hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today we're sitting in mamachang restaurant in Fairfax Virginia one of my favorite restaurants of all time anywhere and we are here with fuchsia Dunlop now fuchsia is the only individual we have done three conversations with Tyler with and that should tell you everything fuchsia quite simply writes the best books I
don't mean the best books on Chinese food I mean the best books and there is a new one invitation to a banquet the story of Chinese food which is just out fuchsia welcome we're delighted to have you here thank you Tyler great to be back let's just start with very quick introductions of everyone at the table going around this way liia hi everyone I'm Lydia I am the business owner this
is my family business and welcome everyone to M Chan hi my name is Fergus um I work on the Fitz William and online publication of Irish ideas I'm Sam I'm at economics undergrad and I work on the Fitz William with Fus I'm rashed and I help Tyler at marus with Emer Adventures I'm Dan Wong I've spent the last six years in China now I'm at the Yale law school as a visiting
scholar very simple question to start for fuchsia how is real Soy Sauce better than what we might buy in the store well I guess naturally fermented artisanal soy sauce has a kind of Tang to it and a richness which would be much more impressive than your average sort of mass manufactured soy sauce if you're lucky enough to get some and how many different soy sauces do you either make our own oh I I don't
make them but I have I don't have that many actually I select few you know there are other decisions to make when cooking apart from you choose between 50 soy sauces and where in China has the best soy sauce or your favorite in your opinion well fuen is supposed to be best for artisanal soy sauce um but I suppose um there's an amazing really traditional
soy sauce factory in hang in southern Sichuan and it's this magical place on the banks of the river with all these clay um pots tanza with straw hats covering them when it rains laid out um with sort of traditional buildings and they do traditional old-fashioned no you know modern Innovation soy sauce and a combination of the flavor and the place is just exceptional any of your books
they're cookbooks they're history books they're also a kind of cultural studies set of books but your latest book again invitation to a banquet it is primarily a history right it's not a recipes book so after having gone through so much history of Chinese food what updates have you made or what have you changed your mind about what do you now see differently well I suppose the Striking
thing about um Chinese culinary history is that there are these extraordinary continuities going back thousands of years in some cases like steaming for example since the Neolithic age or making fermented soybean products going back more than 2,000 years um but that it's also always been so Multicultural and so sort of innovative like you know the H Dynasty about 2,000 years ago was
a period when lots of new ingredients and Technology actually critically for Milling flour from wheat which brought noodles and so on to China but came in and I think while researching this book it was just a real reminder of how receptive Chinese food has been to other influences and how it's a kind of composite of of many different places and ideas so we're here in 2023 you've
been to China recently you went all over perhaps you had a few meals uh during pandemic times it was hard to get there over those years what has changed or what has struck you as different well so going back the first thing that was really striking there were many fewer foreigners um so you know when I was there in the '90s there weren't many foreigners at all and um I felt very
conspicuous and then there's been a period with loads of expats and visitors and tourists and sort of in the wake of the pandemic again I was feeling like I was the only Foreigner around and foodwise um well one thing that I found hilarious and surprising was having takeouts delivered to a hotel room by robots so that's never happened to me here so technological advances and then
also everyone I met was talking about you high like semi-prepared dishes and um so it's been a real Trend in China that um that restaurants are having Central kitchens that are supplying dishes that are either fully made and just need reheating or partially made to be finished in a restaurant and um and it seems to be a really hot topic of conversation and of course all these
concerns about sort of the the erosion of culinary skills if chefs are not learning to cook from scratch but are just finishing dishes I have more questions but now we turn to Lydia to tell us what just arrived right so welcome to Mama chin and today we're having a banquet meal so invitation to a Banquets uh we typically like to start our banquet meal with something called a
coat platter and today we have a um platter of four different kind we have the fava beans with goji berry we have the braced shitaki mushroom uh we have some tus skin and Mala beef jerkey F our Chinese eating habits individualizing so we're here together as a group we're going to share a lot of dishes it's how it should be done but as you know birth rates are declining more
people in many countries spend more time alone that makes it harder to have that kind of meal how is that evolving in China well I think it's very noticeable that restaurants in cities um there are more restaurants with small tables designed for couples and smaller groups um and um yeah so um but but I mean you still have the kind of Round Table big gang but also
Alternatives I have more questions but let me now turn to Dan Wong to my left who will ask a question or two um fuchsia in your book you quote Baron Adria as saying who is the most uh important culinary figure of the last 50 years well surely it is uh Mount adome because the chairman sent all of China's Farmers uh and all of China's chefs to work in factories um thus destroying the
preeminence of chinesee Cuisine um is he right how much do we really understand what culinary culture was between um you know before the People's Republic and can we recover a lot of those Traditions now it I mean one of the reasons that I wrote this book is that it seems to me extraordinary that China has this exceptional Cuisine which is so diverse and sophisticated and also which
resonates with so many contemporary concerns and you know there are parallels in China going back to the 10th Century of people making imitation Meats from plant Foods you have this tremendously creative transformational Cuisine which Echoes the avangard cooking of modernist chess in the west all this stuff and yet China has been the sort of Terror Incognito for many
people in the food world and this is I think it's purely historical reasons um so you know the the the Chinese food that most people in the west know stems from American Chinese food which which was created by immigrants from one particular region the cantony South who were working in very different difficult circumstances you know they were facing racial Prejudice they probably didn't
have access to all the ingredients that they were used to and they were often cooking for people who had no acquaintance with with Chinese food so you have this simplified very appealing fantastically popular and successful but not really a good representation of this amazing colonary Nation so um yeah I think um and then through throughout the 20th century War Revolution Cultural
Revolution and so China was just you know not part of international culinary exchanges and I think also Prestige food is often about money you know Japan got rich first Japanese food is very prestigious people will spend loads of money on on Japanese sushi but not so much on Chinese food so I think that um yeah FIA is right that um Chinese food doesn't have the recognition the
acknowledgement that it really should have and um yeah and I think now it's possible really you know to have a fresh look can we cook a 10th Century meal from hongo today or is that mostly lost to us well the frustrating thing is that there are um some there's an amazing Source um well actually of sort of when is it 12th 13th century hung Joe um describing all the food served in city
restaurants and it is dizzying you know there were all different kinds of restaurants Regional Buddhist vegetarian restaurants restaurants for students and snack shops of different kinds and the author um lists all these Delicacies but there are no recipes or descriptions so um so there's tantalizingly not very complete information but you could you know I
know chefs I know a chef in hjo actually who has created Banquets of Song Dynasty food as far as possible from the texts so I think we have to partly use imagination and but some you know there are some you know continuities in ingredients and techniques so fuchsia we'll give you a moment to eat so I'll ask you Dan a question much of pandemic you spent in China some of that in yunan
what did you learn about yunan food during those months I wonder whether yunan food uh can be considered a Cuisine uh as such I think it is mostly not a very uh convenient label so uh Yan is a uh very mountainous region that is historic Tibet in the north and that is um close to being culturally Thailand Cambodia um Myanmar in the South uh where it borders um and so you know how
do we um make sense of a Cuisine that is basically Tibet in the north and Thailand in the South I don't really think that there such a thing is possible that it is such a mountainous Zone uh you know splintered by uh you know perplexed with intricacies um and so you know I think this is mostly Mountain food depends on where you go I don't think we can recognize it as a
coherent cuisine as such a question for rased we'll get back to F in a moment but you're from Barbados Chinese food is different in every country every region how is Chinese food different in the Caribbean Chinese food in Barb is actually quite dull unfortunately however in Panama which I also live P Chinese food is probably as exuberant as you would go
with some parts of China there are parts of Panama where if El Dorado area where D some is the Chinese restaurants are packed they are full not only with local Chinese but also other panaman races and it's just like a very big aspet culture and to me also Chinese food in Panama has a much more authentic flavor than even most parts of Europe if they had Chinese food that's uh I think quite
surprising almost like a hidden secret in Central America and you have a question for fuchsia yes so recently given the often the surprising boom of Sichuan food globally even there's been a movement by some elements of the government for example to publish these Sichuan requirements I'm curious how that has impacted some of the culinary Styles in sichan well yeah so as you said there's
been a sort of bid to standardize and categorize I classic dishes so you know the local government also in chonging Chongqing they've produced Publications which say this is M and this is the ingredient um like having a sort of you know appalation app cont for wine or something um but I think the point is that I mean it's an interesting and Noble Endeavor but people cook in a much
more free ad hoc creative way so there are many different ways to actually make him up witho fo maybe some key characteristics but you don't have every Chef measuring to the gram the amount of minced beef or the amount of cetron pepper um so I think I I would say they're not having that much influence and also because um Citron Cuisine one of the great things about it is that
it's so Dynamic I mean people in Z love eating and they're creative and they're always you know doing things like making citres dishes with okra which was not around when I was a student there in the 90s so I think that um there's always this tension between you know we all feel nostalgic and we love tradition and there's something worthwhile about trying to document Classics and
