I find myself leaning into the food authenticity camp. To clarify, I define “authenticity” as follows: a dish is cooked with particular ingredients in a particular way at a particular place.

I don’t mind fusion recipes or substituting with what you have. I have a fusion recipe collection I enjoy, and I substitute ingredients too. But sometimes I want to experience a certain taste that is unlike everything else around: break the pattern, have something how I remember it tasted. I don’t want to eat an “adapted” version of the dish, and it really annoys me that restaurants consistently fail.

Take, for example, pad thai and the way its simplest version is commonly cooked in Thailand today. There’s a set of ingredients commonly used to make pad thai. Some serving sides are optional and maybe uncommon (e.g., banana flower); some ingredients are adjusted individually at the table (e.g., amount of dry chili powder). But you’d always see it with garlic chives and never with mushrooms, for example. So the dish has a certain flavor profile and a feel to it you’ll remember after eating enough of them.

A pattern, and likely the source of annoyance to some, is that restaurants have a tendency to adapt foreign cuisines to the local taste as opposed to preserving the “authentic” taste. I’ll give credit: sometimes a new interesting dish gets created that even appears in the home country: California sushi roll. Oftentimes, though, it results in something that tastes like neither the original nor a distinct new dish. It kind of tastes like the “authentic” but wrong - an uncanny valley. For example, Indian restaurants in Europe tend to significantly underseason their food, making it taste bland to anyone who has tasted the real thing.