[Music] hi everyone this is Jeff producer of conversations with Tyler today we're bringing you a bonus episode featuring Chinese food expert fuchsia Dunlap who has a new cookbook out called the food of Sichuan now longtime listeners might remember we had on fuchsia way back on
episode 15 to talk all things food in China I encourage you all to check out that episode if you missed it but for this episode we open things up a bit instead of a mostly one-onone one conversation between Tyler and fuchsia we invited several other guests from the
DC food scene to chat over a Homestyle Chinese meal the perfect place to host that meal is Mama Chang it's the newest restaurant from chefs Peter and Lisa Chang and one of the best places to eat in DC Lydia Chang their daughter who oversees the business hosted us at the
table with a menu CH and fuchsia developed together so here's everyone who is at the table Tyler Cowan mercus Center host of conversations with Tyler David Hagadorn Washington DC and I'm a former chef and restored writer Stephanie Gans program director at
cookology which is a cooking school in uh Arlington I'm sing I'm a chef and owner at the C Hanan S and P I'm Natasha Cowen I'm married to Tyler Cowen and I love Chinese food I'm rkaa Freedman and I am an avid home cook and a follower of
Tyler's blog I'm Jana I'm Ty's daughter uh I visited changu for the first time this summer I'm pich on I'm between pastry chef and Chef I live between New York and DC I'm lyia Chan uh the daughter of Chef Lisa and Peter Chan and uh I love that we're here at Mama chin
today and I'm fuchia Dunlop um writer of several books about Chinese food including now the food of sichan for pictures of the meal click to the transcript in the show notes for what is worth I didn't get to eat anything during the conversation either and I
still enjoyed hearing all the comments so I think you will too special thanks of course to ldia chefs Peter and Lisa and all the staff at mamang for the Fantastic meal [Music] enjoy conversations with Tyler is produced by the merceda center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap
between academic ideas and real world problem s learn more at radis.org and for more conversations including videos transcripts and upcoming dates visit conversations withth tyler.com we are here today to commemorate the publication of a revised and extended
edition of fuchsia the food of sishan fuchsia books on Chinese food are in my opinion actually among the very best greatest books of the entire Millennium they are storehouses of learning about food culture history education training everything possible they are beautifully
written the food in them is delicious they are fun to read the pictures and images are amazing so we thought we would create a special bonus episode of the podcast conversations with Tyler but unlike most episodes of conversations with Tyler this one I mainly will be
eating not leading the discussion so the discussion will be led by fuchsia and also Lydia Chang Lydia is connected to the restaurant mamachang where we are eating one of my very favorite restaurants in the entire world I eat here at least once a week it is
fantastic cauliflower is my favorite dish but for now enough for me I will interject a bit later fuchsia Lydia will do back and forth and the food will come and it will be explained and clarified and the rest of us we will all eat and later ask questions actually I would
like to tell you a little bit about Mama Chan and the concept behind it everybody knows that is professionally trained and everybody kind of has this uh idea of uh PE and restaurants but uh when we started working on this Concepts we want to focus really on the home style
cooking so a lot of people think uh Mama Chen has this real like figure like who is Mama Chan um it's his way of paying the tribute to the home Cooks which a lot of the time are women shs um so that's why you know we are doing the home style very
uh at the city of Fairfax um a lot of people find eating here is like having a meal at friend's home or at their own household so it's mainly based on citrines food is it or Inspirations from all over China or all over China our hometown is actually in the hub Province
um and some of the dishes has the inspiration from Hunan as well so Hunan Hub and suan and are your customers are a lot of them Chinese or most of not Chinese 60% Chinese yeah that's a good advertisement that it makes people so fuchsia maybe you could just
introduce how you think about Chinese food and going out to a restaurant with a group of 10 people as we have here how do you approach that well um with great appetite and I think one of the things about Chinese food is because often you eat family style so with a big group it
enables you to taste a good variety of dishes and that's one of the reasons actually that I think um Chinese food is very poorly represented by the international Arbiters of taste for example the michan guide their system is based on one inspector going out on
their own and sampling what a restaurant has to offer and for most Chinese restaurants that's very very difficult because you know the way you should eat is with a group and having a good a good variety of dishes so Lydia and I have been discussing the menu and um we were
trying to have you know selection of different flavors different ingredients some lighter dishes to balance the strongly flavored ones which is something I always look for in ordering a Chinese meal first dish is Right cauliflower is here Lydia and fuchsia if you could
speak to it and also pass it around and we can all start eating so what we're starting today is with the dry fried cauliflower Taylor is most favorite your family's most favorite gamb is a particularly cinese um cooking method where you toss an
ingredient in a dry walk without without much oil and then you add oil and Seasonings later and make sure you have the greeneries too H cilantro green onion with uh just a lot of seasonings the flavors and cauliflower has become so trendy in China in the last few
years for some reason every every in the US as well really every Chinese restaurant are they doing they mashing it and grinding it and make it into like a mashed potatoes and rice there too and it's like a cauliflower crust like as dough or just as the veget like this
there's one dish that appears on practically every menu Yoji which means organic cauliflower I very much doubt that it's all organic but it's always tossed with these spicy seasonings and sometimes served in a um in a gang war like a a black clay pot or um or or an
iron pot yeah the cooking is a little bit different I think what they do in China is to do a stir fry uh or um with maybe some source of protein like a ham or bacon uh but our way of doing it it's lightly buttered deep fried first and then we uh fry in the walk again to add
the seasonings and what's amazing now is that you actually shop in an Asian grocery store in the US you're going to see something that's called Chinese cauliflower which actually has less fet and more stem the way Chinese like it yes it's looser isn't it it's but
ironically it's not really a Chinese cauliflower but it just so happen that this is what we like marketing marketing and you know I work in restaurants with a very heavy Asian accent and so we embrace it fully and purchase those cauliflower we have
to drive out of our way right s to get this cauliflower at like good fortune or yeah uh the Chinese supermarket yeah there's a I I always ran into that and I was like why is it Chinese I never heard of Chinese cauliflower so I guess someone just marketing term using that
yeah the fuchia you and I we did our last podcast about 3 years ago I think almost to the day and since then you've been back to China plenty how is food in changdu change and in China more generally because 3 years is a long time in China a lot happens right what are
the differences um well I would say the craze for Hot Pot carries unabated hot pot and spicy skewers and this is a negative to me am I wrong to think that they're all I like them but they're all a bit the same unless you go to a very
very good one um for me it's a negative I think Hot Pot is really fun once in a while but um it's sort of cook your own dinner stuff and it doesn't really showcase the Myriad of different cooking techniques and in a way it's just one narrow aspect of Chinese cuisine and I
