‘Ginger’ for the Masses

There’s “fusion cuisine” and there’s “confusion cuisine,” and though the joke may be getting tired, in reality there’s little confusing the two. Fusion cuisine is the artful blending of ingredients and techniques from different culinary cultures. Confusion cuisine is the same thing done by lesser talents. One is sublime; the other ridiculous.

Ming Tsai’s food seems to fall in the first category. “Seems” is the operative word here, because hardly anyone has actually eaten at Blue Ginger, his 2-year-old Wellesley, Mass., restaurant. Most people know him only from watching his Food Network cooking show “East Meets West,” and who really cooks from those shows? Still, there’s no denying he’s a hot property. How many rookie chefs have been profiled in the New Yorker?

With his new cookbook “Blue Ginger” (Clarkson Potter, $32.50), we have a little bit more information by which to judge him. One advantage Tsai seems to have over most East-West cooks is that he actually has some background in Asian cooking. The well-traveled son of a well-heeled Chinese restaurateur, he knows what good food is supposed to taste like, whether it is from Thailand, Vietnam, Japan or China. This gives him a distinct advantage over most of his competitors, who sometimes seem to have been trained in French kitchens and then handed a bottle of hoisin sauce.

In this book, Tsai’s strongest suit seems to be in gently tweaking the flavors and presentations of the various Asian cuisines. His pho, for example, is like the Vietnamese version amplified and expanded. The only European touches are the addition of leeks and carrots to the broth and the chef-y touch of serving the usual plate of accompaniments--bean sprouts and basil--as a kind of loosely composed salad on top of the soup.

He seems less sure of himself when cooking from other cuisines. Skate wings in banana leaves and braised oxtail with preserved lemon polenta seem like the kind of things that might turn up on the menu of just about any ambitious restaurant. In other words, confusion.