traditions but at the same time you have to recognize that a Cuisine is a very vital living form of culture which is recreated in every kitchen every day so um yeah so the difference between practice and theory is quite you know quite deep do you have observations on what we're eating so far M well it's certainly delicious um and it's lovely to have um some vegetable dishes and
that's one of the things that um Chinese food in the west with the sort of concentration on shrimp and chicken and you know beef and fried foods and so on but actually the glory of Chinese cooking is that there are so many vegetables it's healthy and balanced and refreshing so you might have a rich intense dish like this Mala beef numbing and hot beef very delicious and Rich and
meaty but also we've got this lovely tofu skin with a sort of very light dressing and a bit of crab meat and some very refreshing shitake mushrooms and this is gorgeous these um white beans with loudy fermented glutenous rice wine and these are all quite unusual to have in American Chinese restaurant I would say for a typical quality Chinese meal
let's say in the United States or maybe London what percent of the credit should go to the chefs and what percent of the credit should go to the people who bought the ingredients how do you think about that you you quoting y the great 18th century Chinese gouret well that's another thing that's really interesting because um I think Chinese food in the west is not associated with premium
ingredients so if you go to a sort of fancy Spanish restaurant they'll be trumpeting their aerican ham so on and so on if you go to a new Californian restaurant they'll be talking about which Farm they got the produce from but Chinese restaurants generally don't say much about the ingredients and that's just because they've been kind of stuck in this Brack ET where people don't go
to Chinese restaurants for fine ingredients which is completely mad and you know in this book there's a whole chapter about this really that the Chinese practically invented the concept of tah you know the obsession with Seasons with provenant you know exactly you know which land your um your vegetables are produced on in and so on in traditional Chinese cookery certainly
a vitally important part of it is sourcing seasonal fresh quality ingredients um so it would be nice to recognize that and this is clearly happening here we've got all these you know Amish farm ingredients right yes I would say it comes maybe in both ways we appreciate and we use a lot of local ingredients from um the Maryland crab that paed with our tofu skin we also go out of our way
trying to look for seasonal like really good quality uh white beans um what we are about to have we have some Amish pork dumplings uh we try to Source the um best ingredients uh the whatever we can find and use it uh to make quality dishes and I think my feeling is that you know if Chinese cuisine in the future in contemporary times manages to unite the exceptional culinary skills of
Chinese chefs with the old obsession with ingredients they're just going to blow everyone else away a full show sorry you mentioned the teror concept but for example there's a very uh big a very high te for example and they force a lot of teror aspect I wonder how much else that is a quality difference or is it really a big chunk of marketing itself well it's I mean it's like wine
isn't it it's exactly the same so I think that um you know to an extent um probably there is you know the exact the the soil and the weather in a particular place will influence an ingredient but clearly there's also a sort of cultural and imaginative aspect and so there's a lot of fakery as well so people pretending that they're supplying longing tea from from the longing hills
around hjo when it's not actually that but probably people who drink it still feel that it's finer because of the label Sam do you have a question for fuchsia yeah um so I went to India for the first time over the summer and uh the food was Wonder um but it sort of struck me that it was Indian food had transferred with relatively High Fidelity to like very
high-end Indian restaurants in Glasgow or Birmingham so on uh nothing in the cuisine was sort of shocking to me uh in a way that I suspect it would be traveling around different areas of China so I mean you mentioned um Chinese food in the west being so Cantonese but is there kind of more to it than that or like more factors that determine um which Cuisines translate with higher
Fidelity yeah so so the first thing is that China is absolutely vast and it has a very stunning diversity of different terrains and climates um with all the implications for produce so there are so many ingredients from different places um so you're only ever going to see small snapshots of this great richness of Chinese cuisine abroad so even though now we're beginning to see um you know
sichuanese food and different Regional Cuisines there is so much more I mean I've been res in this for about 30 years and I'm still discovering entire new Styles you know local Traditions practically every time I go to China um so um yeah it's um um and in terms of fidelity I think Chinese food I said in the book it's a kind of victim of its own success um and it's all about timing
so Chinese was one of the earliest immigrants Cuisines at a time when Western pallet were probably more conservative and it was you know more difficult to try and Faithfully reproduce Chinese food abroad and it got stuck public perceptions of Chinese food have got stuck there but now things are changing and there are so many immigrants students visitors from other
parts of China living in you know cities like this and all over the place um who want to eat proper Chinese food they want to eat the food they eat at home whether it's from their hometowns or it's trendy Cuisines like cinese so it's now possible for Chinese restaurants in the west to you they don't have to tailor to Western taste they can just start off doing food for a Chinese
cantel so then it's more faithful one should also say that some of the I mean like your yunan Cuisine for example that the The Marvelous thing about yunan Cuisine is all this local produce there are so many ingredients that you simply can't find anywhere else in China let alone abroad and so it's harder to I mean you can't really reproduce many aspects of your wouldn't you say say
yeah that's right um if I can ask a follow-up question on um this comparison between India and China you know maybe this is half a question also for Tyler um why do we associate uh Indian Cuisine so much more with long simmers uh whereas Chinese cuisine um of course it is a little bit of everything as fuchsia knows so well but it is often a little bit more associated with quick fries you
know what is the factor endowment here of you know these two very big uh countries very big civilizations having somewhat Divergent paths as we imagine with culinary Traditions that's a really interesting question um and it's it's hard to answer because I don't really know anything about Indian food um I did have a really interesting conversation with an Indian um who came on my tour to yunan earlier
this year um because I was kind of speculating that one of the reasons that Chinese food is so diverse is that the Chinese are really open-minded with very few taboos so apart from you know Muslims eating halal food and some Buddhists not eating meat um there's a kind of great adventurous open-mindedness to eating whereas in India you have lots of taboos and sort
of religious and ritual restrictions and you know and that's one reason that you would think it would be a constraint on the creativity of Indian food but um this Indian I was talking to who's a food specialist he reckoned that the restrictions actually forced people to be more creative so he was arguing that Indian food was you know um had all the conditions for diversity that
Chinese does but in terms of cooking methods um it's hard to say and I again I don't know about Indian food but the thing about China is that there's been this intense thoughtfulness about food really for for a very long time I mean you know you see it in descriptions of food from 2,000 years ago and more and then in the Song Dynasty this incredible restaurant restaurant um industry in
places like hung Joo and Innovation and creativity and um so I suppose that when you are thoroughly interested in food like the Chinese and thinking about it creatively all the time you you end up having a whole plethora of different cooking methods um and that's one of the Striking things about Chinese cuisine right that you have slow cooked stews
and C things and steamed things and also stir frying so that might explain why um you know several different methods have achieved prominence before I comment on that Lydia on the new dish please tell us oh we what we apparently it's an empty plate now uh we have a vegetarian Spring Row so Spring Row is something that we love to have as a holiday special we have it over spring um the
Luna New Year or you know it's actually um you wrap things together um sometimes you add shrimp pork um and for this one we use vegetarian and that's a really amazing vegetarian dish on your India China question this is pure speculation but my sense has been China was wealthier earlier for a longer period of time and on average stayed wealthier so it had more in the
way of meats and you had people eating in large groups so the idea that you would chop up the meat and divide the meat and feed it to people and then flash stir fry the meat in some way India it's more likely you're cooking vegetables you're on various spice trails to a greater degree uh the Indian spices work very well being simmered for a long period of time you're less
concerned with well how am I going to cook this meat because Hindus are not eating beef and it seems that pigs are much harder to raise in India than in China that would be my guess but do you have a take I have no take okay but I another idea that I was thinking of was that also and I again I don't know about India but China very early on like in the Song Dynasty from about 12th century
had a really Lively and developed and diverse restaurant scene with restaurants at different levels and so eating out was a real thing and I should imagine with eating out that and there were restaurants with menus where you would order your dishes you know um not just um fixed menus and so on and so in those conditions you do want dishes that can be made quickly to order so maybe
that would encourage the development of fast cooking methods as well as you know um home cooking and you know slow the pot on the stove in the home kitchen what about Deion uh so the hot food would um beat three times over the flavors or uh Chinese people love to eat hot quick hot food yeah well it's Bic and also urbanization actually another thing and and is the the emphasis on texture and I
don't really know about the history of this but one of the really distinctive things about um about Chinese Gastronomy is that the Chinese totally appreciate and understand texture to a degree that is unheard of anywhere else really and that's why they enjoy eating so many slithery rubbery and also often tasteless foods that have interesting textures and there are certain textures
so for example one of my sort of old favorite sichuanese dish yaha fire exploded kidney flowers so that's made with pork kidneys which are cut into little frilly pieces and stir fried very fast and you actually have to cook them fast to keep them nun and a little bit sort of crisp right so I think um perhaps when people have this obsession with texture there are certain
ingredients that require fast cooking also vegetables right so that you don't have everything very soft but you have this briskness liveliness crispness in the bite but what's your speculation on why this colan is such a big feature of the Chinese food okay speculation again but I mean but I think the thing about um China like there was this ancient philosopher GZA who said
