There will be serious scholarship on the menu when Brown University and Johnson & Wales University sponsor a series of discussions and exhibitions that explore the topics of Asian food, food memories and ethnic identities.

“Eating Chinese: Global and Local Perspectives on Memory and Identity” is the two-day event in Providence Friday and Saturday. Friday’s events will be at the John Nicholas Brown Center, 357 Benefit St., while Saturday’s are headquartered at J&W’s Culinary Arts Museum, 315 Harborside Blvd.

At 1 p.m. on Friday the topic is What’s Chinese? Food & Identity. There will be screenings of work from Cheuk Kwan, a producer and director of several films based on his documentary Chinese Restaurants. A conversation with the filmmaker as well as Ernesto Martinez of Harvard and John Eng-Wong of Brown will follow.

At 4 p.m. the session is Restaurants, Food and Memory. The participants will include Ellen Leong Blonder, illustrator and author of Every Grain of Rice, and John Chan, restaurant owner of Chan’s Fine Dining, Woonsocket.

At 6 p.m., the chow mein sandwich will be served and discussed for a local perspective.

Those events are free and open to the public, but attendance is first-come, first-served.

On Saturday, two exhibits open at 1 p.m. at the Culinary Arts Museum. One is “Culinary Beginnings — Asia” which provides an introduction to ancient Chinese food, with menus, recipes, images and artifacts. The show features 14 Chinese and Korean antiquities, including objects from the Han Dynasty (206 BC-221 AD). The second is “Illustrations from Ellen Leong Blonder’s Every Grain of Rice. ”At 2 p.m., Globalizing Chinese Cuisine will be discussed with a panel including Kenny Lao, co-founder of the Rickshaw Dumpling Bar in New York; Jacqueline M. Newman, the author of Food Culture in China and editor of Flavor and Fortune, a quarterly publication about Chinese food; and filmmaker Cheuk Kwan.

At 4 p.m., there will be a talk with celebrity chef Martin Yan as well as a cooking demonstration in the Tyson Amphitheater at the Harborside Academic Center at J&W.

These Saturday events are by reservation only. E-mail Sarah Cresta at sarah.cresta@jwu.edu.

For additional information, visit: www.culinary.org.