Could You Do A Food Tour In Your Old Suburb?
One unorthodox way of appreciating suburbia's cultural diversity
I have a new piece up at Greater Greater Washington that I’m really proud of: it’s an account of a very neat food tour I attended in Annandale, Virginia with Virginialicious, plus an interview with Korean-born Virginia resident Mina Kim, who started the company. Virginialicious—which is just herself and a friend, her only employee—runs walking food tours in Annadale focused on Korean food and culture.
Now Annandale, for those of you outside of Northern Virginia or the D.C. area, is a diverse and interesting community, but it’s also an aging auto-centric suburb, with lots of asphalt, old strip malls, and small buildings from various eras just kind of crammed together. It’s exactly the sort of place I find interesting. It forces you to think about what immigration and diversity mean in America today, and also what urbanism means or should mean.
Kim’s business fascinated me for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s the kind of business that is so intuitive and obvious, yet so rare in America: one person’s passion shared with mostly local customers. Really almost more of a lightly monetized hobby than even a small business, per se; one scale-step below a “small business,” if you will. Like this.
It’s a reminder of how much we are missing out on by making it difficult to run a tiny business. So Virginialicious is like a little taste—pun intended—of the cultural and economic landscape we could enjoy if we opened up more opportunity for micro-scale enterprises.
The other reason I wanted to learn and write about Virginialicious is that the idea of a walking food tour in an old, pedestrian-unfriendly, and frankly somewhat rundown looking old suburban commercial district, is fascinating to me. As I put in the GGWash piece:
The idea of a walking food tour in suburbia is novel and, as a travel or experience product, almost unheard of. Yet, this business idea and labor of love from an immigrant is a particular illustration of a general point: In the Washington region and many other US metro areas, much of the immigration, food culture, and general human interest is now taking place outside of the legacy cities.
This is, in a lot of ways, the central reason why I write this newsletter, and why I find this cluster of “urbanist” issues so fascinating. I like cities, I think cities should be properly urban, more walkable, less oriented around car traffic and parking, etc. But the aspect of all this that really pulls me in is how urbanism does, and is going to, look in the other 90 or 95 percent of America’s built landscapes. Places, in other words, like Annandale.
And it seemed to me that Mina Kim was in many ways doing the same thing I am doing—appreciating the cultural complexity of these old suburbs, thinking about walkability in a car-oriented pattern, about the tension between improving a place and gentrifying it—from a completely different angle of attack, as it were, but finding many of the same realities on the ground.
Older suburbs are underdogs. They are complex, deeply settled places with layers of complexity and identity. Scraping that away could well turn out to be a mistake on the order of running expressways through urban slums. You can replace buildings, but you can’t build a sense of home and place, or the kind of settledness that comes from patterns of use and life over decades. Suburban architecture may have been built more like consumer products than monuments or heirlooms. But communities like Annandale are proof that they can indeed be heirlooms.
Now Virginialicious might seem almost like a reproducible concept: Pick an immigrant community or cuisine, and brand it as an exploration of an unlikely bit of human interest in suburbia.
Koreans are far from the only immigrant or ethnic group in the Washington region; they just happen to be the ethnic group to which Kim belongs. There’s the largely Vietnamese Eden Center in Falls Church. If you hop the state line, there’s Silver Spring’s Ethiopian community; the suburban Chinatown of Rockville; and the heavily Latino corridors in places like Langley Park.
But these are all entire communities, not just collections of businesses or attractions. It isn’t that simple to “sell” them as tourist destinations, and Virginialicious is not that simple or reductive either. It’s not based on a “let’s go discover this foreign cuisine!” attitude. Kim and Park are both Korean, know the language, and deeply know and love the culture. It would be necessary—and, Kim says, rather tricky—to find another one of her or Park for every Washington region immigrant community. And that would be necessary to do it respectfully, and to do it well.
Part of this is cultural sensitivity. But there’s also a business aspect: mom-and-pop business owners aren’t always interested in having a large, boisterous group descend on their restaurant. Having someone who shares the language and culture make the pitch helps gain trust.
That’s another reason I found Virginialicious so interesting: out of all of them immigrant communities and their restaurants you could imagine something like this being done for or about, it’s still strikingly rare. I take this to mean that there a great lag in general understanding as to how much of suburbia has evolved, how the immigrant experience often begins here now, and how this challenges both the folks who want suburbia to be bland and conformist (and, sometimes, implicitly white), and the city boosters who sometimes hold that outdated impression of what suburbia is.
All of this is approached in a completely different and obviously much less political way, in one of these Virginialicious Korean food tours. It’s a kind of “show, don’t tell” for a whole massive and barely recognized shift in American culture and land use.
I don’t want to quote much of the piece here because I want you to read it over at Greater Greater Washington. Check it out!
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