think you if one looks at it cynically the spread of hot B is partly because it's very cheap and easy for consumers but also it's very cheap and easy for restaurant because you don't need skilled chefs you need one master broth and you need people to slice up a whole
lad of ingredients and then you can make a lot of money so um and also some new ingredients um so okra and ice plant have um popped up on menus everywhere and also I mean this dish actually the the cauliflower dish is something that's become ubiquitous well we're coming up
next is um some Wan Street snacks uman sesame noodles and we have S do the Triple A dop this is really exciting so PR your request yeah because I went to Wuhan in 1992 on my first trip to China and I haven't been back since and I remember tasting particularly the do PE
so the skin is tell me talk me through the dish it's muming uh so that's the dough the bean it's Bean skin literally with eggs uh and it's stuffed with fried rice right with little nuggets STI sticky sticky rice uh the triple layer indicates one
layer of the skin one layer of the rice and then um also there's the means pork uh situation going on and that I mean I really I haven't seen that Dish anywhere since so in more than 20 years and the ramen hot dry noodles is a very famous probably the most famous with dopy of of
um Wuhan snacks right so and this is is it made with gam yeah or we make our uh noodles here in house uh we couldn't find the right consistency for the noodle again this is not going to be as close as what we get in Wuhan but uh because of the quality we have on
noodles uh we're able to make them house and this is with pickled beans or fresh beans uh uh y yeah so this is with salted um yard long beans very good isn't it and Lydia what would you say characteriz is the food of Wuhan if someone has never been to Wuhan
and you had to tell them on a postcard what it's about it's a lot of uh fresh River fish uh we are by the yza river so a lot of really fresh produce River fish and also the flavor it's um we don't use citan peppercorn Citron pepper corn is from Citron uh typically
but now I want to say the cuisine in China is so fluid and translucent you can almost eat dumplings anywhere in the South and you can eat sichan anywhere like the further north you go you can eat s too so um if we are really talking about the Reginal difference it's uh we
use a lot of local vegetable like uh it's something we well haven't had there's no chance to eat outside ofan H TI Thai the winter vegetable that is one of my favorite vegetables in the whole world that's um red or purple rape shoots right and just in the winter and
they are stir fried and they have a hint of bitterness and they are juicy and they are just marvelously delicious this um this thorpy to an English person is reminding me a little bit of shepherd's pie so there's a layer of sort of Salu
pork and then sticky rice instead of potato and the the the golden um Bean skin instead of like maybe you might put a layer of grated cheese and Grill it on top now you learned Chinese food in China of course much of it in Sichuan Province unan province as Chinese teach
food how is the method of Education and Training different from say Great Britain or the United States um well I haven't been to culinary school in Great Britain the United States so I'm I'm not sure you've been to school in in these countries
yeah well I mean I suppose that I mean the first thing is that um when you go to cooking school you are learning the building blocks of a Cuisine which is like the grammar of a language so the basic components the basic processes and flavors which you then put together to
make a multitude of dishes so whereas um I I guess if you were studying French cuisine you will learn some you know um classic sources a bit of knife work um um techniques of pastry making um and in China in sichan absolutely fundamental was daong the knife skills I actually
have a story to share about Dad's uh cutting knife uh he said when he first started learning there was uh in school there's limited time but he wants to really excel at it so he returned back to the dorm started cutting using CLI to cut newspaper to practice really yeah
yeah so they like they would spend a lot of time outside of school um to be able to cut better and it's not doesn't matter what you cut as long as you are cutting well I remember actually my classmates at the cooking school they they were all um a lot of them were
actually living in and um sometimes they would invite me up to the dormitories in our lunch break and they would be practicing vegetable carving and dumpling shaping and so on but you know when I enrolled at the school I was given a Cleaver and my Chef's whites and
that was the tools of the trade really and um so we had to almost all the cutting very sophisticated cutting was done with this one life which is not a heavy butcher Chopper but a very light and versatile cutting Cleaver I would love to know how you got
into and fell in love with Chinese cuisine generally um well I was already a very enthusiastic eater and quite a serious cook from childhood so in my teens I was reading cookbooks and cooking particularly French Patisserie I love pastry making in my teens and then
I got into China through a job I had um went there on holiday loved it started learning Mandarin it wasn't a plan it looks like a plan in retrospect but it really really wasn't and um ended up in the sit Capital changdu as a British Council scholar and I was supposed to be
doing academic work but ended up spending all my time in kitchens and then did some private classes at the cooking school and finally um was invited to enroll as the first foreign student they'd had in a chef's training course but it wasn't um it was what it
really was was I had since I was a teenager been in the habit of keeping a diary and the diary always ended up up being recipes and menus and descriptions of food so that just carried on when I was in sichan and I was a scholarship student at the University um so didn't
have huge amounts of money to spend but there were all these little noodle shops and Street stores and little restaurants around the university um serving spectacular food and it was all freshly made dazzling flavors healthy delicious and so I was just curious about it so I
started not with some master plan to write books about Chinese food because of course it would have sounded insane for an English woman to want to make a career out of writing about Chinese food in the '90s you know insane um but it was just out of interest and I got more
and more interested as time went on when you visited Street stalls and all these small food shops how willing were people to kind of open their kitchens to you and show you behind the curtain surprisingly willing um just to put that in context so in the
'90s China was really just beginning to open up and so in this changdu this provincial capital city there were only I think a couple of hundred foreigners and so we were very novel and hugely interesting to local people just as China was very interesting to us and so
I would go to a restaurant owner and say may I study in your kitchen and um um people were just stunned that an Foreigner and a woman and a University graduate student would actually like to be mingling with chefs and getting Mony in a kitchen and so I think people just
found it um rather intriguing and hilarious so and I I always say this I mean all the work I've ever done is completely dependent on the generosity of people in China and it's very much a collaboration you know people who have all this knowledge but they don't have
the means to communicate in English and they have always been very supportive and generous so coming up next we have the salt and pepper uh Lotus R sandwich oh which again is a very typical Wuhan Cuisine we generally have this um over Chinese New Year or a big
celebration uh something deep fright it's a luxury um we and they doday like households don't really do a large batch of oil and deep fry so that's something really consider as um prees backr it's like sandwiches thin slices of lotus root with minced
pork is it in the middle oh yes and then coated in batter and deep fried right I don't know how well you know American Chinese food like what you can find in America I assume you do know it well and I wanted to find out how is it different from what you can find in England
