs. approachability, and the cultural and economic impact of global cuisine in America. Moreover, we’ll delve into how certain chefs approach combining local elements with global recipes to develop their American variants of traditional world cuisine.
When The Ritz Carlton, Sarasota, Fla. told its new head chef, Diego Alonso Ortega Oneto that he could draw upon his Peruvian heritage to inspire the dishes served at the hotel restaurant, it was unexpected, but it left him elated! Finally, he could serve food that was as much a part of his identity as offerings on a fine dining menu. The decision by the Ritz likely wasn’t just about pleasing their new chef; Peruvian food is becoming increasingly popular in the United States –and this too, as we’ll wade into, below, economically promising.
His approach to incorporating Peru into various dishes, while creative, can start with dishes with which patrons are familiar, and proceed with subtle changes to them to give them a South American essence.
“I incorporate Peruvian ingredients and flavor notes into dishes such as our Wagyu stir-fry inspired by Lomo saltado, [a traditional Peruvian beef dish], or our Confit octopus with Romesco, [a dry piquant sauce], delicately marinated in Ají Panca [a paste made from Peruvian peppers] and local spices. Our ceviches and crudos highlight Peruvian chilies, while our crispy empanadas use a signature Chimichurri recipe. We also bring Nikkei-inspired marinades into our poke bowl at the recently reopened Lido Key Tiki Bar, always respecting tradition while adapting to the setting,” Chef Ortega Oneto details.
Responsible sourcing, sustainability, and balanced flavors are essential to creating internationally inspired dishes, according to Ortega Oneto. “One dish that represents this philosophy is our locally sourced grouper, cast-iron seared and served over sweet potato mousseline, confit broccolini with shallots and lemon zest, finished with a lemon beurre blanc and yuzu pearls. As you explore the dish, you discover secondary notes such as coconut water in the purée and a subtle mango sweetness hidden within the sauce, creating layers of flavor while remaining grounded in classical technique,” he explains.
Ortega Oneto describes his process as beginning with a single ingredient whether it’s seafood, a particular fruit, or vegetable. As the recipe develops, he introduces global inspiration through techniques or components that may not traditionally belong to the local cuisine, while still maintaining balance.
“Balance is key,” Ortega Oneto said. “In Peru, we are accustomed to very high acidity in ceviche. For a broader audience, I introduce elements like passion fruit and avocado to add sweetness and creaminess, which complement the acidity and raw fish. The result is a more balanced and approachable dish without losing its identity,” he adds.
Why Global Flavors Are Surging
Demographics and Diversity
The United States is more diverse than ever, and its youngest consumers reflect that shift. Gen Z and Millennials are not only more ethnically diverse but also more open to experimentation. Their food preferences mirror their lived experiences: multicultural, hybrid, and fluid.
With a growing immigrant population that has historically seeded culinary traditions just as second-generation chefs reinterpret them for broader audiences, the global food industry including within the bar and restaurant space is projected to grow rapidly. Driven by multiculturalism, world cuisine has generated a revenue of $8.6 billion in 2024 and is expected to cross $13 billion by 2030, demonstrating a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of almost 8 percent per year, according to a study done by Grandview Horizon Data.
Travel and Exposure
International travel both physical and digital, has expanded the American palate. Diners return from trips to Mexico City, Croatia, or Bangkok seeking flavors they experienced abroad. Even those who do not travel encounter global cuisines through streaming content, food media, and online recipes. Even streaming services like Netflix, which connect people to international entertainment content, help bring people to different places where they’ll be exposed to global flavors.
Social Media Acceleration
Platforms like TikTok and Instagram have become powerful engines of culinary diffusion. Viral dishes such as Korean corn dogs (street food which can contain anything from fish sausage to whole sticks of cheese), birria tacos (Mexico’s twist on barbeque featuring goat or beef), ube desserts (made from a vibrant purple yam native to the Philippines) have moved from the margins to mainstream in just months. Social media lowers the “risk” of trying unfamiliar foods by making them visually familiar to potential consumers before they shell out money to actually sample them.
Desire for Experiences that Make Memories and Move Stories Forward
Today’s diners are not just eating; rather, they are experiencing. Global cuisines offer storytelling comprised of history, culture, and technique – culminating in new experience. In the competitive restaurant landscape, this narrative value matters.
According to Ortega Oneto: “Guests want to understand the story behind the dish and what makes it unique.
What’s more is that globally inspired dishes are also perceived as premium, with 74 percent of operators saying in 2025 that they can command higher prices for these offerings than regular fare, as reported in Data Essential’s 2025 Year-in-Review.
From Family Kitchens to Fine Dining
The trajectory of global cuisine in America often follows a familiar arc. It begins with immigrant family-run eateries serving their communities – small, authentic, and often under-recognized. Over time, these foods are “discovered” by broader audiences, adapted for accessibility, and eventually elevated into mainstream and even luxury contexts.
Korean cuisine offers a clear example: once an esoteric choice, it has seen rapid expansion, with restaurant growth and mainstream adoption driven by cultural exports like K-pop and viral street food. Today, Korean flavors flourish in most corners of America, from fast-food menus to Michelin-starred tasting courses.
In recent years, global flavors have even made the leap to international variants of haute cuisine. For Ortega Oneto, such luxury dining means thinking ahead for guests combining eclectic flavors and, “creating that ‘wow’ factor that elevates the experience. It’s about anticipating their needs and allowing them to travel with us on a culinary journey that highlights seasonality, local ingredients, and a sustainable approach,” he said.
Authenticity vs. Approachability
As global flavors scale, creative tensions may emerge – notions of authenticity versus approachability.
