Always Be My Maybe, a Netflix rom-com powered by the magnetism of co-stars Ali Wong and Randall Park, is refreshing for several reasons: It’s a rare rom-com about Asian Americans, and even in a landmark year for Asian-American representation in Hollywood, stands out for its diverse cast, skirting of stereotypes about Asians, and portrayal of a woman who chooses her career ambitions above her man — and is rewarded all the more for it.

But while ahead of the curve in so many other ways, the film skews curiously traditional when it comes to food — more specifically, the ideas of “authenticity” that hang over immigrant cuisines and cooks, including Asian-American ones, like a specter. Wong’s character, Sasha Tran, a latchkey kid growing up in ’90s-era San Francisco, learns to cook by making the Korean comfort food taught to her by Judy, the mother of her best friend and next-door neighbor Marcus Kim (Park). Years later, after Judy’s death, sex with Marcus, and a subsequent fight that ends their friendship, Sasha is a celebrity chef whose “modern Vietnamese fusion” LA restaurant is a far cry from her more humble culinary roots: It serves “hay-smoked fish loin, fried spot prawns on skewers, and trays of pleated lemongrass dumplings” expertly plated and served in a cavernous dining space filled with glitz, glamor, and mostly non-Asian customers.

As viewers, we are clearly meant to side-eye Sasha’s transformation into the kind of cook who uses “transdenominational” to describe her new SF restaurant and who cynically decides to print her new menu on rice paper because “white people eat that shit up.” Marcus, who still lives with his father and works as an HVAC technician, evidently does. After becoming reacquainted with Sasha by way of a service job, he shakes his head disapprovingly at the PR-ready way she speaks about her restaurants on the phone (“transgressive, transforming, transcendent”), sneers at a theatrical dining experience that involves admittedly absurd dishes like venison accompanied by a set of headphones, and, most significantly, implies that she is a sellout in the story’s pivotal conflict scene.

“Asian food isn’t supposed to be ‘elevated,’” Marcus insists to Sasha, now his girlfriend, on the eve of her SF restaurant opening. “It’s supposed to be authentic.”

What is authentic? To Marcus, the answer is obvious. It’s the kind of food that Sasha used to make with his mom: homey, cut with multipurpose scissors at the kitchen counter, served “in a big-ass bowl” rather than in shot glasses. It’s shumai served by Cantonese-speaking aunties in the neighborhood dim sum parlor. It’s the congee that Sasha makes herself alone at home. It’s Judy’s kimchi jjigae, rich in flavor and in memories.

By placing such value on the nebulous concept of “authenticity,” Marcus falls into the same trap that ensnares so many immigrant cooks in diners’ webs of impossible expectations. “Authentic” is coded: in the U.S., it has become a sort of shorthand for “ethnic” (another loaded word) cuisines that must hew to narrow definitions of taste, dining experiences, and price points in order to satisfy the preexisting biases and notions that diners already hold. Krishnendu Ray, a New York University professor and the author of the book The Ethnic Restaurateur, calls the word “both a search and a stick to beat it with.” As he says in a 2016 interview with the Washington Post, “If the food is expensive, then it can’t possibly be authentic. If you’re charging $40 for it, it’s definitely not authentic.”

Sara Kay, in a recent Eater NY article, confirms that idea with quantitative data through an extensive study of Yelp reviews for New York restaurants — according to the analysis, non-white cuisines like Mexican and Chinese are particularly confined by the bounds of the authenticity myth, as reviewers tend to rate those kinds of restaurants lower for not being “authentic.” As a result, chefs and restaurants are often shackled by tired stereotypes and impossible price points that they must maintain in order to receive positive reviews from “authenticity”-seeking diners.

As loaded as the term may be, “authenticity” in and of itself is largely meaningless. It’s a concept shaped by individual experiences and imaginations, meaning what’s authentic to one person may not be to another. Writer and San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho questioned the concept itself in a 2017 essay for Taste about what she calls “assimilation food,” the unique cuisines that immigrants must cobble together using sensory memories of their homelands and new ingredients from their adopted ones.

To Ho, banh mi on sliced white bread — an invention that didn’t exist in Vietnam — is as true to her culinary roots as any other Vietnamese dish. To John Paul Brammer, a writer who recently wrote about authenticity for the Washington Post, it’s cheesy quesadillas and hard tacos from American fast-food chain Taco Bueno. To me, it’s my mother’s slightly tangy Taiwanese pineapple cakes made using cream cheese in the dough and Dole canned pineapple chunks — a dessert that my mother herself only learned from a Taiwanese neighbor after immigrating to the U.S. from China.

A generous reading of Always Be My Maybe and its muddled handling of “authenticity” is that, as Ho writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, the film argues that Sasha’s “public engagement with Vietnamese cuisine is shallow, inflated by a whole lot of hot air and not much else.” If that’s the case, the film doesn’t quite do enough to unpack that tension and to dispel the harmful myth of authenticity. Instead of teasing out the nuances of that debate, the story ultimately casts “authentic” traditional home cooking as the virtuous victor — less shot glasses of fusion food, more big-ass pots of kimchi stew, like the kind simmered and served in Judy’s Way — Sasha’s cozy new New York restaurant dedicated to Marcus’s mother and her Korean recipes — which opens at the end of the film.

For immigrant chefs, there can be dignity in cooking theatrical hay-smoked fish loin and kimchi jjigae, “authenticity” be damned. It’s too bad that in Always Be My Maybe, it’s presented as less of a spectrum of choice, and more of a polarity of morality.