um food and sex are human nature and there's this unabashed pleasure in the physicality of eating like English people traditionally are a bit sort of buttoned up and you know it's impolite to make noises when you eat and it's not very proper to show Too Much exuberant Delight in food right but in China you see this absolute joy in eating in ancient poetry in the way people eat
today and and I think part of that is is feeling uninhibited about it as something physical so like when you eat in China you can make little noises you can you can put something like a duck's tongue that's grais and a bit bony and complicated to your lips and you can enjoy the the game with your teeth and tongue and that's all perfectly acceptable and enjoyed perhaps when you
don't mind a little noise and you you're not shy of the physicality then you can have things that are slithery and crunchy and um you know require a bit of Engagement when you eat them really makes you wonder about the English approach to sex yes well let's P swiftly on this subject Lydia please tell us about the new dish oh we are having a jinsam soup
uh with what looks like tofu but it's actually chicken and this is a classic suchan Bank dish which goes back at least 100 years it's sort of written about in a very famous text early 20th century and it's just a reminder that sichan food is not all spicy you know like any other Chinese cuisine it's about balance so if you have very you know intensely flavored and hot dishes and oily dishes
you always have refreshing like things like this lovely broth and this is Amish chicken right why is that how and why is that different and better well let's just say that the environment has a lot to do with um how things are raised and you know it's when dad first met the armish community he felt a strong tie to the way they leave it reminded him a lot
of the time you know he was um raised as a boy in the village in China in the 60s uh my grandmother was a farmer um she used to be the one that's earning all the credits and contribute that to the local The Village government and in return they don't really have a lot um to eat on the table so it's the humble life of the Amish community reminded that a lot of uh Nostalgia Sam do you
have another question well I was going to say um Tyler recently told me that the third best chicken he ever had was an Amish chicken which pleas pleased me a lot because it implies you have an encyclopedic ranking of every chicken you've eaten um yeah I mean to continue on the train of uh extremely speculative things um there's this uh famous or perhaps Infamous observation about how
um whether areas of China uh engaged in mostly wheat-based or mostly rice based agriculture has effects centuries later on you know various social outcomes SAT scores Etc um and you think about ourland where I'm from even just beyond the famine like it seems like there are many ways in which the presence of the potato like and the dominance of it like affects culture and land buildings and
so on um how do you like think about the role of the staple crop in creating like the culture or Cuisine of a certain place H well an easy question and you thought I asked hard once well I suppose I mean that China was a whole civilization That Grew around the staple grain which was originally Millet and all the rituals of the state the ancient Chinese state were about offering food to gods and
ancestors um so wheat and alcohol and um so so Millet and alcohol and so on and roasted meats and um yeah I mean I suppose what's interesting about that is that Millet went on being the sacred grain right up until the end of you know the the Chinese Imperial period in about 19 1911 um but it had actually disappeared from people's daily diets so people in North China went on to eat
wheat and noodles and breads but Millet remained the staple grain but um yeah so I guess there's a a gulf between what people are actually eating and ideas about ritual and so on what remains of Manchu cooking in Chinese food today well um I mean there's a bit in the book about this idea that I mean one of the distinctive thing about Chinese cooking going back about 2,000 years is
the habit of cutting food into small pieces and eating it with chopsticks and yet there are some dishes which are presented whole like a um you know Cantonese ceremonial suckling pig or peaking duck and of course they're cut up before they're served because you don't have knives at the Chinese dinner table but um the Manus were sort of rugged Northern Nomads who liked um
eating huge chunks of sheep meat um which they would then cut apart with their own personal knives and this was something that was still part of um high level um Society in the Ching Dynasty when China was ruled by Manus and you can see these little eating sets that people slung onto their belts or tucked into their boots where you have a pair of Chopsticks and a knife so that people
could eat both Chinese and Manchu food the the sort of whole roast Meats particularly in Northern Cuisine may have been a legacy of this Manu pred predilection for meat and there's a scholar Isaac uer who I cited in the book who looked at an 18th century Chinese banquet menu and there were whole servings of what were clearly Chinese dishes with food cut up very
fine and served in in soups and stews and then these whole Services of real sort of you know charred and roasted and boiled Meats which were Manu so um and then also actually in in Beijing Cuisine there is some Legacy of the Manu in Dairy Foods so like of other Nomads they at um dairy foods and so you have very fascinating something in Beijing Imperial Cuisine called n now junket
which is like a steamed custody dessert made from milk um and also another very interesting dish when n g when it's cooked at a very low heat that it turns to kind of fudge a bit like dce the leche but um solid so there are traces of Manchu food in Chinese cooking particularly in the north Lydia what is new on the table please it's our homemade uh pork dumpling and we use uh
arish pork now maybe you can tell me what the difference is fuchsia why doesn't pork in particular have a higher status in China because Chinese eat so much of it it's maybe the best pork in the world right the best pork dishes but it's not the highest status food or close to it well because it's popular and ubiquitous and um so pork is the celebratory food for anyone
traditionally but in China if you want to get to the really highest echelons of gastronomy you need rare and exotic and particular and sorta Foods so things like deer tendons you know these are imperial Delicacies Camels Hump you know um hashar the ovarian fat of the snowf Frog all these unusual Delicacies and bird's nest where and fabulously expensive so these things are more
prestigious in China in China because they're scarce and expensive and extreme luxurious does Bears Paw actually taste good um you better ask someone else because you've never had it yeah you don't have Bears po really served these days it was it was in appears in in um cookbooks right until till the 1980s you know even of State Banquets but um you know it's now something but you have
lots of bears in America don't you we do but I don't think you're allowed to eat Bears Paw I'm not sure you I've never tried it it seems awkward to eat at the very least right well but I mean if you're Chinese that's no problem because you know um people in China eat camels feet and pigs feet and they cook them to make the most of these gristly and gelatinous textures so the fact that
it's um highly Grappler and not appealing to a western pallet is no problem at all Fergus do you have questions yeah so as we sort of alluded to earlier there's this Regional divide in China where in the north um you know wheat is sort of primarily grown rather than rice um which is obviously much the same as as Europe so what is the kind of explanatory factor that that means that
in China um people tend to make noodles rather than bread and obviously bread in Europe rather than noodles is there a kind of factor single factor that explain exp that so it seems that um the CH this is um there's a very interesting book a cultural history of Chopsticks by Ed qwang who looks a bit at this but it seems that the Chinese very early on
apart from eating um food that was cut into small pieces they really liked eating food that was plucked out of um hot liquid right and so the classic ancient Chinese dish long before stir fries and the more more sort of famous modern Chinese dishes was The gung which was sort of soupy stew made from lots of ingredients that were cut into small pieces floating around together in
liquid um and of course this sort of evolved with the use of Chopsticks which are very suited for eating that kind of dish and um so it seems like some you know early forms of pasta appear to have been you know bits of dough dropped into hot liquid and that would have fitted in to the CH you know a way of eating that was already becoming you know a bit distinctively Chinese you could say and
so um and I think that's still the case that wouldn't you say Lydia that Chinese people really like liquids in their food more than westerners so a classic Chinese you know in England we say meat and to veg is like a basic standard meal in Chinese it's four dishes and a soup and when I was living in Sichuan you know you never have a meal without soup
it might be really really basic but it's just going to be a light broth to cleanse the palette and sort of you know refresh after the other dishes so I think perhaps you know and in modern China you know westerners much prefer chain stir-fried noodles Chinese it's all soupy noodles and fried noodles are much much less common really so perhaps this is what why and also just in China
um until very recently and still in most cases Chinese people don't have ovens at home they do not um roast or bake so everything was done on a stove top a design that really hadn't changed much for 2,000 years you know so you have um you can still see in farmhouses in China these stoves with two openings for walks or Steamers and that's how you cook and so bread in
China traditionally is usually steamed and sometimes cooked on a kind of griddle maybe with a lid like shaing um but um yeah the absence of ovens as a common kitchen Implement and the love of hot liquid now you live in London if I'm looking for good Chinese food in London conceptually how should I go about it should I run to Chinatown should I go to the outer Burrows or what's the right
schema apart from any particular place you might recommend well I mean I would look at where um Chinese students are eating partly so then you'll get the sort of more recent um Trends in China but how do I find that out if I just ask chat GPT will it tell me where the Chinese students are eaing or no you need someone um someone who reads Chinese to go on social media and find
whatever what is being talked about I think that would help maybe the app sh is going to help popular among students F how much cumin is too much for a d b barbecue oh I mean that's a matter of taste right I have no idea yes have you been have you been assaulted by excessive amounts of cumin then or for me it varies for much because sometimes I the is like just cumin flamed essentially and then
sometimes it's n at all and I ask people you know how do you determine they said well guess taste but it feels like I felt with something more than just I decide today to put more in than than not it's very unst standard in that sense H yes I have no idea I'm afraid okay followup question um so a very standard Caribbean dish is J chicken yeah and a very strong component of that
is soy sauce mhm and people don't obviously consider it as a Chinese influence but of course it is and I'm curious if he is there any other areas of standard dishes across the world which has a very strong Chinese influence people don't really realize it itself well that's hard to say I mean I suppose that I mean all soy products is you know the influence of China right
