What dish encapsulates the Asian-American identity? Instant noodles with hot dogs, Spam fried rice, California rolls?

For chef Jenny Dorsey, it’s an emerald-green maze, formulated from chrysanthemum and celtuce — greens commonly used in Chinese cooking but recently “discovered” by Western chefs. At the center lie veal sweetbreads wrapped in a shrimp, garlic, and chive rice sheet, inspired by the steamed rice rolls commonly found at dim sum.

It’s “a polarizing texture that is so very Chinese and frequently called ‘gross,’ ‘slimy,’ ‘disgusting’ by those under-exposed to its particular mouthfeel,” Dorsey wrote in a July Instagram post unpacking the symbolism behind the dish. “For a long time I shied away from putting anything like that on my dishes because I was afraid guests would tell me they hated it (and by extension, all my cooking).”

Dorsey continued: “Through this process, I realized how much that slippery noodle encapsulated my own struggle with the model minority complex,” referring to the harmful stereotype that emerged after World War II, in which the white American public came to see Asian Americans as hardworking, high-performing, law-abiding “good minorities.” In the years since, Asian Americans have come to resent (and reject) the pressure to maintain this imaginary “ideal,” as well as question its use in normalizing acts of discrimination, racism, and economic inequality in the Asian American community. The rice sheet-wrapped veal dish itself is called “Model Minority” — and Dorsey notes that sweetbreads, “an offal deemed acceptable, fancy even, by haute cuisine,” are “a model minority of the offal world.”

The dish is now part of a dinner series called Asian in America that Dorsey has produced in New York City and Minneapolis over the past few months. The meal distills her 27 years of experiences into six courses, zeroing in on moments when she felt particularly confused, conflicted, or lost in her identity.

Asian in America is just one project of Dorsey’s, albeit the most personal, in a six-year career that has seen her move from celebrated fine dining establishments to creating, in temporary settings, challenging dining experiences that privilege honesty, deep connections, and individual stories over generalizations. Born in Shanghai and raised by tradition-bound scientist parents in the Seattle area, she graduated from the University of Washington at age 19 following a career as a Junior Olympics–level competitive fencer. After a few unfulfilling years of fashion management consulting, she was accepted to Columbia Business School and decided to go to culinary school as a creative sabbatical during the months before graduate education. She soon fell in love with cooking and the culinary community: After one uninspiring semester, she took leave of the MBA program to pursue a career in food.

Now an alum of Michelin-starred restaurants Atera in New York and Atelier Crenn and SPQR in San Francisco (with occasional appearances on the Food Network), Dorsey says her quest to find meaning and personal expression through food came after feeling unsatisfied in fine dining. “When I first started, I really just wanted to be someone that made beautiful food,” she says. But “slaving day after day, doing your weird purees at 2 in the morning — it felt really empty and a low-key waste of my time. What we put out there is a really sterile thing that people eat and forget about immediately.”

“Slaving day after day, making weird purees at 2 in the morning — it felt really empty and a low-key waste of my time.”

That’s the exact opposite of what she strives for at Asian in America and at her popular “experimental dinner series,” Wednesdays, which she has produced since 2014 in New York City and San Francisco with her mixologist husband, Matt. Wednesdays was born from the couple’s frustration with commonplace, superficial conversations, and its stated mission is to “make the dinner conversation as interesting as the meal itself.”

“Our main goal is to engage people on a deeper level,” Dorsey says. “How do we get them talk about things that are personal to them?” Guests answer probing questions via email ahead of the dinners to prime expectations about the intimate discussions the Dorseys hope to foster (a recent dinner with the theme of “radical honesty” required guests to divulge their greatest failures).

Asian in America is the natural evolution of Dorsey’s continuing quest to strip away diners’ day-to-day emotional artifices, as well as their expectations about fine dining. She began exploring the concept last year after acknowledging that she wasn’t divulging her own weaknesses to her Wednesdays guests. “I started an entire business about vulnerability but I was too afraid to be vulnerable myself,” she said in a keynote speech about being emotionally open at a creative tech conference in Minneapolis in September. “I’d been so busy trying to build some brand, I’d drank my own lies and told myself that I didn’t need vulnerability anymore.”

