There was a hoopla a while back in Austin about the Tex-Mex chain Torchy's. Protests, graffiti on their buildings, etc.
How DARE a non-Mexican sell bastardized Mexican food - in a city that has dozens/hundreds of Tex-Mex restaurants owned by REAL Mexican-Americans (and dozens/hundreds owned by NON-Mexican descent people)!
If you have to pass a DNA test to own/run a business in America, we're gonna see a looooootta businesses close down.
Go to the Mexican-American owned place instead if you want! You are allowed!
Who gets to draw the line anyway?
So if a European-descent person can't own a Mexican restaurant, can a Mexican-descent person own an Italian restaurant? Can a Guatemalan own a Mexican restaurant? The American Dream, anyone?
Should Julia Child be dug up and burned because she made a living teaching French cooking - and she was - *GASP* -
not French?
And can a Hawaiian person have a tiki bar that has Papua New Guinea and Maori art in it, 'cause it's just going to be a Hawaiian bar and not a Tiki Bar if not.
Yeah, I'm over that stuff. We are [mostly] beautiful mutts who love the purebreeds AND the mutts.
And it's not like the Oregon guy went and stole Hawaiian land himself to open his place, fer cryin' out loud. He just [badly] used Hawaiian-ish (and other!) iconography to open a meh spot. The market would have taken care of it. It didn't need The Self-Appointed Arbiters of Righteousness rising up and impaling his head on a spike.
No one could accuse the FOM (or Tiki Central folks) of not loving Polynesian cultures. We might cross the line in the eyes of an actual Papua New Guinea native who actually believes in the spirit power of the carvings......that he carved to sell to tourists.......
Wait! No! I'm not even gonna say that!!
Seriously!!
But the old stuff - we all treat that with great respect.
And the FOM show our respect of places like Rapa Nui with our raising money for scholarships for the young people there who wish to study subjects that will protect their island's culture.
We might cross the line of silly, but we strive not to cross the line of outright rude/totally unacceptable.
The Samoan family who owned The Tiki saw all of our Room Crawl silliness and they
honored the FOM for our having donated in their name to victims of the tsunami damage. They were not horrified that our men wore lava-lavas. They LOVED that fact.
Tiki Vee, I'm buying stock in your restaurant.