While diners increasingly seek “authentic” experiences, regional specificity, traditional techniques, and cultural integrity, restaurants must adapt dishes to local tastes, ingredient availability, and operational constraints.
This dialectic is not new, but it is intensifying. Nearly half of restauranteurs cite challenges in executing authentic global dishes – from sourcing ingredients to training staff. Moreover, complete authenticity can sometimes alienate mainstream diners unfamiliar with certain textures, spices, or presentations.
The result is a spectrum of options: traditional authenticity with family-run restaurants preserving heritage recipes; adapted dishes modified for local palates (e.g., milder spice levels); and fusion or hybridization, resulting in such creations as – Korean tacos (fusing Mexican and Korean flavors), sushi burritos (fusing Japanese and Mexican fare), and chicken tikka masala pizza (putting the Western palate’s favorite Indian food on a pizza)
That said, increasingly, fusion cuisine has become the new “F-word” in dining principally because too many chefs have thrown different ingredients together without keeping a consistent central core or overarching concept to the menu offering. These days, restaurant owners prefer to refer to dishes as being “inspired by” various dining traditions, which have been combined to achieve a certain experience.
For Ortega Oneto, it’s about respecting tradition before adding innovation and reinvention. “By always respecting the roots of a dish, even when we prepare an 18-hour sous-vide short rib with taro root foam, it begins with proper braising fundamentals: precision cuts, correctly cooked vegetables, reduced wine, spices, and well-balanced flavors. Only after honoring the traditional technique do I introduce modern methods such as sous vide [slow cooking in a water bath] or espuma [foam] to elevate the dish,” he said.
For Victor King, executive chef at The Essential of Birmingham, Ala., his central core is Southern cooking, which he takes in different directions. The addition of a pasta or exotic saucing, simple modifications, he says, can present southern favorites in a different way: “Like, a tortellini that we have right now that's filled with braised, pork that is from right down the street from where I grew up, in Tennessee. At Bear Creek, and… it’s like braised pork. This is Southern with you know, local mushrooms in it, and we've got, like, local produce, and just, like, or asparagus, and things like that…But to do it through, you know, something that isn't super familiar…so, we add a little bit of Shiro Dashi to the broth to, like, give it a little bit more brightness,” King described. He said it prompts customers to ask what that flavor is.
“At its heart It’s a Southern dish but that simple alteration makes it more of a worldly offering, and overwhelmingly, people respond positively to it.”
King also said that fusion has fallen out of favor. “I think fusion became… yucky, because, it was just so… blatant. It became so inauthentic that it just stopped being good,” he said. That’s why he doesn’t try to do too much when it comes to altering his cuisine. He wants people to identify with its basic Southern character while carrying an element of the international that makes it more exciting for diners.
The Cultural and Economic Impact
The rise of global flavors is reshaping not just menus, but the broader restaurant economy. It creates opportunities for new restaurant concepts centered on specific cuisines, premium pricing strategies tied to uniqueness and quality, better supply chains for global ingredients, and culinary innovation through experimentation.
At the same time, going global raises questions about cultural ownership, representation and equity. Academic research has shown that immigrant cuisines are sometimes “othered” or undervalued in mainstream discourse, even as they gain popularity. As global flavors become more profitable, who benefits and who gets credit remains an ongoing conversation.
Nashville’s favorite Middle Eastern meets Mediterranean restaurant, Butcher & Bee whose owner Michael Shemtov, a Baghdadi Jew, who is both American and Israeli notes that sometimes politics, too, can get in the way of enjoying a meal. The political climate in the U.S. due to the conflict in the Middle East, he feels, may deter people from coming to his restaurant if he is identified with the politics of the Israeli government. He feels it just isn’t a fair judgment simply because his father moved the family from Iraq to Israel in the 1950s. Identifying Shemtov with Benjamin Netanyahu’s positions would be a gargantuan irony given his vociferous opposition Netanyahu’s government.
“I grew up in a household that valued pluralism. You know, a lot of my dad's close friends were Muslim and Arab. And, my memories growing up was [sic.] being told, you know, people are people, and these are our neighbors and our cousins, and going to people's houses for, you know, to feast at the end of Ramadan fasting was something we did,” Shemtov said. “And that's what I believe. I believed that even before it became politically toxic to say, you know, ‘Israeli’. So, I don’t call the food Israeli – it’s really a confluence of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean.”
Shemtov believes food can be a great uniting force. Indeed, he recalls befriending a Palestinian gentleman with whom he bonded over bread and spice. “Food can bring people from different backgrounds together,” he noted. “He [the Palestinian friend] loves the bread that I make, and, you know, I bring him za'atar from some Jordanian brothers that import it, and he thinks it's the best… when he goes to the market, he brings me, you know, labneh, or a cheese that he thinks that I like… Eighty percent of our relationship is about food, and gifting each other food that we think… or cooking food for each other, that we think the other will like.”
The experience led him to start a restaurant “incubator” for new concepts in food, for people “who are long on passion and short on cash,” he said.
Shemtov punctuates this point: “I never wanted to have debates about where the food originated, or who claimed it. My loyalty is to… delicious!”
Having successfully brought global flavors into fine dining, Ortega Oneto feels that the outlook for global flavors in the U.S. is strong in every segment of the restaurant industry. He says that global flavors with significant local influence will burnish both casual and fine dining. He emphasizes that storytelling through food will be a key element to growth, as will a continued focus on sustainability as well as creative approaches to lesser-known ingredients.
So, it seems that the story of global flavors is well on its way to becoming one of further integration in Americana to the point where people may stop even identifying what’s American and what isn’t. As the Founding Fathers envisaged with immigrants, foods from different places could end up together in a way that can only exist in that great big melting pot that is America.
