What a weird article. Modern culinary arts are at their most inventive right now, with boundaries constantly being pushed, with the trickle down reaching more and more places due to globalization, resulting in more and more people being able to have exciting dishes at affordable prices.
At the same time, more and more attention is being paid to preserve authentic food, while elevating it to more haute cuisine levels.
The author claims they're not trying to begrudge locals good food, but basically the entire article reads "I want to travel to places and have TRADITIONAL!!! cuisine, not this fancy bullshit!"
There's never been a better time to be alive for foodies and even food tourists than now.
Which is no more than a few decades old at most, a century at the outside.
People live, people die, and new people do the "same" food differently; people move, new people come, and there's a new influence in both locations.
A static view of tradition is a Victorian invention, a reaction to the increasing pace of industrialization, and nothing more than nostalgia. Mix that with the idiotic notion that the Medieval period was a stagnant "dark age" and you have the modern notion of "traditional" "organic" food which was the same for ever until Evil Modernity Literally GMO Monsatan moved in and made a Mordor out of our little Shire.
>A static view of tradition is a Victorian invention, a reaction to the increasing pace of industrialization
You understand that those two notions are contradictory, right?
If industrialization "increased the pace", then indeed "static tradition" was what existed before it, as food and other aspects of tradition changed with a much slower pace -- even if not totally static (which is a strawman anyway, no Victorian thought food at 20 A.D was exactly the same as food in 1700 A.D)
Everything around the world shows influence from everywhere else in the world. As people travel back and forth, they bring ideas back and forth, until eventually a sort of equilibrium is reached.
As for restaurants, I'm not sure I agree entirely. A few generations ago, every 'top' restaurant was a French restaurant. Serving the same classic dishes. Now you have places serving 'Nordic Cuisine' (Noma, Faviken), Spanish cuisine has had a resurgence in a major way (Arzak, Etxebarri), South American cuisine is becoming recognized at the highest levels (D.O.M., Central), as is Asian cuisine (too many to list), there's 'avant garde' (El Bulli and the Adria brothers' other ventures, Alinea), and then you've got the chefs who break all the rules and just create whatever they want at the time (Pierre Gagnaire comes to mind). Not to mention the trends of gastronomic bistros, brasseries and pubs, cheap tasting menus, haute fast food and street food, etc...
While I think it's somewhat true that the 'style' of a restaurant is becoming less location specific, I think there's more variety and innovation than ever before, more restaurants in general than ever before, and I would argue that food itself is getting more interesting.
As for the article, it seems more like the writer just doesn't like the fact that Buenos Aires isn't as they remember it (almost a colonialist attitude IMO, that Buenos Aires should stand still for them). However this attitude also ignores history - people have always migrated, adopted new ideas, cultures, cuisines, etc... 'Traditional' European ingredients like the Potato and Tomato, for instance, both came from the New World.
It's disappointing to me that restaurants always tend to serve the same tired dishes with slight variations on recipe or style.
The best and most exciting food and mixes of ingredients / obscure cooking techniques seem to come from hole in the wall restaurants with chefs who just really love food and know what tools/ingredients/techniques are available to them and like a brilliant mad scientist they serve up and share their successful experiments.
Basically, everyone in the world agrees on what ingredients they'd like to cook with, and how they'd like to prepare things. When you give a chef unlimited time and money to make a dish, they make mostly the same stuff, which is what we tend to call "fine cuisine." There might be variation due to local consumer tastes, but a French chef and a Japanese chef and an American chef will basically agree on, say, who makes the best beef in the world, and then will (if allowed) all import that same beef.
So, you only get originality and inventiveness and "ethnic flair", under resource constraints. Every "local dish" is a local resource optimization, making food tasty using ingredients or techniques that happen to cost less to apply (or, at least, used to, traditionally) in the local area. And hole-in-the-wall restaurants, running under the heaviest resource constraints, tend to thus produce food at its "most ethnic."