because China domesticated the soybean very early on and soy soy foods have been incredibly important also in you know they came to Japan from China right making tofu and soy sauce so um wouldn't Mexican mole be an example those original preer recipes from the 17th century what came on the gallion from Philippines a lot of Chinese influence ingredients yeah I have been told okay
speculatively yeah I'm trying to think of examples yeah I'm really not sure if a reader is using their recipe your recipes and they make a mistake what's the most likely mistake for for them to make I mean um not not paying attention to cutting things evenly with stir fried food maybe and how does that influence the final taste or what goes wrong then
well it's just if you're stir frying something that's cut into um slivers or slices the whole point of stir frying is meant to be very fast and the reason that it's effective is that um if the food is cut finely and evenly then everything will be perfectly done at the same moment and if the cutting is clunky and uneven then some pieces of food will be Overcoat While others are still raw
so I think that's maybe something that people don't necessarily realize that it's not just aesthetically important it's also technically important in Chinese food why might an older Chinese Chef be reluctant to stir fry himself or herself oh well that's um yeah because um and this is something that several people told me that stir frying is perhaps the most difficult of all
cooking methods in any cuisine because it's so fun fast um there's no room for maneuver there's no margin for error so if you have food that's finally cut and that is sensitive to heat so like I don't know stir fried scollops for example um so if you overcook them it's a complete disaster so you have to cook very quickly and you have to add your seasonings absolutely correctly because
you can't it's not like making a holay sauce when you can have a taste and then add a bit more lemon juice or whatever you have to just have this Instinct so it's like woo it's like martial arts you have to be on the top of your game and it's incredible seeing you know when you see a really accomplished chef with a professional cooker stir frying it is so fast and it's so instinctive there's no
measured thought they're just doing it correctly and it's a kind of Miracle when it turns out right and yes I found that sometimes when chefs have been explaining even their own personal classic dishes to me their preferred method is to stand by the walk and get a younger impr Apprentice to cook and people have said that's because you know the Elder chefs have more a management
role they're not cooking every day so like a martial artist or a dancer they're not they don't have that fluidity and sharp Instinct that you have when you're doing it constantly so you may eat your dumpling I have a question for Dan Dan you're a Canadian citizen you've also spent plenty of time in China how is Chinese food different in the United States versus Canada I
think Canada depends on where you go um but where I grew up in Ottawa um there wasn't a terribly great amount of Chinese cuisine and I think the there was a little bit more of the Cantonese influence um you know something like 11% of Canadians live abroad uh and that was uh that's I believe that is the highest ratio in the world and that is because uh in about you know in the 90s the
Canadian government just offered extraordinary numbers of visas to Hong kongers to uh basically Escape Hong Kong before the uh before the return to the mainland and so that has a very big uh Cantonese influence um now I haven't really tested this but people would say that Vancouver at some points had you know the best Chinese food in the world um because of just the amount of um
influx there but I haven't really tasted enough in Vancouver to say I've only been there three times my sense was they had First Rate cantones food not quite as good as Hong Kong but you know clearly the best in this hemisphere but in the other areas at least at the time are much weaker right Fergus Ander Sam do you have comments on Chinese food in Ireland Northern Ireland Scotland or
anywhere else you've been yeah I mean I suppose Chinese food in Orland is similarly not very developed like in Barbados um if there is any um sort of non-generic uh Chinese restaurant um in Ireland is probably sichan uh so I'm interested like how did sesan become maybe this is not an accurate description the like Prestige Cuisine uh like the one if a first
Regional Chinese restaurant opens in a city it's most likely to be that one how did that happen well I think that sichan food travels really well so there are some Cuisines like the food of the jangan region or yunan we already said there there's so many really unique local ingredients that you can't get elsewhere and when you think about yunan food you think about these extraordinary
ingredients but Sichuan food the heart and soul of sitan cooking is in the The Artful combination of flavors so not just Mala numbing and hot but also yusang which is you know a bit of sweet and sour pickled chili ginger garlic spring onion all these wonderful um um combinations of flavors and I think that if you have because the sort of identity of sichuanese food is in the
the flavors you can apply a citrines y fish fragrant sauce to the kind of fish that you can get in um that you can get say in England it doesn't have to be a local carb it'll still feel like cines cooking because the flavorings and the techniques are there so I think that with you know a cines cook just needs a sort of small battery of key ingredients cetr and pepper dried chilies pickled
chilies do banang pickle chili paste soy sauce vinegar and then you can cook whatever's to hand so I think for that reason it's quite accessible and transportable as a sort of concept in the practice Olivia could you speak to the new dish please absolutely so we have a seafood stew with Crispy rice and this is one of the typical dish that you think oh it's um you have a Rice Krispie
on the top and cook everything so fast but I will probably call this one of the because we homemade the Fishbowl and that process on its own is probably 8 to 10 hours um and you know you see some jumbo shrimping there scallops um and they're all cooked at different time for it to be at perfect condition and what region is that from uh well this is something my dad is holds very dearly to
his heart um the fish ball we eat it back at home in h um yeah this is a I will call this a h and how do you think about not just any single dish but how you put this meal together the combination of dishes what would you tell us well I have to say um if you go to any Chinese restaur strong um I would T probably takes um a mastermind to put a bquip menual like this um so either
someone that's really knowledgeable in the ingredients in the methods that are things are prepared um you get a good balance of something uh mild something with soup something crispy different Petry it it's really like putting puzzles together and um Chinese people eats pretty pecky so any end of the meal I'm sure the guest will have something to say oh I didn't like this and that
pair together so it really takes a lot of skill to put a banquet menu on the table so today's meal uh Chef Peter my dad actually put everything great Fergus comment or question yeah going back to the sort of exotic ingredients aspect so I think we even mentioned um say deer tendons earlier in in the west at least it's um deer typically w it's quite difficult to
domesticate and farm them um so what is the kind of economy of accessing those ingredients in China look like presumably some are intensively farmed if possible but presumably others are very difficult to get your hands on well they're quite unusual and some of them are imported as well and some of them are wild and then of course you know one of the problems that China has is also
with an illegal trade in Wildlife but that's under the table and um you know that's um not not in the open so you're unlikely to find these things on sale in markets um but um yeah most people would never eat any wild food because it's expensive and scarce um and yeah so you know when I was saying about things like um the deer tendons I mean that's a grand old Imperial delicacy and not
something common at all and then some ingredients are imported So like um well bird's nest is farmed a lot of it's farmed in Malaysia right so now when I go to China sometimes I'm disappointed when I see so many Hot Pot restaurants they're typically pretty good but they're a bit all the same and maybe you I'll go eat there once during a trip but after that it's just a kind of plague
what's your view on this why is this happening I totally agree with you and I call it the hot poz of the Chinese restaurant scene and it's just you know Hot Pot is great fun it's a really convivial Lively inexpensive it can be very inexpensive way to eat and you know to to share food with your friends but in terms of cooking technique it's definitely low skilled so and that of
course makes it hugely appealing for restaurant I mean you know how difficult it is to get good chefs right walk chefs especially it's a nightmare um because it's so difficult to do um with hot pot you just need a good soup base you can even buy it in and then you just need staff to slice up bits of food and your customers cook it themselves and so I
think it's partly that hot pot is very popular and partly for economic reasons that it's actually just a lot easier from the point of view of the restaurant right but yeah it's a poor particularly with suchan I mean sichan has such amazingly diverse and exciting food and Hot Pot is a poor reflection of all that it may add I think Hot Pot restaurants are like the McDonald's in China it's
really considered as a um fast food yeah well they a lot of them are but they you also have incredibly high-end ones with you know seafood and yeah so it's sort of you find them at all levels of the market but it is a bit of a plague nice and moderation by the way I have to say this the technique of this dish is fantastic and if you notice well so you've got an assembly of
all different ingredients and as you said they're cooked separately so these fish bows have a lovely light delicate texture but they're not FL they're not completely flaccid they have a bit of liveliness to them bit of scallop in mind sort of juiciness the prawn is beautifully silky and also a bit crisp and you have the vegetables that are crisp and not overcooked so that shows
you that they've all being cooked separately to the peak then combined together and then you have the lovely contrast between the crisp crunch of the um The Gua the rice crust and the liquid and so there's a lot that has gone into that technically right lyia the new dish please explain excuse me tell us what's the difference between chicken of this sort on the bone and not
on the bone this is not chicken we're having scallops today so we elevated it um yes you are right typically we will serve this as l g red chili pepper chicken and some people would like to call it um the treasure chicken because you have to find the chicken among a pile of red peppers um and to elevated it um today we're eating wild scallops that has to it it's rather lovely do you see the
garnish these very deafly intricately cut cucumbers and that's something that you hardly see these days so it's real sort of classic old school Chinese cooking but it's labor intensive um most people did your father do it himself one he did it himself and let me say about 40 years ago um he was actually in a national competition to just um uh to compete on the knife cutting skill
really yeah because apart from the technical aspects of cutting like you have to cut I mean the Practical aspects you have to cut to eat with chopsticks the technical ones evenness for stir frying there's also the aesthetic um aspect and there's this whole other thing like the French sugar art of completely frivolous Artistry with vegetable cutting Dan do you have a view