The dinner series comes in the midst of a prominent cultural discussion about Asian-American identity, fueled by cultural products like Crazy Rich Asians, Searching, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and Kim’s Convenience. Dorsey’s dishes, some of which are preceded by a virtual-reality experience featuring animated illustrations of ingredients and cooking techniques accompanied by Dorsey’s spoken-word poetry, have names like “Stereotypes,” “Saviors,” and “You Make Asian Food, Right?”

The last dish is composed of black-bean sauce clams nestled in black sesame and rye pasta, topped with habanero chutney and a beet-pickled egg, and enshrouded in a terrarium with applewood smoke. The accompanying poem reveals the dish’s roots, in what Dorsey calls “a search for the in-between”: her grandfather’s breakfast porridge (black sesame), Jewish delis (rye), tea eggs (beet eggs), dim sum (clams), and her stint in Haiti opening an ice cream shop (habanero). The dish’s name was inspired by a common refrain she hears, as well as her experience in culinary school, where a career advisor recommended externships at Asian restaurants based not on her cooking interests but solely on her ethnicity. “Culinary school has a special place of distaste in my heart,” she tells me, detailing her horror at watching a teacher improve a sweet-and-sour sauce by dousing it with ketchup.

Substitutions happen to be a singular pet peeve — and the name of another dish, in which each part masquerades as something else: her chawanmushi, typically a Japanese savory steamed egg custard, is actually an aerated egg with gruyere; her take on the Thai staple chile sauce nam phrik is composed of charred pollack roe and shrimp sauce; and the “pork” is actually smoked jackfruit. The dish is meant to provoke diners to ponder the acceptability of substitutions for hard-to-procure ingredients or unfamiliar techniques. It engages wider concerns of food authenticity and appropriation and how chefs should engage in a respectful cultural exchange. “If you search for ‘ramen noodle recipe,’ the very first result on Google is a recipe containing eggs, not kansui (alkaline water),” she wrote in a Medium post earlier this year. “Misrepresentation and lack of representation reinforces incorrect worldviews that the particularities of these ‘other’ cultures’ techniques or ingredients or traditions don’t matter, or are somehow inferior.”

Anger, shame, indignation, guilt, and eventual pride — her cooking seeks to surface these sentiments. It’s a sharp departure from the “pretty food, pretty people, lots of money, we’re happy all the time” fine dining style she says she was trained to execute.

“I used to think cooking was about making others feel good, but now I’ve learned it’s about letting others see you as you are,” Dorsey said in her keynote. “Shame, regret, fear, uncertainty, half-truths are not only normal parts of being human, but some of the most precariously beautiful bites.”

Dorsey doesn’t see her work as fine dining. “For two- and three-star restaurants, the emphasis is about culinary excellence and curating the perfect guest experience,” she says. “I think vulnerability in that setting is giving guests more of a peek inside the lives of the executive chef and really feeling his/her presence in the food. But ultimately, the experience hinges on what the guests want — whether it’s an extravagant evening of celebration or a romantic anniversary. Guest comfort is the No. 1 goal, as it should be.”

“I used to think cooking was about making others feel good, but now I’ve learned it’s about letting others see you as you are.”

She identifies more as an artist whose medium is food. “I see my work as more of a typical museum or art gallery installation where the guest is there to observe and partake, then hopefully engage and be interested, but their whims and wants are not part of experience,” she says. “My focus is about making people uncomfortable and really feel something. I think guests can feel much of my vulnerability throughout the event, but it’s also meant to force them to also feel something about themselves.”

This is tasting menu as intellectual exercise. And Dorsey’s found an audience: Nearly 7,000 people are on her email lists, and tickets for both dinner programs (which range from 12 to 100 seats and run about $125) sell out quickly. The 16-seat debut Asian in America dinner at Brooklyn’s Museum of Food and Drink in August had a wait list of 150.