While I agree that constraints can lead to creativity, there's not nearly as much 'consensus' when it comes to cooking as you think. Someone from France and someone from India will have very different ideas on how to cook something, even if they both live in Canada and have the same ingredients and cooking apparatus.
Note that I'm mostly talking about the five-star chefs who do global competitions, as far as "cooking alike" goes. Like the best singers have a "vocal range" so wide that it overlaps with a lot of the other best singers, the best chefs have a "culinary range" so wide that it overlaps with a lot of the other best chefs. Basically, a thousand-dollar meal in America doesn't look a lot different than a thousand-dollar meal in Pakistan or one in Norway, because if you're paying a thousand dollars for your meal, you're getting a chef who could make anything, and who has ordered their ingredients from everywhere.
That doesn't seem to be a very widely-applicable point, I admit. But my real argument is that this a point on a spectrum. Hole-in-the-wall short-order cooks are on one end, inventing new ethnic foods out of necessity. "Globally-ranked" chefs are on the other end, synthesizing together every style in the world and thus ending up with their own "cosmopolitan fusion cuisine" culture that doesn't really belong anywhere except within the space of a fancy lounge.
Between those points, most real chefs lie—not quite constrained to only cook with what's grown locally, but not quite free enough to bring together fresh ingredients from opposite ends of the earth on a whim. Western "home cooking" is precisely in the middle, in fact: a cuisine that sits on one end of the incentive-structure of the global shipping industry, cooking with whatever can cheaply be brought from wherever it was grown to a local chain grocery store.
Still though, just thinking back to the cuisine in my wife's home country (a thoroughly 3rd world country), even with something as basic as a fish you get from a fisherman on the road, we'd eat fried fish, fish curry, fish stew, fish sautéed with various starchy vegetables or greens then eaten with flatbread or rice, and so on...
Even in a culture where the only cooking implement is a fire in the backyard (and a clay oven similar to a tandoor), all the vegetables come from no further than the next village over, and starchy vegetables are dug up from behind the house, the variety was staggering.
Fusion cuisine exists everywhere BTW. African cuisine has Arab and Indian influence, Caribbean cuisine has African, Indian and Amerindian influence, Asian food has Western and Indian influence, and the various Asian cuisines all borrow from one another.
Heck a great example of fusion cuisine is the Kebab - seen from Germany to Turkey to Iran, Pakistan, all the way to Vietnam and elsewhere. All have regional variations, yet all can trace some sort of middle-eastern (likely Iranian) origin.
The fusing of cuisines has happened since the beginning of time, ever since nomads encountered agriculturalists, since Egyptians traded with Sumerians, since Greeks journeyed to Babylon and India, when merchants travelled along the silk road (all Western cuisines use Black Pepper, which is certainly not indigenous to Europe), etc...
One possible contributory force here might also just be the smaller size of the market for >$1k meals, resulting in less total creative effort being brought to bear on the problem. Intuitively this seems very likely: a large fraction of the world's population cooks on a regular basis, and the sheer scale could overcome even very large forces that select for highly skilled and creative chefs to cook in fine dining.
I don't believe this is the case. I think many restaurants want to appeal to familiarity and safety.
Restaurant patrons may often want the best American/European style slab of steak with seasoning they've come to expect. It's possible to create a wide variety of sauces or crusts for a slab of steak/lamb/bird/fish but often the chef decides on something familiar tried and true. There's plenty of room to explore with side dishes, soups, salads, curries.
I highly recommend the book "Modernist Cuisine". It does an amazing job of breaking down cooking methods though photography, history, and scientific explanations of the physics of heat distribution from various sources and equipment. [1]
At the same time, more and more attention is being paid to preserve authentic food, while elevating it to more haute cuisine levels.
The author claims they're not trying to begrudge locals good food, but basically the entire article reads "I want to travel to places and have TRADITIONAL!!! cuisine, not this fancy bullshit!"
There's never been a better time to be alive for foodies and even food tourists than now.