on Hot Pot um I think it's terrible the what what else is there to say I think that hot pot is a great social activity um but it is uh never really my first choice to eat but on the point about chains uh one of the uh things I've observed over the last few years is that there has been a pretty uh growing uh uh scale of chain restaurants featuring basically slow casual Cuisine I'm
thinking about uh cbay noodles I'm thinking about the sourkraut fish restaurant that is achieving remarkable consistency uh across uh all of these different restaurants which is a pretty difficult thing to do I understand and I wonder you know do you see that these restaurants can be something like ding taong to become you know major exports um at some point or do you think that
will be they can't quite figure out the international market um well I don't see one on I think they'd be very popular if they could export and I think that this sort of technical innovation in Chinese food is something that's going to be more and more of like we mentioned you know the pre-prepared dishes which is something that is not necessarily a good
thing but um but also yeah I met a very high level Chef in Beijing who was showing me um a a robo walk you know an electric walk that was trying to automate the process of stir frying um which I'm I'm sure is at the early stages but yeah I think if they can achieve the consistency in standard standardization which they are doing in China then yes um but one thing about
sheay particularly this is a noodle um a restaurant that specializes in Northwestern um sort of country cooking right and a particular oat pasta which is a specialty of shanii Province and when she B opened the first branches in Beijing they had all these people on tables outside doing incredible it's a bit hard to describe but they they have a big lump of oat pasta in their hand
with a little bit going between their fingers and they rub it onto the board and they get a tongue of Pastor on the board they whip it up into a tube and they stick it in a steamer and you end up with all these tubes of pasta together in a steamer like a honeycomb and then you steam them but I have to say that when I've been recently they don't have those people anymore so I
don't know whether they're dropping the real artisanal High skilled aspects so that they can standardize and expand it but that's a bit of a shame because it was lovely when it started that they were showcasing one of the amazing sort of handcrafting noods of shi either fuchsia or Dan do you have an opinion on how good the Michelin guide is for China and I guess Shanghai in particular might
be where you would use it do you want to go first I guess I would have never tried to look at the Michelin guy anywhere yeah in China um you know I I guess I would look a little bit more just at the apps and look at the photos is Michelin guide useful for you well I think they do Identify some of the very best restaurants in Shanghai in changdu and it's helpful for people
who don't know Chinese to have some kind kind of guide um but the downside is that I think although I mean the classic misham methodology is to send a single inspector to a restaurant to have a meal and that means that um eating like this which is more typical of many very excellent Chinese restaurants is a little impractical I did interview someone from michan recently and they
said that on occasion they do allow inspectors to go out in groups which but certainly with the early mishan guide to Shanghai for example they did pick lots of excellent restaurants but they missed some that were equally good but that did not have tasting menus suitable for individual diners and I'm guessing that may be partly why places where you have to book a private room and have a big
dinner um so I would say it's um that's one issue with it but they have got better also at recognizing even small noodle shops in changdu and I think they're trying to be closer to the pulse of what people actually want to eat but the down side is that I know um a lot of Chinese chefs I know are a little bit preoccupied with mishow and I think that when and it's the problem in the West
too but when people start aiming at mishan stars then it has certain implications for Chinese cuisine like a sort of pushing people towards individual plating rather than this style which there's nothing wrong with but this is lovely eating like this too so I sort of hope that it doesn't sort of distort the way that Chinese chefs are actually cooking and presenting
their food how are social media changing Chinese food in the US people Instagram their food I would say far too often so there's an incentive to create instagrammable dishes what's going on in China totally in China I mean everyone's on their phones like maniacs like people everywhere else and um yes and certainly um very visually exciting food and that's one problem actually with cinese
food that I think it's the real drama dishes like you know this sort of a chicken normally which are great but they're just one facet of a very diverse Cuisine and um again I think maybe they encourage restaurants not just in China but everywhere but it's the same pressures of social media and um yeah one it brings people in but when they're in the restaurant I guess it's a whole
menu dictates um if we can keep them a lot of the time restaurants suffer with oh we have a lot of onetime Diner they came because of Instagram the food is instagrammable but actually it doesn't taste uh amazing so what is the reason for them to come back that goes beyond social media what is the new dish oh it looks like we have a uh young um so in Chinese Umami has half
fish and has half lamb so this is a dish with f Mami with our fish bow and L stew lovely I heard about that as a Shanghai dish and when I first heard about lamb and fish stew I did not quite believe it as a real soup have you been converted I I have been converted I think it's awesome maybe you should go go first okay yes please and also again we were talking
about the importance of soup this is a proper Chinese meal with a soup it's not just one soup it's cses of soups right and a ni soup sorry where in China have you not eat in the food I have never been to jangi Province MH also one place I really want to go is Hong Jang in the dong Bay Northeast because there it's sort of bordering Russia and that's going to be a whole other um you know
lot of local ingredients and traditions and a bit of Russian influence it's a very good restaurant in D right on the border of North Korea that has a very very strong North Korean Chinese cuisine combination it's the only place you can go to get that particular food yeah I mean that's again the diversity of Chinese cuisine that you don't only have the sort of branches of classical
Chinese Gastronomy but also you said in yunan you have food that is like Vietnamese Thai Lan and then in the Northeast Korean Russian I mean it's very extraordinary Mongolian chenyang I quite like the food spicier than I was expecting it to be right wonderful dumplings maybe the best dumplings I had in China oh yeah there are there are kind of Shenyang dumpling
restaurants aren't there in other places too yeah since uh Korea was mentioned my Korean friend has a um theory that a lot of um perhaps most of uh sort of global variation in Cuisine can just be explained by temperature in different countries uh in particular that you know Western and Northern Europe it's too cold to cook outdoors and if you're cooking indoors and you don't want to
poison yourself from the fumes or the smoke uh you have to rely a lot more on covered pots and um cooking vessels that rely on less they they create kind of less Smoky uh flavorful dishes um what yeah how do you kind of think about the um geography or temperature of a placees as variable I was just trying to think sort of so Chinese walk cooking does create a lot of smoke and so on but I
mean in lots of Chinese modern apartments they they would have a kitchen that's almost like a balcony that where you can open all the windows so you don't actually influence the place where people are sitting and eating but it's adjacent right but I suppose in yeah in the north dong Bay North you have lots of hearty stews and soups so may be to an extent very
interesting question the suchin say they need to eat a lot of spicy foods because it's such a humid and hot environment I've never understood that what what what actually why is that helping with the Mak you sweat so you have to because it's humid you have this unhealthy dampness in your body so you have to have ginger chilies pepper pepper corns to make you sweat um and that drives out
the um the unhealthy humidity and restores a lovely equilibrium yeah but I mean the funny thing about that that I that is a little inconsistent is that the cantony south is also pretty humid it seems to me and yet chilies are not advised there eating but sweet water is T oh yes that's true yes you do other things for the this is a lovely texture too with the the sort of slithery crisp
wooder mushrooms yes as well you've noted very well fuchia that um Chinese cuisine has bit of an elitist bias these eight great great Cuisines are very much concentrated in the more Rich uh Coastal uh provinces um I wonder can you just towards what a people's history of Chinese cuisine could look like you know what how do we actually incorporate these folk Traditions a little bit
better into our conception of Chinese food so it is not so Cantonese and tangan focused well I think so the first thing to say is the eight great Cuisines is a very recent scheme you know people talk about it as if it was something really old but I think it only I've said in my book but I think it only goes back to about 1980 or something and um so so
there are many different ways of trying to express the regional diversity of Chinese food all of them totally inadequate because it's such a sort of intricate Patchwork but but I think already as you said jangan which is the food of the Eastern sort of region around Shanghai very elitist fine Cantonese food is very LST but sichan already has a reputation for being a
sort of hearty folk Cuisine right so it is represented the the eight great Cuisines um incorporates like an which is not regarded as a very great culinary region now and I think it's the categorization of that scheme is actually quite irrelevant and it doesn't rep I think if people took a fresh look at it they would include um and also in the eight great Cuisines Hunan Cuisine is one of them
but that they're talking about elitist Hunan food and not the wonderful spicy home cooking so I mean I think in terms of what people actually want to eat it's not Elite right so the Cuisines that are most popular now suchan what else h no the spicy ones are more popular spicy ones yeah guo is also and that's not an elitist Cuisine so um I think that you know the people writing
about food are no longer the sort of Confucian gentleman Scholars are they so it's yeah why is Hunan food fallen behind in the west so you used to have so many restaurants that claimed to be Sichuan Hunan you know they weren't really either one but nominally there was some connection and now PE many more people want real Chinese food there's plenty of more or less broadly authentic
sishu on places but I I don't see broadly authentic on places what happened not so many um I don't know I mean what do you think um my understanding was that Hunan food became quite popular after Nixon's visit to China and you know this was all chairman Ma and then everybody just started advertising their um Chinese restaurants as Hunan Cuisine I think that kind of um
shaped distorted our view and so maybe people have caught on um personally I enjoy Hunan food a little bit less than cine food I find Hunan food a little bit too oily um and the flavors are a little bit too much instead of more refined and tingling and um teasing in a way that sat Trine often is LD do you have a view on this um are Ed to serve who on dishes yes may I introduce you what we're
