The New ‘New American’ Cuisine: A Guide to the Country’s Most Exciting Restaurants Now

IN OKLAHOMA CITY, Jamaican-born chef Andrew Black cooks his turnip sous-vide, with star anise, juniper and lemongrass. Diners at his restaurant, Grey Sweater, eat the turnip—or seared Norwegian scallops, perhaps—with rundown, the Jamaican coconut-milk sauce. At Nudibranch, in Manhattan’s East Village, fried shrimp are tossed in aioli and accompanied by granola and hot honey in a homage to the Cantonese banquet mainstay he tao xia (walnut shrimp) by way of California and Tennessee. And by the light of a Lakers game flashing on a flat-screen at Pijja Palace in Los Angeles, Avish Naran serves a tandoor spaghetti, its Italianate strands flecked with smoked chile. Pair that with an order of achaari buffalo chicken tenders, if you like.

In earlier times, this freewheeling commingling of cuisines might be called fusion, a term coined by Florida chef Norman Van Aken in a speech delivered at a Santa Fe symposium in 1989. Though for Mr. Van Aken, the term simply meant “an interplay, a fusion, between regionalism and restaurant technical know-how,” fusion has since come to suggest blighted, chimerical mashups of world cuisines. Cheeseburgers with ramen for buns. Burritos with tikka masala filling. Novelty fare for the gimmick minded. By the turn of the 21st century, for many chefs, fusion had become a byword for cultural appropriation and bad taste.