is it basically the same scene or is it a different scene I think um so you have the old school American Chinese food um chop sui egg fuong I would say were not as big in Britain they were in the early days but you don't see them anymore but I actually had my first American Chinese
chops sui last year in Los Angeles and I went to this um Cafe in the Grand Central Market with UB a famous sichuanese chef and I made him eat chopu cuz I wanted to see his reaction and um well he was very um he was very diplomatic and said that he
thought it was you know quite a healthy and cheap meal a mixture of meat and vegetables and rice and so on but um definitely light years away from his own style of cooking but um so there are certain dishes that are really popular in America in particular on the East
Coast General so's chicken which doesn't really exist in England at all so our traditional Chinese dishes where when I was growing up we had sweet and sour pork balls so a nugget of pork meat dipped in a very thick batter deep fried and served with a bright lurid red sauce
and this is what I adored as a child and then more recently every Chinese restaurant really um certainly in London but I think Nationwide has um crispy duck so it's the easy way to do a peeking duck peeking duck is very complicated you need to wind dry it you
need a special oven but crispy duck the duck is marinated and steamed and then deep fried in pieces so you can just order a quarter of a duck but it's served peeking du Style with the very thin pancakes and the sweet fermented sauce and scallion cucumber it all
sounded like a variety of fish and chips yeah so so it's just different and it's you know different communities and different markets and um different Evolution and now we have what quar Under fish rolls that's a Peter Chang specialty created by Him Am I Wrong
created by Him tell us is there a story um there is a lot of stories and um for the season right now we incorporated blue Maryland crab uh so today we're taking it to a new version uh you're enjoying the crab roll a cenal crab roll I actually have a question for fuchsia um you know when
you see the rise of Chinese cuisine I think now the Chinese cuisine itself uh doesn't have a Brer between like the way they cook it in China and the way they cook it in the US you know American American Chinese cuisine versus the authentic Chinese cuisine I think there
we are actually for my trips to China uh almost once every year I notice that food in China is slowly to evolve to change as well when I was at a shinese restaurants uh to have this drunken shrimp I noticed that they use citrum pepper corn in the marinade so it comes
to a wonderful surprise with the shaing wine the C pepper corn um there's really no fine line between can canones Cuisine Shanghai cuisine or sichan Cuisine and where do you think the future modern Chinese quisine is going um it doesn't
have to be in China I think it's a global I mean I think that um a Cuisine is always a living um form of culture that's recreated on a daily basis it's just not something static and that's where you sort of trip up when you start getting hung up about Notions of
authenticity and um particularly in China again and sichan is a good example of a place with feverish competition in the restaurant business and so many different restaurants all chasing new ideas and New Concepts so there's a period at the moment of extraordinary
mixing so people traveling all over the world all over China and as you said you find citrines dishes on everyone's restaurant menus even the old Cantonese restaurants in London have to have some spicy dumplings or some spicy fish because that's what customers want um
and also just in sichan itself that like the fish dish we've just had that you find the d d aluto the um steamed fish head with chopped salted chilies which is very Hunan is popular in suchan there are other is from jjang but I don't think this is actually something
entirely new and when I was researching the the new edition of the book one thing that was really interesting was going back to a guide to changdu written in 1908 um called the changu Tongan and this has a list of restaurants and dishes and snacks and you can see from
that period that it was already quite Cosmopolitan and there were quite a few dishes that were clearly from the jangan region there were um Western dishes like um sort of certain pork chops and dishes with curry um which would have come I think from the um there were
missionaries foreign missionaries um living in ch early 20th century um so in in the 20th century there was a period when China closed in on itself but we're now just having another period of flowering but with increased transport Links of course it's faster and crazier
and more International but I think you're right that the big difference with um uh Chinese food in the west is that you no longer have a community of mainly Cantonese American Chinese people who are catering for Western tastes and who don't have access to many local
ingredients apart from dried and you know preserved food which they could import very early on but um you now have a fluid interaction between food in China and food in Chinese communities abroad and many of the customers as you you as you've said here are actually
Chinese and they're recent arrivals or temporary residents in the states and they don't want to eat Americanized Chinese food they want to eat the same food they have at home and then also I think in California there are people growing Chinese vegetables there's fresh
produce airr in so it's not just soy sauce and dried shrimp things that you can get to make Chinese Fe you can get so many ingredients Lydia the new dish yes we have Grandma's sticky rice wall with crab again uh typically the feeling uh it varies traditionally with mined
pork pork is uh heavily used in central East China but again because of crabs uh is in season right now that's why we you know it's about where you are uh the food changes so is it just crab or is it crab mixed with pork uh crab mixed with
tofu oh really how interesting and they look very pretty all speckled with rice gra don't they on the outside Lydia's father um is a generation who in China lived through the Great Famine and indeed it wasn't until he went to cooking school as um a young man that he
was exposed to to food in abundance I mean there were many things he had never tasted before because the farm they came from in the country it was such deprivation how how has that experience for so many chefs of this generation informed the cooking of in of China
well I suppose everyone of that generation had experience of acute hardship of different degrees depending on where you were living and so one of the great joys of the reform period has been the easy availability of food and particularly meat because people um who
lived through those years told me that they used to dream and fantasize about pork because they never had it and some people used to for example have a small piece of fatty pork and use it to wipe around the walk for stir frying vegetables and then keep it for the next
dish because they really didn't have enough meat to eat um so I think that sometimes the excess of Chinese dining out with just tables Laden with dishes which is something the Chinese government is actually trying to curb now there's a campaign to make people um
waste less food and eat what's on the table but that's a reaction to the period of deprivation but one thing that really amazes me is how um despite these very tough years and not only the f but also the cultural revolution which was an assault on you know Bourgeois and
Elite culture when um fancy food and elegant restaurants were attacked and forced to change their ways and become more proletarian um that it's extraordinary that the cuisine has recovered and that you can once again get Exquisite and refined Chinese food
and I was talking to um one elderly Chef um recently about the culture of L Revolution period And I was asking him about the effect of the movement on the dishes they were allowed to cook and he said well actually that was the least of
our problems the main problem was that just wasn't enough of everything um so um given that China is a particularly food focused culture and it's always been so important I think um yeah the memory of deprivation is very strong for The Elder generation but of course not