having this is a Sam special uh but it's not fair to serve it only to Sam that's why our table gets a separate platter this is um Chef Peter's signature uh dish it's a dry fry eggplant um he has done so many ingredients the dry fry way we call him a dry fry Master he can do it with fish he can do it with shrimp with o with cauliflower with shitaki mushroom it's the special batter that he coat
anything with makes it very crispy outside but still like juicy and tender in inside with um great balance of cilantro pepper sometimes he likes to add cumin other times it's um just a lot of flavors if you think about all the family Empire how many restaurants is it now I stop counting stop counting exactly obviously the food is wonderful but in terms of business principles what
has made the difference what have you all done that has been the Difference Maker viewing them as commercial Enterprises all right I have to start with the things that we have tried but are not in a way financially successful is we keep trying to uh offer new Concepts we wanted to in a way offer modernized Chinese cuisine you know people will call that more Fusion or not
really as authentic this is something I really want to ask the people sitting on the dining table so when it comes to comes to the tradition the classics the authenticity versus modern Ambience what is the balance what is your ratio when it comes to like if I'm going to pick a place for a meal what do you guys look for floor is open I don't think I'm a very usual
Diner so I don't care that much for Ambiance usually I like a very dull Place often times especially with the he love Filipino food also and because it usually it's very demor location just go in everyone's it's like a family restaurant so they cook everything very simple homemade done and you go in they don't have time for the other aspects of it but I know when you
go those kind of places the only other people there are other Filipinos and similarly cuz right now I live in live in Madrid and often times the best Chinese restaurants I find actually mostly hes actually are just very simple restaurants and that's usually where the most people from H typically go and have food but the ones that look very nice very objective thingss typically cater
to just the average consumer and because of that they don't really tend to put that much effort on the food but you know that's most people I think would prefer a nice looking restaurant I am uh against nice looking restaurants because it attracts too much instagramming um I'm there for the food and we we're there for the food um you know we don't want the photos well one of one of the uh key tenants in the uh
tler count theory of how to selected restaurant is uh looking for spelling mistakes on the menu Fus any uh yeah similarly I think um some combination of um Chinese clientele not a particularly nice venue and uh I think just kind of I guess also when you're in a restaurant typically if in in the UK If the service is kind of not as warm and I guess um polite you like to beating
mean yeah that's usually a very strong signal about the food being good and I find that to be very true I don't think you should take any of this advice exactly so this is a constant debate well I mean fisha will probably uh what what do you look for do you look for the a dining room full of at least 90% Chinese audience well I think having a Chinese audience is a good sign um but
I like everything and I sometimes I like to go to beautiful places with amazing service and beautiful China and elegant presentation and sometimes I like to go and have street food and that's the joy of eating and of Chinese food that you have something at every level yeah and I think also just this thing about Classics versus Innovation you know all the classics are actually the product of
innovation somebody was saying to me the other day you know M it's only hundred years old you know it's not an ancient dish the sichuanese didn't have chilies until a couple hundred years ago and um so I think you you know you can't be too conservative ready I like it when the diners are grumpy when they're too happy I start to get suspicious like why are
they here are they here to have a good time there's something about food you mentioned sex earlier when you film people doing it that don't necessarily look happy wow so it's true I shouldn't take any of this advice for fuses who is maybe closer to our day-to-day customer um it it is absolutely true when it comes to a business success is we look at what brings people back so yes you
can have a very peacocky showy um dish that maybe lights up in flame or you know something that's people look at it they're like wow I want to see what what they're really like but once they are in the door um you know we think about what makes them stay it really goes down to the ingredients the their personal feelings you know some of you guys like to be treated in a mean way maybe that's
a strong association with um uh how you were being being treated but I believe um there is a lot of perception about Chinese cuisine we're trying to make a change to and again I know that everyone on this table is a um foodie and takes a lot of Pride on standard and quality uh we're trying to expand that audience we wanted anyone that doesn't know much
about Chinese cooking coming to a restaurant uh and feel good about being here it's not just them it's everyone they're eating it with yes our dining room is a little loud uh but we tend to you know offer them appetizers before the entree comes out um and we offer them a little like um matcha or or um ice cream at the end of the meal kind of in a way feel them make them feel
comfortable and familiar with what they're eating um otherwise you know we stay pretty true on the flavors we like to offer both flavors especially how D started his career in the US is really not afraid of using pepper corn at the time it was bandn in the US um there's no legal way of getting pepper corn or souret I remember the restaurant owner would ask um their family member in
China to send it over from fuin um so yes things have changed quite a lot in the past 20 30 years and now we're looking at oh there's a lot of options what is from a business perspective what makes us different that we get customer to come back for occas special celebration or for their day-to-day carry out and delivery tell us about the new dish and should one eat it with
chopsticks everyone should eat with chopsticks yes we have a pork belly dish that is um from start marinated and then coated with rice flour um after it's steamed and cooked 80 90% then we want it to create a crispy texture that's when we start to put in the walk very quick um double Sid uh pen SE here and then uh add all the green jalapeno the scallion the red chili
pepper um peppercorns this is my favorite dish so far this and the numbing beef but fuchsia would you comment on this I was just think this is the first time so do this thing when you marinate the pork belly and you coat it in rice crumbs and you steam it is a very classic Chinese country dish and it's the first time I've had it fried like this and it's delicious it's a sort
of um like a a new version of quo back in the pot pork twice cooked pork um if I can ask um this is a dish that is very known in the household family when you have um something steamed like at home my mom or my Grandma will steam it for the first time and serve it as a beautiful first time dish but for something to be consumed later in the day or the next day um people tend to
get tired of eating the same thing over and over so they get really smart on why don't we pener it so it becomes a new dish m going to have to try it yeah Lydia are you um seeing a difference between Chinese restaurants in the DC area in the LA area and the New York area is there a distinct difference with these things or they're just kind of you know citrine restaurants or something in
in each of these places they kind of consistent I feel like um restaurants or restaurant owners um are very smart to see what the trend is uh as you guys can probably see it's the trend restaurant you know if we're talking about about in the 2000 there has there has not been many um and that's probably how that got his reputation um being a master's the
TR Chef although he's really a classic trained Chinese Chef cooking all um the regional Cuisines now I want to say ever started in the 2010ish um this is when the new immigration from China started to merging a lot of them went to LA a lot a lot of them went to New York a lot of them came to DC so we're starting to see um Na in Orange County we see um Julie which is a very [Music]
um in New York um and I'm just naming uh a few there's actually a lot more original Cuisine like some um I remember my friend uh Chef Simone ton was making V noodles by NYU and it's vastly popular Sam any comment on the the eggplant it's very good Fergus rased what's been your favorite dish so far oh um the eggplant has been very good actually um I've also liked the the scallion have been
excellent I think I'll go the pork this one my favorite yes why I usually like a very subtle ma tingling sensation usually that's not kind of overpowering and also the combination with the you fry it's very very good if you had to pick a favorite so far do you have a nomination well so for me I love the pork and I love that soup with the fishballs and but for me the reason this
is such a lovely meal is that it's such a well-planned menu and this is the thing that I think foreigners have the most difficulty with with Chinese food is how to assemble a menu and you've really thought about different cooking methods different ingredients textures some wet some dry and that's what makes it not only delicious but also shuu comfortable because we have this you
know something very sizzly and then a lovely light refreshing soup so the pleasure of the meal is sort of physical as well as just I mean yeah and how did you learn that just induction you were served a lot of meals and you ran the mental regressions or is there a way it can be taught to Someone Like You Well mainly I've learned through just constant eating but that is but yeah I
think I mean I try to write about this really and the idea that you know a well planned Chinese menu it's not just about delicious tastes and I think if you think about going out for a classic French meal you think about having lots of rich food pudding cheese and feeling quite heavy afterwards with a well-planned Chinese meal you can have dozens of dishes and still feel
comfortable but I think it's just you know as a foreigner once you start considering that the the light and delicate dishes are just as important as The razzled Dazzle exciting dishes is then you're on the way to be able to plan a nice meal right I would say start with picking out your favorites and look at oh what I'm me missing from there and that's a good way to go and your father
taught you I guess so I am very influenced by both uh great chefs at home mom and dad's mom is a pastry chef dad is a uh walk chef and I they train me to have a very uh pey Palace mhm but I think also it's just yeah it's about not repetition right that's the key thing so if you have a dish with one ingredient or one style you just want to make sure the other ones are as
contrasting as possible on the subject of fuchsia writing I think that your book is wonderfully well organized um to have 30 to introduce the cuisine through 30 dishes and to use that to talk about knife work and the diversity and everything else I thought it worked really well and furthermore what worked well was that you are just a fabulous writer and in terms of talk making the
physicality of eating uh very very good can you speak a little bit about you know is food writing this is um I think it really rewards um food really rewards good writing can you talk about how you learn that other craft that you've picked up so well well thank you very much um I don't know how I mean it's just Instinct and trying to I mean I suppose what I've been trying to do all
