How Chefs Have Reinvented the Dishes They Envy Most

Some dishes are so essential to a country’s cuisine that most diners don’t remember that they were revolutionary to begin with. Nobu Matsuhisa changed American sushi forever when he added jalapeños to hamachi. Wolfgang Puck’s smoked salmon pizza, first served after Spago opened in 1982, gave future pizza makers license to put anything (and everything) on a pie.

The 1980s were a particularly rich period for fine dining in America. Enterprising chefs in major cities were breaking out of restrictive cooking histories: New York began to see fine-dining options that weren’t traditionally French, for example. In California, chefs took simple farm-fresh food and expanded it with ideas from Asia, Europe, and Latin America.