for the younger generation right so you don't have any direct experience of this yeah what's your most popular dish with Chinese guests and with non-chinese guests here now it's all infused um we get a lot of reviews uh luckily from The Washington Post the Washingtonian and
people are H they have the urge to try something different they want to know more about why the food is cooked this way of course they're going to get their um favorite comou chicken the map tofu um but also when you see this um fish dish with piles of uh
chopped fresh chilies how can you resist uh so this is the dish um that's very popular on the menu the fresh chili flounder fish with rachelli M that's a bit like the Hun you ex h a very popular dish is a the head of the giant carp big head carp split in two on a huge platter
and covered in pickled chilies and steamed and this is a more small version of that with Flounder well I remember the first time I actually experienced um Sichuan pepper corn uh was in the 9s um I have a very different background of you know being Chinese because um my
parents left China during the war in the uh the late 30s and early' 40s and I was born in in Thailand and grew up in Singapore um I don't have any um you know Sichuan in my blood but it's really strange that the first time I actually encountered The Taste was through
Japanese cooking with Sano pepper and in um Japanese Cuisines you know Sano pepper is actually like Chinese peppers and because perhaps the Japanese palette um likes more subtle flavor it's always brined or soaked in water or sugar water is that correct and then it's it's a
very different effect because it has a very gentle numbing effect which is the main characteristics of Citron pepper corn and so in the '90s it was a big chop for me and it actually took me a Whole Decade to kind of become accustomed to that you know he heavy
spicy Sensation that that last for a long time actually Beyond Chili's yeah but you're right there are many different varieties of the plant yes so the classic red Sichuan pepper um there are actually different varieties from different parts of China and it's
thought to express its teoa like wine grapes so some Boutique Citron pepper producers now are starting to label the exact place of origin of their pepper um and you can really taste the difference but there's also green Sichuan pepper yes which has appeared on the market
only since the late '90s that was a previously wild variety that was then licens as a food in the late '90s and is everywhere now and it has a very zesty refreshing lime flavor and it's particularly good with fish with frog in sort of light vibrant um soupy dishes
and this will also take over the world in my opinion it will take over the world yeah and Sancho is another variety and um there are also in the countryside in China I've stayed in farmhouses where people use wild varieties of cetu pepper
and they add them to their green tea for example how is Chinese or Sichuan Farmhouse cooking different from say the urban Styles a tourist would more likely encounter is it more fermentation or what else well I think City people would often say that country cooking tastes
the best because you get um often people growing their own vegetabl is is it otherwise different other than just freshness you have I would say Less meat generally because people traditionally would rear their own pigs for meat um and fabulous cured pork por so bacon and
sausages which will be used and salt pork used in small amounts and cooked with country vegetables and sometimes more um sort of coarse vegetables like potatoes and um sweet corn and so on and also wild vegetables so certain amount of foraged greens for example um and
pickles yes traditionally everyone would have a pickle jar and they would use pickles to add Umami flavors and refreshing sourness to their dishes I have the most naive question possible as an economist I'm interested in the geographic spread of innovation and Mala
I find to be one of the glories of cooking anywhere the whole world but why has Mala not spread to more locals either within China or elsewhere what hinders the spread of Mala and if you look at the border condition well there's Mala here but not there what
accounts for that do you have any any sense of that fuchsia well firstly it's just concerned with patterns of immigration so the M taste the tingly taste that's the word in Chinese which also means pins and needles and anesthesia the tingly Taste of cetan pepper so that Ma flavor is very
particular to sichan sichan is an inland Province and did not um send people out into the world on mass until comparatively recently but I cook with it why don't the people say in Wuhan or some other part of China I think now they do now they do since the reform and
opening up in the '90s there are citran restaurants all over the country and people are crazy for Mala I think one of the reasons is that um it's it's so stimulating so Mara is a flavor that holds its own in a very crowded Marketplace and also that um some more
delicate Cuisines they speak more quietly and they don't attract your attention in the same way and I think they get drowned out like the delicate cooking of the jangan region around Shanghai which we were talking about last time that that's more subtle more
difficult to do well relies more on particular ingredient suchan the Mala flavor is this flavor balm you can apply to anything so you right it travels very well but I think your question about why it's not more pervasive is just cuz it's early days
it's going to be everywhere it will take over the world it will Lydia's mother has a good story about sichon peppercorn so when she first encountered sichon peppercorn she's like she's very adventurous where she from in China Wuhan okay Wuhan yeah yep like fisha
said we didn't know what the ingredient is uh until in the '90s and that's when Mom started uh you know to discover this New Sensation she's the first one in her family to step out of the comfort zone be like oh this is really interesting let me see what I can do with it so
nowadays she even use Su pepper corn in her cookies that's how crazy she is the soup we're drinking right now it's blackbone chicken uh soup uh uh typically you would see um uh the spice that we use uh to make the soup but the version that we make it now it's
uh very clear it's like how my mom likes to drink is that D you know yeah Chinese Angelica that um that slightly stringent taste it's a medicinal herb Chinese Angelica D yep yeah uh there's also um Chinese States uh you see the red goji berry uh and then the Chinese
yam the Chinese yam which has a lovely consistency a bit like potato but a bit slippery as well but I particularly asked Lydia for this soup because um for one thing I thought it would be nice to have a very refreshing pet cleansing contrast to some of the spicier dishes
and also because soup is so important in Chinese meals and almost every Chinese meal will have some sort of soup even if it's really rudimentary just me Tongue in Countryside which is um the leftover water used for par boiling rice or you
might just have some pumpkin boiled in water and it's a pallet cleanser um and that's one real difference I think between um Western and Chinese Cuisines that soup is more necessary for Chinese people as part of the diet I agree if I'm cooking for CH for friends at home
if they're not Chinese I might make a soup or not but if I'm cooking for Chinese friends I will put a lot of effort into making a beautiful broth because they'll really appreciate it and it'll make them enjoy the whole meal more as well what does China do best in western
food um pastry actually you're right you quite right and it's actually the greatest love affair uh for a Chinese person and you know as you were mentioning the cosan cities with the people of xats and the locals the idea of pastry from all over the world have really penetrated
China with very full kind of synergy yeah you've absolutely nailed it lamination um bread uh steamed baked and it's really taken on to a next level where you know in Taiwan in particular like bread is just infused with local ingredients like Lan or local wine tea
so I think that that's kind of the greatest um you know marriage of uh technique and ideas and it's funny because you get in China One thing that's quite trendy is toast so you get toast caes but this is not toast as English people like it sort of crusty