On that balmy summer night, Dorsey, a brisk, clear talker, focused her opening remarks on an entreaty to “be open.” “What do you think she means by ‘be open?’” asks my tablemate, a mid-30s Asian American who works in tech and is seated next to his white girlfriend. We’ve all been primed by wonderfully boozy cocktails (one featuring baijiu and Sichuan peppercorn syrup, another lamb fat–washed brandy and Shaoxing wine). Someone speculates that it could be a nod to the novel incorporation of VR technology; another offers it could be the unfamiliar ingredient pairings on the plates. Or perhaps it’s simply a way to facilitate conversation among strangers. Coincidentally, the dinner took place on the buzzy opening night of Crazy Rich Asians, which was a frequent topic of conversation.

Guests sat at four tables of four, with chunky VR headsets and headphones sitting next to each plate; the service was informal, and guests were relaxed yet curious about how the meal would unfold. Three courses were presented with cards printed with the dish’s ingredients on one side and a short poem by Dorsey illustrating the course’s theme on the other. The “Saviors” dessert course, for example, was a sly dig at the some of today’s high-profile, outspoken male chefs, with the ingredients list reading: “Gordon’s ice cream (smoked bone marrow),” “Andy’s mousse (champagne mango),” “David’s mochi doughnuts (with spicy raspberries),” and “Rick’s tapioca boba (in sweet soy)”. The accompanying poem underscored the name’s ironic intent by praising two of this year’s notable Asian-American women in the performing arts: “congratulations sandra oh / young jean lee / i’ve longed to hear your stories / the narrative not brought forth / by a white knight.”

For the other three courses, we strapped into VR headsets, observing the VR illustrations and hearing Dorsey’s spoken-word poetry through the headphones. The final course, titled “Fancy Because It’s French,” was a classic Chinese mooncake reimagined with showy French techniques: “The red bean filling has been made into a fluffy mousse, the salted duck center into a custard akin to a crème anglaise, and the kansui-and-golden-syrup wrapper replaced with an oolong-flavored biscuit,” Dorsey has written of this dish. “Ultimately my ‘mooncake’ is different, but no better, than the traditional version.” The spoken-word poem touched on how certain things (foods, recipes, restaurants, cultures) accrue worth and others do not, and how that lack of valuation trickles down to members of a community: “I’ve forgotten much of my own history / Maybe that’s why I’ve internalized another’s / I grew up wishing I would wake up blonde / But I could never give up my love for soymilk.”

Helen Situ, a VR company exec I met at the dinner, told me afterward that she felt “incredibly proud” to attend Asian in America. “I saw and tasted and felt myself in her expressions of identity,” she says. “Each course was carefully constructed with infusions of Eastern and Western flavors, which spoke to me as a first-generation Chinese American. I’ve often felt compelled to choose which side of my identity to lean into, and as I become more comfortable in my skin I’ve sought experiences that help me embrace the hybrid of Chinese and American.”

“The event was nothing like I’ve seen before when discussing the Asian-American narrative,” says Felicia Liang, an illustrator who worked with Dorsey on some of the dinner’s AR art. “Every part of each dish, from the ingredients to the preparation to the final presentation, all revolved around very difficult themes around race and identity. Food is already such a great connector for people, but she takes that ability to have meaningful conversations over food to a whole new level. There’s been a cultural movement the last few years about the importance of Asian-American representation and sharing our stories, and it’s been exciting seeing how she’s exploring these themes.”

Dorsey will produce her Asian in America dinner at the Culinary Institute of America’s reThink Food Conference in Napa Valley on November 8, and she’s in talks to bring it to Philadelphia, Montreal, and Atlanta. She also plans to expand her brand of “culinary storytelling” to an immersive dance collaboration later this year and an augmented reality and ceramics project in early 2019.

“What I really want to do with food is to use it as one of the platforms in which I tell stories,” she explains. “I hope that people dig a little deeper and find the uncomfortable bits of meaning in their life.”

Lisa Wong Macabasco is a writer and editor based in Queens, New York. Her writing has been published in Vogue and Slate.

Editor: Hillary Dixler Canavan