this time is find ways of describing the intricacies of Chinese food um to make it sort of Illuminating and delightful for people who didn't grow up with it and so trying to find ways things like texture which is a quite difficult subject in the sense that many of our texture words in English are a bit disgusting slimy gristly but trying to write sort of playfully and
engagingly so that people can both sort of acknowledge these unfamiliar textures but also see how they might be delicious I did a degree in English literature so I read lots of good books which is the best training for any writer but I think also I just try to have fun with it um you know to just be playful and have a laugh and also I just I love eating and I have since I was a teenager I've
always kept a journal and it's always turned into sort of Epic descriptions of meals so I've had a lot of practice when you worked for BBC World Service you learned how to write then or before or well I mean I suppose I've always written I mean you know I had a certain training for for how to think about language and try to trying to be very fair and thinking how it will be in in
in you know how it will be understood in different cultures but I think more of it is just practice just writing having a notebook writing your impressions and it's just a craft that you develop through use yeah what did your parents do um so my mother taught English as a foreign language so she had a huge um food influence on me so um she's a great cook and we always had lots of foreign
friends in our home so I had a very very unusual gastronomic upbringing and my father was in sort of the first generation of it people there's a bit of anxiety I get when I go to a new Chinese restaurant because I feel like when you want the good food you have to perform you have to perform yourself you got to say laan I I'm here to actually consume the correct food but people who can't just
you know turn on some changa dialect how would they actually get the good food from the restaurants well so without the language or yeah I mean I suppose that one of the best ways is to look at what what other people are eating um but it is difficult and even when I go to China and I order for a group in good Mandarin knowledgeably and I know the names of
the dishes um it so often happens that the waiter will say if I'm with foreigners he'll say oh they can't possibly eat that so there's a sort of assumption that foreigners won't be able to handle certain some foods and I've sometimes have to have an argument and just say look we will eat it and we have gone around proving that we can eat CA cucumbers and stuff you know on many
occasions but I think and it's quite understandable because I think a lot of foreigners have a habit of ordering something that they can't handle and then being rude and obnoxious and just complaining or they think that there's a you know there's a bone in the chicken so that's a problem it's not a problem it's meant to be like that so I think that Chinese um waiting staff
particularly in the west but Al in in China a little wary of upsetting foreigners and also they just want people to have a nice time so you have to battle against that stereotype if you really want to eat the good food but um but I think thing you know I think things are changing and I think but I think just looking at what other people are eating is incredibly useful and then
also showing your appreciation when you do eat something unusual because I have a you know I I should imagine that all the restaurants where I've been with groups of foreigners eating unusual things with gusto that afterwards theyve thought well you know it is possible for foreigners to to eat this sort of thing what is it then that you can't eat put put aside the illegal uh but where you
just say like no I'm not going to have that no I will eat everything you will eat everything well I did in yunan actually I did eat some there's a very special dish in one particular region which is raw pork like a sort of turtle pork Shi Dal Shi and um I at that um because I was you know local people Rave about it e all the time and I was aware that there are
health issues with eating raw P but I really wanted to try it and so I had it with some local friends it was really delicious but I had this terrible Panic afterwards and I kept you know and I probably wouldn't do that again but I think it's a really hard thing like I want to eat with people and I want to be totally open-minded and non-judgmental and um and then yeah so I suppose it's
just the only things that will restrain me are possibly sort of health concerns like that and then also sort of ethical issues but I have a real dilemma with hairy crabs so this is one of the great Delicacies of the jangan region and oh they are so and one of the best ways to eat them is they're drunken crabs sweet yeah and they're sort of pickled in rice wine and Seasonings and it's just like
you just fly to heaven when you eat one um and I've been eating these for years with great delight and then a couple of years ago or a few years ago the Shanghai authorities where there are great delicacy they banned raw drunken crabs and um so I started sort of looking at why this was and it turns out that they can carry parasites fresh water raw creatures so now you know
somebody offers me a raw hairy CRA what do I do you know I've been fine so far and um but I don't know that the sort of lust for eating them is so you only live once yeah why aren't there more raw dishes in Chinese food overall well I mean historical Prejudice so in you know in ancient China the Chinese defined themselves as people who ate cooked food
and barbarians beyond the borders of the Empire at raw food and so there is this idea that um a very ancient idea going back to the book of Rights lii one of the classic texts that um you know civilization began when people leared how to harness fire to cook their food and they left behind the era of eating drinking blood and eating feathers and having all the diseases from raw food so
there is a sort of idea that you I remember when um I took a a Hunan friend out for dinner in London and she was served a rare pigeon breast you know her initial reaction was anxiety is this going to be a bit dangerous so it's a sort of health concerns coupled with an ancient tradition of eating cooked food I spent about 3 months in dol last year and I was offered a lot of raw pork
and I never took it right probably very sensible it was very it was like I mean it was a bit like a steak tartar but you leave raw meat in the US or I would eat raw beef sure yeah pork I don't know but I think like um in in Germany I think it's I don't if it's a certain region they have met which is raw pork but when you eat this it's um there are all kinds of rules and regulations for the
temperature which it's kept and how it's served and so on whereas in darly I mean it was very very kind of easy but the fact is that local people of this particular group eat it all the time and I was F I was always asking people if they had any problems and most people say oh it's fine you know they check the pork it's fine so um when and where is China most effective as a street food
country and when isn't it so I don't I don't eat much street food when I'm in China why not but I might say in Malaysia uh the restaurant food is so good yeah and I've never found the street food to be better even though it can be very good whereas the say in Malaysia I might find street food on average to be better than restaurant food is there anywhere in China where
street food is the way to go oh well um yeah in the North in I went to kaiun the old um Song Dynasty Northern capital and they had this is some years ago but they had the most incredible night market with all kinds of food on that was just amazing and delicious and then I've had good I mean I think the problem is that um you know with China's modernization there's been this big effort to clean up
the streets and they've they've seen sort of street food as being old-fashioned and something undesirable and so like when I lived in sichan in the beginning there were actually quite a lot of Street Traders doing really nice food and it's harder to find them but actually in if you go to changu go to the Wu Monastery and in the streets around there there are people serving
some traditional snats danong these little pancakes stuffed with pork or sweet things um yeah yeah these lovely so I would go there there are certain areas where it's tolerated and where you can have really lovely street food yeah Dan do you have a view on this basically anywhere with a night market I think is reliably the places with great street food um and
especially these nice little barbecues and noodles um I Echo fushia here that Shanghai I believe used to have actually quite a nice street food uh life and then they cleaned all of that up and I think they've maybe have been borderline successful in driving that out I know and sometimes what they do is they they bring street food into an area a bit like the Singaporean Hawker Center idea
but the problem is that they're not individual Traders anymore they're just people working for someone else and it's not really not really the kind of really good street food Lydia what do we have here uh I think we missed our uh seafu Pro with sticky rice that's a dish that everyone took one and is now gone so that's a very typical Hub Cuisine um we like to use pork as a filling but for
today's um variety that switch to crab and seafood um and coat it with sticky rice steamed and just uh finishing up with a beautiful glaze and next we have the famous soral fish um today I think they are more Daisy looking sometimes amazing knife work look at that yes it is you know cut like that and they're not falling apart they're all staying in these lovely FRS
that's right something thank you no episode of uh conversations with Tyler would be complete without a implication or understanding that uh everything comes back to economics what can it what can an economist learn from eating more Chinese food you're asking me either anybody I have no idea I'm a competition Works B Adam Smith said division of labor is limited by the
extent of the market so as Chinese became the number one group coming to the United States you started getting a lot of regional Cuisine but also look for places that are not too easy to get to not frequented by too many tourists and have grumpy uh diners and abusive staff because there's a selection effect if the place is in business at all and it's full that's implying the food is very
good it's being patronized Often by elderly Chinese who in my view are much fussier than a lot of younger Chinese younger Chinese in this country sort of by my standards are too willing to go out to eat to enjoy themselves and I just think that's wrong uh those would be my starting points but other answers are welcome um trade promotes globalization U Citron food is slightly easier to
export as fuchsia said given the chilies and the pepper corns that's why it's really easy to have that standardized across the world when when fusa mentioned that the the willingness for the government to try to standardize cuisine Did It Really Work you kind of see this ability of the individual to kind of design the menu themselves it's a very big aspect as you
know big economic concept there slight a different question for fuchia um I'm wondering you you write in your book about how the the West I guess the anglosphere in particular had this experience with Chinese food coming and I guess in the postwar period when um essentially what they ended up what you end up getting and a takeaway is not real kind of proper Chinese food um so I
guess do you have a sense of other regions other continents of the world have they had a similar experience with Chinese food coming there or maybe some of haven't even had it yet oh Well I mean I think yes I think that the sort of cantony simplified model is in many places but with slight variation so like in Sweden they have something called four little dishes which is like a
