Consider the divergent trajectories of Japanese and Chinese cuisines in America. In the past few decades, Japanese cooking has become something to emulate in haute cuisine, with elite Western chefs frequently visiting Japan to observe how chefs there are preparing and plating their work. “Japanese is doing very well in terms of prestige, and that is about … the rise of Japan as a major economic power,” Ray says. Meanwhile, he argues, the status of Chinese food remains held back by many Americans’ perceptions of the country and its economy. “With China, [Americans] are still filled with this funny disdain, that it is about cheap and crappy stuff, including about cheap and crappy food,” he says.

Ray’s analysis in The Ethnic Restaurateur is not just based on subjective assessments of a cuisine’s influence and reputation. To great effect, he draws on data from Zagat, whose reviewers collect check prices for meals at the restaurants it lists (which tend to range from middlebrow to the lower end of high-end); in New York in 2015, the average check at a Zagat-listed Japanese restaurant for a meal for one (including a glass of wine and a tip) was $68.94, while the average price for the same thing at Zagat-listed Chinese restaurants was $35.76.

Data: Krishnendu Ray; Zagat

In 1985, the earliest year for which Zagat data is available, Japanese food had the sixth-highest average check price in New York. Last year, it ranked first. During that time, Greek and Korean have also seen their lots improve, while Chinese has remained at the lower end of the check-price spectrum, along with Thai, Indian, and Mexican.

Data: Krishnendu Ray; Zagat

The theory Ray outlines in The Ethnic Restaurateur is more complicated than just loosely extrapolating from a country’s financial and military might. Some more-granular data does support that approach—many cuisines’ Zagat check averages correlate closely with the per-capita income of the corresponding cultural group—but Ray believes that other variables must matter a lot too, considering that nearly all the cuisines with the highest check prices are ones generally associated with whiteness.

And even when a country’s food makes the jump to haute cuisine, the process of deciding who will be its public face can still bleed into issues of race and class. In the ‘80s, Rick Bayless popularized regional Mexican fare in the U.S., in cookbooks and at his restaurants, and because he’s a white man from Oklahoma, his de facto stewardship of higher-end Mexican cooking is controversial, even despite his fluency in Mexican culture. Ray’s book provides a number of examples of immigrant chefs who feel they’re confined to cooking only dishes from their home country, while they see their white peers given the latitude to dabble in other cuisines.

In The Ethnic Restaurateur, Ray also discusses David Chang, an Asian American whose empire of white-tablecloth-free restaurants are often viewed as a rare subversion of traditional fine dining by a nonwhite chef. But Ray pushes back on the notion that Chang is truly an “outsider”—he was trained at a French culinary school and worked under the accomplished French chef Daniel Boulud. Ray writes that Chang’s food “is extraordinarily original, but his career path has been the standard route of the new American chef since the late 1980s.” This is not a knock on Chang, but an observation about who is permitted to ascend to the upper echelons of the food world.