toast any yeah and they have these very soft Square loaves which are served with all kinds of different toppings sometimes ham and cheese and ketchup or um yeah sometimes there the bread is mixed up with red beans so it's a totally Fusion food um and you also get
um pizzas that would outrage any Italian like durian Pizza Pizza strawberry and chocolate pizza um but also in changu and this is one thing French Patisserie I had some of the best hasson that I've had anywhere in shangdu recently made by a young sichuanese pastry chef who's
married to a Frenchman and lived in Paris and trained in Paris and there are several um patisseries in changdu and these are not um Fusion Creations that would horrify Italians like the pizzas they are doing Patisserie but with Chinese ingredients
sometimes a bit less sweet because Chinese tend not to like the sweetness of say Americans or even French um but done with stunningly beautiful technique absolutely ravishing displays of P you just want to eat everything I agree and I was surprised because um I've been
traveling to China since the90s as well and I see the change and cities or towns that weren't very popular back then like C like I I managed to find really top-notch bang yes and it's the thing that's really remarkable about that is the speed because it's happened in 5 years 10
years not more than that it's just like lightning suddenly they've cracked patiss in the way that the Japanese have and one thing one thing also that's really really shocking to me is for a great tea drinking nation is the popularity of coffee so not only
Starbucks which has spread like a rash over the whole country and now has a local imitator called luckin coffee which emerged from nowhere and but also um there are so many little cafes doing um freshly ground coffee beans and I went to a little town near Lan where the
giant budha is in pursuit of a particular fermented tofu which I adore and um I was dying for an espresso and I thought no hope in this little County town but I found a little cafe and I had a superb espresso made with freshly ground beans
absolutely amazing but the only thing was they served it with a little dish of Mala pickled radish which is a really unpleasant flavor combination in my opinion where would you go in China if you were somebody restricted meat and I'm also curious from a home cooking
perspective how you make a good meal without meat yeah well if you want to make a good meal without meat then Chinese cuisine offers plenty of fabulous Solutions because the Chinese are brilliant at using um fermented foods uh like uh soy sauce black beans
cetan chilibean paste and fermented tofu all of which have almost meaty or cheesy or creamy Umami flavors to cook with vegetables so you can make the kind of dishes that are actually very appealing and satisfying to meat eaters as well as vegetarians because of these very bold
and satisfying flavors and mouth feels um but vegetarians in China do have a bit of a problem and that is because the Chinese approach to vegetarian eating is very different from the Western approach so in China people often make a distinction between Chinese Su
vegetarian eating vegetarian food and sush vegetarianism so Chinese people um are many Chinese people believe in Buddhism and will have vegetarian food when they go to visit a temple or on certain holy days but they don't abstain from meat all the time and I've even met an
elderly monk who was a lifelong vegetarian who said that when he was sick or weak he would eat a little meat to boost his strength so vegetarians traveling around China have this problem that sometimes they ask for vegetarian food and it has little bits of meat in
it or it's cooked with lard or stock or dried shrimps so it's quite hard you have to really insist to restaurants that I am a total vegetarian I don't you have to list the things you don't want to explain um and the only place that traditionally you would get pure
vegetarian and even vegan food is in um Buddhist monasteries and sometimes DST monasteries which have the larger ones have their own restaurants which cater for pilgrims and patrons and do extraordinary um Vegetarian Cuisine so partly it's simple vegetarian cooking
and partly it's funai imitation meat dishes you know impossible Burger they got their centuries before you and so you can go in sitan to a monastery and you can Feast on spare ribs and sharks fin and sausages and gong bow chicken and they're all totally
vegetarian so one change in the last few years is that there are a small number of Chinese people maybe Cosmopolitan intellectual types in cities who are becoming vegetarians in that Western way it is actually often connected with Buddhism but they are abstaining totally
from meat and not only from meat but also from the w the pungent um aromatics like garlic and all kinds of oniony vegetables which is also part of the Buddhist diet Lydia the next dish if you so what we have here it's a gingo style fish cake uh with a yellow eggy skin uh with
grandmother's fish ball so again this is you know the dish that beloved by our Westerner and uh Chinese clients very pretty yeah um everything in here is made in house you know that's uh years of culinary experience yeah and that's very sort of
classical presentation precisely with all these carefully cut rectangles of egg skin and you don't actually often see that no now even in China right and this Fishbowl dish this reminds me of a lot of New Year dishes in many regions of China which are quite laborious to
make because separately you've made a fish cake and fishbowl and then cut them up and reheated them in a big festive pot so people would often do that sort of thing for the Chinese New Year so is lamon uh spicy chili crisp oh la ganar yes yes yes so that delicious is that is
that a here thing or there it's everywhere it's very trendy and it's from guo Province another spice eating province in Southwest China um and it was invented by a woman La GMA and it's now the mass production and it has been popular in China for a long time and now
westerners getting addicted to it it's quite funny when you take a flight on Sichuan Airlines they have pretty good food and um sichuanese dishes maybe with rice and the um the steward will go around with a jar of Lan Mar sauce and offer to put a spoonful on your food
extra citran Airlines Lydia the next dish if you please yes the red pepper chicken with Sesame uh again that's our version of um the chong ching chicken we want to make something a little lighter not so heavily battered and the Sesame
flavor just uh creates a balance off the R peppers I have a question uh what are some of the kind of most interesting economic historic determinant of food so for example uh in Italy uh in the north of Italy it was typically a wealthier region so the pasta dishes come from a
lot of zero zero flow whereas in the south smolina is more popular and that's really shaped the the food scene what are some of your favorite stories from China of kind of the ways in which those economic realities or just technological realities have shaped the direction of
food development um well I suppose the first thing is that um patterns of trade historically and one thing that I always find very fascinating is that um many Chinese ingredients bear the names of the the of the the era and the place from which they were imported so for
example pepper in Chinese is called Hua Barbarian pepper because it was an imported um pepper from the Northwest where the H barbarians lived um from the h Dynasty onwards into China Jiao pepper was the original sitan pepper so lots of imports from that you can tell from
their names that they came from that from the Northwest in that period um more recently and there are other ones like the the um ingredient that came from the sea um in during the Ming Dynasty and the early Ching bear the name fan which is another word for
barbarian so the tomato is called faner um which means a barbarian eggplant and one of the early names for chile was fanga Barbarian pepper in such one they still call it haa sea pepper um and to in terms of connection with economics it's very conspicuous that um the great
Chinese Cuisines have just always followed the money so um you had a a flourishing restaurant scene in kaiun the city now known as kaiun which was a northern Song Dynasty capital from about the 10th Century um and there were restaurants including sichuanese