standard menu of Chinese Takeaway food um yeah and I think that it seems to have been a blueprint that worked very well all over the place um yeah with sweet tastes and fried foods with with with variations but I have to say I mean I haven't traveled to Peru for example where they have I by all accounts a very interesting yeah local Chinese food and also Kolkata has
some very interesting old Chinese dishes and I have yet to go there so both of those are very good but they're very different yes they don't feel to me like white Chinese food but I would recommend them Chas which you even can get in Northern Virginia though it's much better in Peru oh really but they're like rice dishes with Chinese elements in them is the way I would think about them I spend
some time in Barcelona uh this summer and I found uh first of all Barcelona to be I think the um my favorite city for food in Europe in part because I think it has um a very great respect for Asian Cuisine this was the first European country I've seen where there were a lot of Spanish chefs making Chinese food Spanish chefs making Japanese food um and I thought that was um um quite
good where where is the best city in Europe for Chinese food is it London I mean I haven't done a survey so I have no idea but um yeah but if somewhere were great you would have been pulled to it right well I hope so but I mean I'm spoiled because I atat a lot in China so you know I don't feel the need to go and eat Chinese food everywhere else I feel
like Singapore has really good Chinese food because of the Chinese population um like yeah London has great Chinese food not just um you know the Chinatown that has been there for maybe uh decades but also the newer where I like to call it modern Chinese uh we talk about um Chef Wayne Andy Wayne um yeah really doing excellent um idea with elevated Chinese foods um
being tasting menu but I think one problem and this maybe comes back to economics again that in England for example I think now the door has opened to massive public interest in Regional Chinese food and people are really you know open to trying now eating suchan Xian food and so on but the real problem is that we have very stringent um immigration rules so in order for a you
know a chef to come over and work in a restaurant in London they have to have a certain level of English and a certain income which is prohibitive for anyone but the big international hotels and I think it's a shame that we don't have more trained chefs coming in um from China to bring different aspects of Chinese I find that the Chinese food in Madrid is actually even better than
Barcelona you spend much time in Madrid the Chinese I think because even there you get very very obscure local Cuisine from China also in Madrid where in Barcelona it's not as uh you know you can't get the obscurities as much this book other books you've written what's the hardest thing for you about writing a book um well I found this a lot harder than writing a cook book why um because
a cookbook has a slightly obvious structure so unless you're going to do something really radical you have a sort of introduction you know you can go into basic techniques and ingredients then you have recipes often grouped by ingredient and each recipe has a headnote so the structure by now I've done a few cookbooks is is fairly straightforward um with a narrative book
it can be anything you want so I you know I start with a Vue idea that I want to talk about some of the great themes of Chinese Gastronomy and Cuisine and then it's sort of how to organize it it's a bit frightening because I felt that I was starting with much more of a blank page than with a cookbook yeah what's your most unusual successful work habit um getting on a train and what do
you do then no if I have through China or just you got on a British train and you write or you got on a British train and you cook if I have a BL a WR block and I just I'm frustrated and I feel I can't possibly do it and I just give up if I get moving and get on a train then for some reason my mind starts loosening up and I have a breakthrough um also sitting in cafes
but just change of scene so moving and not moving or you're getting away from being the solitary writer at your computer or at your desk and sort of that breaks the deadlock but I have I have to say I mean yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't put myself up as a model of effective um and you know efficient working but I want to say you finished your book on time I remember meeting you last year in London you said
you were writing this book and you have a very um strict deadline and look at well where we are well I did have the the advantage of the global pandemic which meant that I wasn't racing around the world but I had to stay home other than China now that it's quite easy to travel where else do you want to go for food I I'd like to go back to Japan you know people sometimes
think I know about Asian food and I really don't because I've been so concentrated on China and I went to Japan for the first time in 2018 and um I have only dipped my little finger into that particular pie and so I would love to go and it's so interesting because obviously it relates to Chinese food and you see some words and processes and things that have died out
in China that are still in Japan expressed differently so it's kind of Rel but fascinatingly different for me I was there a few weeks ago I had one Chinese meal for breakfast it was quite good just amazing Sushi anywhere without even looking for it yeah U some people would say that Japan now has the best French cooking some of the best Italian cooking now I'm skeptical that they can have the
best Chinese cooking but what you I don't think they do I've been to Michelin star chinese restaurants in Tokyo they're very good they deserve their stars but I think say compared to changu or somewhere they'd only be middling quality among the good restaurants is it because there's no grumpy diners they're cooking for Michelin diners who do have good taste but it's a
little rarified and at the visceral level there's something a bit missing I found but it seems so this is a very super official impression because I wasn't there for very long but it seemed to me that Japan also has the old school Chinatown cooking and newer cooking yokahama in particular yeah yeah but um but one meal that I wrote about in this book a Chinese meal was actually cooked
that the stir fry chapter um I went to one small Chinese modern restaurant where the Chinese technique and the sort of sensibility and Aesthetics were very Chinese um and it was absolutely superb yeah so that that was just a little snapshot but um it was very interesting um yeah Chinese food cooked in at and served at a sort of bar like a sushi counter actually Lydia where do you
think of going to for food obviously there's may be other reasons to travel oh my God uh well I'm dying to go to Peru um for the food but also for the nature thing um Machu beu um and I want to say I haven't really explored much of Mexico I feel like it's so close to home where we live but it's underrated I was only in Mexico City the first time this August with my at then 9mon Year
Daughter we explor the city from pastries in the morning great coffee shops to um we haven't really had a lot of opportunity to explore the street tacos but the dining scene the restaurants are truly amazing with boat flavors Dan then um I would say uh southeast Asia for me um I guess maybe more the street food um that I find um quite thrilling I've had quite a lot of
refined Chinese food now it's more um it's a it's a street food now for me and I have not spent Mexico and all and I think that Mexico is um hugely exciting rural Mexico in particular is one of my all-time favorites for me it's on a par with China I love Mexico City it's incredible but just side of the road dishes in small towns or on the edge of midsize towns for me that's the
best food in Mexico and I will do that in life until I can't do it anymore and I've been to Mexico over 30 times and just every meal is a Wonder in the way that it is in China and can be in India but not too many other places I love Japan but Japan also has a lot of the worst food now I don't go there to eat it but it can be disgusting or the desserts or I think Japan this dos very
high variance of food even though all of it Is Well Done by its standards sometimes I think they are pursuing their wrong standards what explains that variation they pursue Perfection and in in a way achieve it but if you don't agree with all matters of taste pursuing perfection in a sense can be a negative so if you look at these Filipino desserts which for me are too
sweet they're too gooey they're too large too many different things piled on top of each other but they're quite popular there are people who love them and I don't think they're wrong to love them uh Japan just takes every direction you can imagine and perfects it and that's a little dangerous and I won't eat raw chicken in Japan speaking of things you know that I
don't eat to me um I don't know that I'm afraid I trust that it's safe I just think it would disgust me and that's irrational but there I am and what what else I can get is so good nominations from this side of the room I've only been to China once so I think I'd love to go back um I was in chonging um I think I mean for all the reasons we've just mentioned like there's I think an endless amount of
things to sort of um discover and and kind of seems to mind there well I've never been to China so that's the obvious answer I think e the Opia is still very underrated when it comes to food only been there for the first time this year and it was it blew me away so I want to go back for sure and try a lot more Ethiopian dishes what struck you in particular the spice
combinations that was the quickly quick quick answer um some of the combos are so odd I can't describe them properly and it's it's the only closest thing reminds me of it's like some of some Peruvian spices for example strange in itself or Mexican spices but that combination of spices um is uh needs a lot more exploration I think but yeah what do we have here we have a
peach tree sa speaking of um Chinese is not huge on dessert sometimes you know after full meal of banquet we just eat some seasonal fruit um it will be a lot of like um specialty cutting into like um cute shapes of watermelon or um uh apples pears dragon fruits but today we're having a little tree sap this is also a modern Chinese dessert future can talk a lot more about it it's funny CU I
never saw so this ingred ingredient peach tree sap I never saw it until the last five years or something and suddenly it's become incredibly trendy and it's often served in sort of fairy tale soups with things like silveria mushrooms and Lotus seeds GOI berries and um another of these love texture Foods right and it is from the peach tree yes and how do you Source it is a peach tree
buiness you get it dried and it looks like little pieces of knobbly Amber and you soak them and then they sort of swell up into this lovely jelly we are at about the end of our podcast I would just like to thank everyone for participating uh thank Lydia Chang her Father Peter the entire staff at Mama Chang they always treat me wonderfully I just love them uh I actually don't want
them to be Surly to me they're they're super nice uh fuchsia of course has done the book and made this all possible again that's invitation to a banquet the story of Chinese food uh please do buy it read it and I would stress buy all of her books uh you cannot buy just one and fuchsia thank you very much thank you thank you all thank you so much for your support
of conversations with Tyler for me I feel it's the most important thing to do teaching people the art of appreciating humanity and appreciating Talent if you would be in a position to support us in any way possible please let us know send us your contributions we plan to continue producing conversations with Tyler but we're only able to do this because of the support of individuals such as yourself