🫒 THE FUTURE IS FUSION — Collabs, Third-Culture Menus + Grand Margaritas Plans Its Next Peruvian-Mexican Location
Guest chefs, fusion restaurants + third-culture menus are growing around the Capital Region. Susie Davidson Powell tracks the trend.
Feature article: Susie Davidson Powell
We are fans of pop ups. And bar snacks. And chef collaborations. Especially when it involves cool chefs doing creative things. Last month, local Mexican pop up Los Hermosos collaborated with their Filipino host, Chee-bog, on a Filipino Mexican menu dubbed “Tortilla in Manila,” a culinary mash up with isaw taco, sisig quesadilla and lumpia tacos dorados. At Familiar Creature in Saratoga, Executive Chef Michele Hunter is hosting her new Familiar Faces series with guest chefs dropping three or four dishes into the regular menu on a single night; sibling business, Hamlet & Ghost, preceded that model with a kitchen collab with Filipino pop up, Ala Ala. Now Nick Furnia, one half of the Ala Ala duo, is on staff.
Not all collaborations are fusion cooking, but there’s a clear resurgence of the trend that dominated food media around 15 years ago with chefs, many of them American–born children of immigrants, rejecting the restrictive expectations of culinary “authenticity” and seeking comfort and inspiration in their heritage and third-culture cooking.
L.A. Times restaurant critic, Jonathan Gold, was instrumental in popularizing Los Angeles strip mall businesses and food trucks serving fusion taco egg rolls or Italian sausage wontons. When he revived the 101 Best Restaurants list in 2013 and included Roy Choi’s Kogi BBQ, a Mex-Korean food truck, in its top 5, it fueled a coast-to-coast craze. On the East Coast, New York’s Ramen By Ra was combining its namesake noodles with familiar American flavors like the BLT ramen bowl or bagel-inspired ramen with gravlax, tomato shoyu and cream cheese foam. It still makes best restaurant lists today.
FUSION DINING UPSTATE
In 2016, I wrote about the newly opened Kraverie in Saratoga Springs, an upstate brick-and-mortar offspring of two New Jersey food trucks with fusion Mex-Korean BBQ + crepes. A decade on, Kraverie’s menu is still a beautifully chaotic mash up of kimchi-dillas, Korean wings, savory Korean crepes, Korean burritos and sesame chicken tacos, as well as the classic bibimbap and japchae noodles.
Last year, fusion Japanese-Italian restaurant, Itameshi, opened in Albany’s Warehouse District as a partnership between veteran restaurateurs, Mike Pietrocola of Pastina in Delmar and Dave Zheng, owner of Sake Café, Graney’s Bar and Grill and Tanpopo Ramen in Albany. Italian-Japanese fusion is hugely popular in Japan, and at Itameshi Albany, you’ll find cacio e pepe gyoza, wagyu meatballs, Italian caprese sushi and squid ink spaghetti, along with an impressive bar selection of Italian amari and Japanese whisky.
Fast forward to this January, when Grand Margaritas Brunch & Mexican Cantina opened in East Greenbush, and we took note of the surprising number of Peruvian dishes on the Mexican menu. The restaurant gets its vibrant, LED-lit Mexican decor from its Slingerlands sibling, Las Margaritas, (a related Latham location has different ownership), but while Las Margaritas has Peruvian lomo saltado and chaufa, the Peruvian fried rice with Chinese-Cantonese immigrant roots, the East Greenbush Grand Margaritas goes further. Co-owner Damian Company calls it Mexican-Peruvian fusion, pointing out their unique lomo saltado tacos and Peruvian ceviches, and pineapple salmon and shrimp.
FROM FUSION TO MEAL PREP
Interestingly, Grand Margaritas not only has all-day brunch in its name and 20 vegan versions of classic Mexican-Peruvian dishes on the menu, it also—in what may be an area first— has a take out program called FITMEX, a customizable, weekly meal prep service! They also partner with a local yoga instructor for Mats + Margs, bringing yoga into an unexpected restaurant space, as well as programming paint n’ sip, karaoke, line dancing and speed dating nights.
đź«’ DISHING INTEL: Damian Company tells us the success of Grand Margaritas in its first quarter has fast-tracked the opening of a second Grand Margaritas in Glenville at 10 Glenridge Road, Schenectady, projected to open by July 2026.
Try the fusion menus at:
• Kraverie, 78 Beekman Street, Saratoga Springs
• Itameshi, 745 Broadway, Albany (Inside L’Industrie Apartments)
• Grand Margaritas, 596 Columbia Turnpike, East Greenbush (Inside the Hannaford Plaza)