A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to be at a dinner arranged by local food writer Suresh Doss. He gathered a mix of industry and industry-adjacent folk at Khau Gully, an Indian restaurant near Yonge and Eglinton. The food was excellent.

Sitting across from me was a polite, softpoken fellow. Exchanging pleasantries, he asked me how I came to be there. I told him I was a writer who sometimes writes about food. “What about food?” he asked. Oh, mostly cultural issues, I replied — cultural appropriation, things like that.

As he in turn told me what he did, it slowly dawned on me that I was talking to David Schwartz — the white guy who was then mostly known for running two well-received Chinese restaurants: Sunny’s, the more casual spot in Kensington Market, and Mimi’s, the more upscale place in Yorkville.

Heh, whoops.

When he asked me what I thought about cultural appropriation, I fumbled a bit, feeling a bit awkward. Maybe I should have been more forceful or direct. But I guess this is why some people become writers.

I don’t begrudge David Schwartz. He seems like a nice guy. More significantly, the normal accusations of usurpation or theft that often accompany discussions of cultural appropriation cannot be quite so easily cast at him. Read anything about Schwartz, like this long (and now award-winning) profile in Toronto Life, and it’s clear he has not just a deep knowledge of and reverence for the dizzying diversity and complexity of Chinese cuisine; he also has a moving story about his connection to the food as a young Jewish boy that is much more than the cliches of “what Jewish families eat on Christmas Day.”

But then, this is often the mistake made about cultural appropriation. Critics of the concept’s very existence assume it’s about a set of restrictions about what an individual or group is, or is not, allowed to do — of whether someone has earned the right to claim something as their own. Given where that line of reasoning takes us — to making the cardinal mistake of attaching specific culture to specific bodies — I have no desire to promote that obviously retrograde idea.

That’s not to say there’s nothing there to discuss though. If there is an issue with cultural appropriation — at least beyond the simple fact of who gets paid for what — it’s largely about what circulates publicly within discourse and media. “Is David Schwartz allowed to cook Chinese food” is a boring and, to my mind, mostly settled question. The more useful question is: “how should the media talk about a white guy who owns and runs two Chinese restaurants?”

After all, it is in the arena of media, broadly defined, that “David Schwartz” — at least as a symbol if not a person — becomes… do I really want to use the word “problematic” in this, the 2025th year of our Lord? I’ll just let it stay implied.

But if you look at the Toronto Life piece, you’ll see that Schwartz is described as a, or the, “Chinese-food king.” He is also “a dominant force in Chinese dining in Toronto.” We get little anecdotes that Chinese guests also enjoy the food at Sunny’s, dismissing ideas of appropriation as somehow quaint. ‘Aren’t we past this by now?’ writer David Sax seems to suggest.

Still, the conclusion is clear: David Schwartz, white guy, is redefining Chinese food in this city. And I suppose in a way he is.

Is David Schwartz in fact important in Toronto’s Chinese food scene? That depends: on what counts as the “Chinese food scene in Toronto,” for one; and on who gets to decide what’s important, for another.

After all, those proclamations make more sense when you think about who they are made for. I’m sure there are some people who think Sunny’s and Mimi’s are important Chinese restaurants in Toronto. And though I’m purposefully being both glib and unfair, I’ll still do the Twitter-style thing and say: “I bet those people are not Chinese.”

Even if I am being a little deliberately reductive, it’s still true that there are certain places and certain figures who factor into the media construction of “important restaurants.” That in turn produces a collective discursive construction we call “the dining scene.” And because that construction traffics in certain currencies — novelty, prestige, “cool” (however it’s defined), youth, and its attendant trait, desire, and so on — Schwartz’s Chinese restaurants are part of the abstraction called the dining scene in a way that few “actually” Chinese restaurants are.

I have a quote in my head that floats through my mind often and may well be apocryphal, but I believe it’s from Frantz Fanon by way of Homi Bhabha: that “the third world is the past on a timeline on which the first world is forever the present and the future.” Only the thing that transcends what people euphemistically call “traditional cultures” count as being part of both the present and the future. The “third world” — which here, I simply mean to refer to the cuisines of the global south — can, definitionally, only ever exist a step behind, as symbols of not just a past, but the past of this particular hybrid, polyglot, syncretic present.

This is basically how discourse and representation work. There is a public horizon, often controlled by gatekeepers of various kinds, that forms part of a collective understanding — but by virtue of its position, also bestows prestige and with that, material reward. This is why almost every new place that opens on Ossington or Dundas West or Geary gets written up — and a few become much-discussed: it’s about what reaches the level of being worthy of being discussed. That in turn forms a tiny part of how we understand the idea of “a culture” — what is considered modern, desirable, forward-thinking and so on.

So… then what? To me, the question of whether or not David Schwartz should run Chinese restaurants is a bit of an elision of the actual point. He already does! Rather, the target here is not so much David Schwartz as it is the media and figures who talk about David Schwartz. That’s what the tired scolds who object to any discussion of cultural appropriation as “more leftist illiberalism” seem to miss. One is not asking for a set of approved rules as to who can do what; rather, we are suggesting that the people who produce ideas about culture be aware of the interplay between representation, identity, public recognition, money, and prestige. Another way of saying that is: writers and editors, do your damn job.

Look, it is true that, particularly in multicultural societies like Toronto’s, cultures need interlocutors. People need someone to hold their hand and translate one way of understanding to another. If David Schwartz is part of how some people come around to the idea that the term “Chinese food” makes about as much sense as a cohesive whole as “European food,” then so be it.

But surely it must be clear that in anointing a white chef the authority or “king” of certain cuisines, one reaffirms the idea that white people and whiteness remain the standard by which all other things are judged. That, far more than “theft,” is what one is calling out when one talks about cultural appropriation.