6 ideas
The price and prestige a cuisine commands in the US depend less on the labour, skill, or ingredients involved than on the social standing of the people who cook it and the nation they come from. Diners pay a premium for French or Japanese food and expect Mexican, Chinese, or Bangladeshi food to be cheap because they ranked the people before they ranked the plate.
American diners share an informal ranking of foreign cuisines. The ranking sets what price, décor, and critical attention each cuisine can command, and it maps onto the perceived wealth and power of the source country and on the class and racial position of its diaspora. A cuisine's place in the ranking can shift, but only slowly and usually after its immigrants move up.
Calling a cuisine 'ethnic' does not neutrally describe where it comes from. It marks food made by poor, recent, or racialized others, which is why French and Italian food at their high ends escape the label. Seeing 'ethnic' as a status category shows how the word itself caps what a cuisine can charge and how seriously critics treat it.
A cuisine gains haute prestige only once the group associated with it gains wealth, cultural capital, or distance from recent poor migration, as Italian and Japanese food did over time. Upward mobility of the people comes first, and elevation of the food follows. This explains why talented cooks from low-status groups struggle to charge high-end prices no matter how refined their cooking is.
Immigrant restaurant owners are usually treated as objects of diners' curiosity or critics' discovery. Ray instead treats them as thinking agents with their own theories of taste, business, and culture. Centering their voices shows the practical intelligence and constrained choices behind the menus and prices diners take for granted.
The gap cannot be explained by the costs of production. It exists because diners and critics assign value according to the cuisine's cultural rank.