restaurants at that time in K Kang and when the Song Dynasty was overrun by nomadic Barbarians in about I think the 13th century the capital fled South to Hung Joo and then you had the court and so on in Hong Joo and that became a flourishing cultural center and that's where you
also had an extraordinary cuisine food writing poetry about food restaurants and um the jangan region that sort of hungo and yango all these cities were the Crocs of trade patterns the salt trade went all went through young Joe there were lots of Rich salt
merchants and they were the people who were having um lavish dinner parties entertaining the chenlong emperor on his southern tours and many of the grand old dishes come from there then later um you have um Shanghai and Ningbo and these
areas becoming rich treaty ports and having a different sort of cuisine in Shanghai an early Fusion Cuisine with there are Western Restaurants in Shanghai dating back to about 1900 doing a Shanghai version of um West food um and then during the cultural revolution
and so on the sort of um the place where you had all the Chinese money and the elite Taiwan and Hong Kong and those places became the sort of custodians of traditional Gastronomy so for uh those who've been anticipating for the Spice the mama CH home style is not very too
focused on just uh the heat the spicy but actually a lot of balance for flavor so so far we didn't really have something that's too um intense uh however this one uh it's we call it uh y River beef because uh of where we are from in the uham city uh we are by the yanza
river um so the main space we using here is actually Pico chili with some bird ey chili uh and uh Pio juice and those are the really deadly little green yeah sh they're called wild mountain chilies so you look at that and it's a delicate jade green it doesn't
look really red and spicy but they're the hottest sort of pickle chilies and also the bird's eye little rice chilies in Chinese I think I have that version with fish and Flounder yeah I remember having that I was I was really surprised how shwan used a picko chili that was my
first time here actually here and I was just can't stop eating it that's kind of uh our way of incorporating what we can find here in the United States so we use a lot of Tai Chili uh with the picko Jin now you're a famous laan cook when you encounter Sichuan food and also from
Wuhan I mean what connections strike you or what differences you must see this all through a different L yeah I remember um I remember having um encounter Shuan gin actually through Pang because I remember um when I first moved here I actually went to my friend
house who's from northern Lous and she was making this um chili paste it's a dry chili paste with um northern La uh peppercorn is very similar to Chan peppercorn but it's miter floor and I was encountered the first time I took the first bite I was like what is this
how come I never experienced this in my life before and it's from La so I actually did a lot of research and I found Peter check actually was um think about driving all the way to Williamsburg to try that but I I didn't make it out there until Peter CH was
opening here so i' ever since then I just start to experiment with more with Chan pepper corn um infused with LA laan cin so I actually made a dish recently with the steamed chicken with the steamed chicken which is one peppercorn is uh like a chili paste um with a
little bit of oil cuz I pretty much do a lot of res on pepper um kin as well so we don't use o oil um when we make uh uh chili paste so I start to um Infuse that with oil and use that on the chicken in Lan food do you CU I don't really know about Lan food but do you
have that sweet sour spicy salty thing no mostly Savory and sour spicy um and a little bit complex I would say complex because of the a lot of different herbs that we use and some funky definitely funky I forgot that one definitely funky we use a lot of fish
paste so is this very different from your other restaurants yes uh explain that a bit well first of we we wanted to do more um home style cooking and the upbringing my family is spent most time in Wuhan besides our time in the US right now um so like for example the
fish cake it's originated from one of the uh so it's a very typical fish cake uh in that region I typically don't really see this kind of fish cake like outside of Hub Province um so again you know this is something takes uh a lot of skill and um people outside of the
region would have different variety of fish cake but the way of to make it an eggy skin again that's something very typical in Hub so our main focus here is really to launch what we like to eat at home uh for example uh veggie dish uh that's vegetarian if you if for
vegetarian to eat eggs uh a farmer stir fry it's a stir fry of uh some green peppers uh Chinese celery uh tofu skin and eggs and this is something my grandma can easily make out of um the ingredients she can get from her garden sometimes it's tofu skin
sometimes it's just homemade tofu I think it's so interesting because um certainly when I start started um writing about Chinese food I was reviewing Chinese restaurants in London for timeout magazine and a lot of the Chinese restaurants at that period they
had the English language menu intended for English speakers and they would have secret Chinese menus with all the really good and interesting dishes that the Chinese people wanted to eat I mean not strictly segregated but a lot of the funkier dishes or the more unusual ones
that you don't find transation too yes and I think that a lot of westerners used to go to Chinese restaurants with a very fixed idea about what Chinese food was and they would want those classic familiar dishes and that's totally changed so now you can put anything on a
Chinese menu and the foodie people the more adventurous people are Keen to try new dishes right so you don't have to cater for different audiences anymore no we don't and sometimes we do find our non-chinese customer are more open to having trying new things because the
Chinese normally come having this um same menu over and over uh pretty funny I have a writing question because I I write cookbooks for other chefs and um you've updated this cookbook and I like to explain to people that there's fashion in cooking just like their's
fashion in anything else and they change and and they and they grow and they reference the past but also in writing styles too there's a fashion how how has the writing world and the writing style changed now compared to when you set out
to well I think there's a huge appetite for detailed cultural information about food um and when I sent a proposal for my first sichan cookbook in the late '90s it was rejected by all six Publishers and they all said that well British readers would not be interested
in a regional Chinese cookbook because it was too neat to narrow and I think you know you can see how ridiculous that statement sounds now because I think there's a real hunger for specific and specialized cookbooks so that's completely changed so it's not outlying
thing to want to do a very local and Regional cookbook um and I think there's been an explosion in food writing as a Gena I mean not just in books but on the internet and all kinds of new indie food magazines and an appetite for more stories about food so that's just become
very mainstream but I would say that the main difference perhaps well one is that the greater availability of ingredients and the hunger for authentic information but also just in design and people wanting lots of photographs and visual
information as well and has the way you've written the re written the way you Broach writing recipes now has that changed over the years um no I don't think so I mean I'm more experienced so I think it's a bit more streamlined but I would say that it's possible to push
the boat out a bit further in terms of more adventurous dishes and ingredients um because I always want to have the majority of dishes in a cookbook doable for someone not all of them so every now and then you sit back and you cackle I'm going to put one in that none of them
