The steamed buns look familiar, snow white and spongy, mouths propped open around thick cuts of pork belly candy-striped with fat. But we are far from the East Village dens of Baohaus and Momofuku, in Sunnyside, Queens, where Salt & Fat sits by the No. 7 train tracks. Here the meat in the buns is slab bacon, with the customary American adornments (lettuce, tomato) and a slather of what is immediately identifiable, even in highly evolved form, as special sauce, evoking not so much a Big Mac as your best childhood memory of it.

Note that the sauce is boosted with sriracha, togarashi and tobanjan (fermented bean paste). Daniel Yi, the 28-year-old chef and owner, was born in Seoul, grew up in Sunnyside and its eastern neighbor, Woodside (both home to sizable Asian communities), and honed his craft at Riingo and Sapa, where the accents were, respectively, Japanese and Vietnamese. He describes his cooking at Salt & Fat, which opened two years ago, as New American, and in a sense it is exactly, exultingly that: the food of the new America, in which immigrants companionably raid one another’s larders.

I would call it, more specifically, Asian-American, which should not be confused with fusion. Exotic ingredients aren’t being co-opted and sublimated; they’re not thought of as exotic in the first place. If you grow up eating hot dogs with rice, and pizza with kimchi, why not introduce sambal to meatballs, pair a classic French duck breast with litchis, and steep oxtail in dashi before compressing it into a wondrous terrine?