can make yeah yeah being ahead of the curb and which which recipe would that be in your new book well um there's a very popular very fiery Chongqing dish called maang which is spicy blood stew and it's made with pigs blood pig pigs blood and aul and it can actually be
made with ducks blood if you have it but that's something that is not available in every Chinese shop and you have to be more adventurous to make yes so I think you can see the difference in the cauliflower more even more so in this
steam star version that it's a little bit different with more stem yeah so mild addition with that beautiful purple Chinese eggplant we call it Garden dual again from grandmother's Garden two vegetables uh you want to know what creates the consistency yes sace [Music]
oil sorry to tell you but um glob yeah globally eggplant always a lot of oil from eggplant pesan to Chinese cooking is is pretty much soaked up in that that creates the meaty texture you know that's very tender um it's it's like eating pork belly so recently I
just came back from Shanghai and I went to a restaurant that you had written about jilan so um how did you come about meeting Chef L well so I've known him for 15 or 20 years and he's actually one of the chefs that I brought to um the CIA Culinary Institute of America in I think
2004 and I came with him and two of leading satane chefs to do a demonstration there so he's always been an extremely creative and talented chefs like one of the most outstanding Chefs of his generation so I followed his career with interest and when I first
met him he had a restaurant serving more Farmhouse food um called sang trza The Village chef and um this was all the hearty spicy ja changai Homestyle flavors really um but he had this dream to open a very restaurant um doing his own style of s high level Cuisine so Udan I can't
remember which year it opened but there so that's what he's trying to do is to recreate the Ambiance of an old Mandarin's house you know a lot of the finest food in China was in the private dining rooms of um Chinese officials who would have private chefs so I think
there's a maximum of about 18 seats in that restaurant it's tiny and it's run by um Chef Lan and his wife and his sister-in-law and a few other staff um and it's typical of suchan banquet cuisine in that you have some of the spicy flavors of folk cooking but you
also have very delicate flavors based on Exquisite stocks made from chicken and ham and fish depending on the dish and so I think you can also see that he has some very traditional dishes like you might get some malao numbing and hot beef as a starter
or a spicy rabbit dish very traditional but then he becomes extremely inventive he also designs all his own table wees which are handmade in Jinger and the porcelin capital so it's quite a an experience and very different from the kind of restaurants tile that you write
about yes um of holes in the wall and popular places it was highend um but I was most impressed when I I had a little tour of the kitchen and there was only one walk like a portable walk and you know this is if I'm okay Chinese cook and I always
tell people like my weakness especially Lydia's dad that I can't walk if you want me to cook with you you're doing everything on the walk I'm just going to fry and do the salads do the steaming the dimsum I can do any of that but not the walk and so when I saw the kitchen
of uian I was very impressed because I always have been like thinking about is it possible to do a Chinese restaurant that's not walk focused and if you see the walk here I mean he's got what 10 12 around yeah I I won't be able to handle a kitchen like that but I think that
that that this new no walk or less walk Chinese restaurant um how you know I never figured out how they do that like in New York there's a very popular one called um how noodles by Madame oh yes beautiful and you know this is all over China and there's no Rock it's very
interesting really yes so I think I think you can't tell from the menu but you definitely have you know can go through you know a quite an Exquisite meal without realizing that you know nothing comes from the rock I mean I would say that um when people
think about Chinese cuisine they often think about stir frying as the Chinese method par Excellence but it's one of many different cooking methods and certainly steaming has been done in China since the Neolithic age and you can say that is the classic Chinese cooking method really
um but often a good meal will have steamed dishes and boiled dishes as well as stir fries and also particularly in such a wonderful cold dishes so cold dressed Meats cooked salads so yes it's not all about what cookery given your background in Singapore how do you
assess Chinese food in Singapore what's it good at what's it not good at in the last century if if you speak to a lot of um Chinese who migrated to let's say Thailand Vietnam Malaysia Singapore the crem of the crop went to Singapore and they mostly went before the the war
broke out during famine times of the rest of China and I find Singapore Chinese food at the core to be canones based I would say for the longest time um and over time it's been infused with um Malaysian influence um some Western some Thai uh and Indian and
so you find find a lot of spices you find a lot of fermented flavors curries and um you know cinnamon a heavier use of cinnamon clothes star an is which uh not it's used in CES cooking but not quite bold um and grew up with a lot of that and uh it's it's it's different it's in
its own category Al together would you say yeah yeah but I found I can't get very good Sichuan food in Singapore or at least I don't know how to find it that southern Chinese hwan fuen it's weird but it's pretty good Singaporean food is amazing Malay food
is amazing but a lot of the harder core Chinese regions somehow Singapore has too many other good things for singaporeans to be interested in them or do you have a different impression well to to clarify a little bit more um there's restaurant Chinese food and
there's home Chinese food the home Chinese food might even be more simple uh prob probably a lot of Hy or deu kind of flavors which has a lot of soups and clear broths and um almost like no stir fry and very little oil used in the cooking and lean meats lean cuts of meat
um and and restaurant tends to be spicier but I would say that Sichuan is is is for some strange reason for me in Asia it has taken a slower um growth uh especially in Thailand where you almost never see Sichuan restaurant it's ironic cuz you mentioned the the um complexity
of the favor profile and agree with you but in Thailand for some reason you just don't find a whole lot of Sichuan restaurants and the same thing in Singapore I would say that uh you probably find more in Hong Kong uh and the rest of China which is a a huge uh I
think it is the story of immigrants you know the immigrants in Thailand a lot of them were Chao or tal people um and you know Cantonese immigrants in southeast yeah Haka and Fuji and that's a completely different flavor profile and then in Thailand they have their own
spicy food so maybe they don't need sich ones in the same way there's something also about the mentality too of culture because I think spices for a lot of um Southeast Asians are seen as almost like not as high so as cantony because you do
have to consume with some kind of starch or rice and um a lot of Singaporean Chinese or Thai Chinese they prefer to eat more things like that or the vegetable for sure where you don't need rice and it becomes more of a lighter meal and something that maybe so you
know on a society level is considered more of the way to eat and this one we this is do G yeah um pressed to really oh this is lovely the significance of that uh so we use cured uh pork pork belly uh with smoking house uh with some leaks uh smoked tofu um and again the last when we see
the greens we know this is the last dish of the meal uh snow pea tips simple stirfry and this is real this is like also in Hunan Farmhouse cooking so a little bit of cured pork with tofu also with that Smoky flavor and the Chinese garlic or leak delicious that's
something else about Chinese um food it's it needs to be consumed at the hottest points temperature wise um so going back to the Udan story um yes a lot of uh there are like cold dishes um there are courses it's okay to have uh a room temperature but generally Chinese
food is not the best for tasting menu it's because everything needs to be consumed super super hot um I haven't really have you seen anything that really worked out in terms of Chinese tasting menu or for S oh well I mean I I mean I think that the food at
Udan and also ubor restaurant are fantastic but as you said there's actually less of an emphasis on stir fries so you don't get a big piping hot stir fry dish and more soupy dishes and brazes and so on so um yeah but I think I think um one of the reasons that some
Chinese chefs are now going for tasting menus is partly with an eye to International recognition actually um and wanting each dish to be presented beautifully and not on a shed dish that gets must up as it's passed around the table are we uh is it sort of similar to
like the Michelin guy but coming into China and maybe a lot of those restaurants is follows the format basically I think yeah and I think that's unfortunate it is that me as I mentioned before is not very well equipped to judge Chinese food and the
first Chinese restaurant to win three michan stars was one in a um fancy hotel in Hong Kong that did a tasting menu of courses which one person could enjoy but I think chefs in China as they become more internationally minded um they do feel a bit hard done by you know they
have this great Cuisine and why is it not recognized why is it not put on a par with Japanese for example that people are willing to spend spend money on and so some chefs are definitely I wouldn't say at all changing the cooking technique or style but just a bit the
presentation and aiming at that market of elite International cooking why you well I appreciate um that kind of restaurant too because I do travel to to often travel by myself and I can actually go to uian and eat at the bar by myself and enjoy like a myriad of
dishes with so much technique um solo and not have to eat 10 C cucumbers at one time but rather just one perfect one yes so you could be a m inspector I may be I'm kidding you talked about how you think about preparing food if you're having people over for a Chinese meal can you
just walk us through kind of if you were creating the balanced meal what are the pieces that you want to hit you mentioned soup already well the first thing is that if I'm cooking at home I don't want to be like a banshee over the stove for the whole evening so I would
not choose a menu That's all last minut stir fried dishes particularly important cooking at home so I would always do a spread of cold dishes and how many depends on my energy levels and how many people but maybe at least three or four
cold dishes and they're easy to prepare in advance and really delicious people can start eating them while you prepare the other dishes I would also do a slow cooked stew like some bread braed pork or beef really delicious and then um some I I normally do M dul just cuz it's
one of the greatest dishes in the world and everyone loves it and it's very easy to make and that's a strong dish so I would also always have a lightly stir-fried vegetable and then another dish that I often do is a steamed fish Cantonese style and it's so easy to make
and I almost feel embarrassed that it it wins so much praise there's something about that method a really fresh fish and um you just um marinated a bit of shaing wine Ginger and scall and steam it strew over some sliver Ginger and scallion Sizzle over some hot oil and
then baste it in a little soy sauce and that's it and it's so easy and it's Sublime and that's a nice contrast to the hotter citres dishes so um yeah and I would try and get a balance between dry dishes and soupy ones so you have different mouth feels different shapes
so if the meat is in big thick cubes I might have a stir fry that's slivered so it's not very scientific but it's impressionistic and I just try and think about how all these things will taste in sequence and in relation to one another and how they will look on the table and
then in China you don't normally have a separate dessert course you normally have fruit so either cut fruit I try and get some Chinese fruit seasonal maybe tangerines in Winter maybe dragon's eyes or L cheese in another season and then because my guess maybe Western and need
a sugar hit then I sometimes Buy in some little bucks or chocolates to serve with the fruit and some nice Chinese tea or sometimes um it's a rice cake um uh for example we're going to have in a minute in a minute it's um milango milango it's
fermented rice cake uh with just this uh White a little translucent and how do you think more generally about serving Chinese final course or I may call it dessert in America where Americans expect big heaping of pie and sweetness and sugar how do you approach that what do you
pick what do you recommend we actually do have a sesame flowless chocolate cake on the menu uh right now being made by piche uh and also matcha cream cheese uh sulle cheesecake sule cheesecake um those are things that's not so after a big meal
like this today there's just hardly any room left for a yes you always have a separate uh stomach for dessert but um yeah I'm I'm very much in favor if you want to have a sweet hit it doesn't have to be Chinese right if you want to have
sweet have a chocolate cake that's right long that's right for a long time the uh you know find dining Chinese restaurants in the US you just get a chocolate smoo cake or or a croissant or foule yeah but uh with my shanghan uh mother and Heritage I do have a very very very
sweet palette like you know I grew up eating chocolates for breakfast what other Cuisines do you really like to cook do you have a secondary like a if this is your major what's your minor basically other Chinese Cuisines I mainly cook Chinese food yeah all the
time even at home yeah that's what I instinct ly do and when that's my comfort food now and that's the easy thing to rustle up so I do do a bit of Italian I really love marchella hazan's books and um yeah and a bit of Turkish I spent some time in Turkey when I was
much younger but the thing is when I have guests they want me to cook Chinese food and then that's what I like eating as well Soo I certainly hope they don't want you to make Yorkshire pudding no and I don't and bangers I didn't know how to make your how do you experience the
oppression of being famous at cooking what's the major disadvantage of that is it that you always feel obliged to be pleasing other people if there's a meal or can you just set that out of your mind and make other people cook when I published my first book suddenly
my friends started saying we're scared to cook for you and that's a shame because it's lovely being cooked for and you don't have to be a professional cook um but the funny thing was that after my first book was published I had a total cooking paralysis at home for ages I was
too scared to cook for people cuz cuz I thought everyone was going to be thinking oh she's a professional cookbook writer it's got to be really good and I would only disappoint them and um now I don't care anymore but the great Advantage about writing about food
particular Chinese food is that I do get invited out for the most wonderful meals in China and I feel so privileged on that note why don't we end the podcast formally I just like to thank uh fuchsia and again recommend hard uh her new book the food of Sichuan
what I find most remarkable in her books is someone who writes books and reviews many books most books there are just Pages Pages where the author is coasting like what's there might be fine it might be true but there's parts that are really good and then Parts like yeah
yeah yeah and in fuchia books there's no page there's no paragraph there's no word that's coasting like it's all as great as the best parts and to me that's a phenomenal achievement just in terms of the production function of fucha Dunlop you know whether or not Chinese
food is your thing they're just marvels of books to read to understand books and to thank Lydia and her family and all of the people in the kitchen all of those serving us Lydia this was a remarkable meal I'll repeat again Mama Chang is one of my favorite restaurants
on planet Earth I come here many many times I'll of course see you and all the others again and this was just phenomenal and to all of our distinguished guests thank you for coming your remarks and so on and let's just have a round of applause for fuchsia and
Lydia thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show