 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 Fuxia Dunlop. Now Fuxia is the only individual we have done three conversations with Tyler with, and that should tell you everything. Fuxia 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. Fuxia, 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, Lydia. Hi everyone, I'm Lydia. I am the business owner. This is my family business, and welcome everyone to Mamachang. Hi, my name is Fergus. I work on the Fitzwilliam and online publication of Irish Ideas. I'm Sam. I'm an economics undergrad, and I work on the Fitzwilliam with Fergus. I'm Rashid, and I help Tyler at Mercatus with Immortal Adventures. I'm Dan Wong. I spent the last six years in China. Now I'm at the Yale Law School as a visiting scholar. Very simple question to start with, Fuxia. 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. How many different soy sauces do you either make or own? I don't make them, but I don't have that many actually. A select few. There are other decisions to make when cooking, apart from choosing between 50 soy sauces. And where in China has the best soy sauce? Are your favorite in your opinion? Well, Fujian is supposed to be best for artisanal soy sauce. But I suppose there's an amazing, really traditional soy sauce factory in Hejiang in southern Sichuan. And it's this magical place on the banks of the river with all these clay pots, tanzas, with straw hats covering them when it rains, laid out with sort of traditional buildings. And they do traditional, old fashioned, no modern innovation soy sauce. And a combination of the flavor and the place is just exceptional. And many 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? Well, I suppose the striking thing about 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. But that it's also always been so multicultural and so sort of innovative. Like, you know, the Han 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, that 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 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. 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. So, you know, when I was there in the 90s, there weren't many foreigners at all. And 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 food-wise, well, one thing that I found hilarious and surprising was having take-outs 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 yujutsu, like semi-prepared dishes. And so it's been a real trend in China 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 it seems to be a really hot topic of conversation. And of course, all these concerns about sort of 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 Chen. And today we're having a banquet meal. So, invitation to a banquet. We typically like to start our banquet meal with something called a cold platter. And today we have a platter of four different kinds. We have the baba beans with goji berry. We have the braised shiitake mushroom. We have some tofu skin and mala beef jerky. Fuchsia. 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. It 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, there are more restaurants with small tables designed for couples and smaller groups. And yeah, so, 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 Wang to my left who will ask a question or two. Fuchsia in your book, you quote Darren Adria as saying, who is the most important culinary figure of the last 50 years? Well, surely it is Mao Zedong because the chairman sent all of China's farmers and all of China's chefs to work in factories, thus destroying the preeminence of Chinese cuisine. Is he right? How much do we really understand what culinary culture was between before the People's Republic and can we recover a lot of those traditions now? 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 of going back to the 10th century of people making imitation meats from plant foods. You have this tremendously creative transformational cuisine which echoes the avant-garde cooking of modernist chefs in the West, all this stuff. And yet China has been the sort of terror incognita for many people in the food world. And this is, I think it's purely historical reasons. So, you know, the Chinese food that most people in the West know stems from American Chinese food which was created by immigrants from one particular region, like Cantonese South, who were working in very 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 Chinese food. So, you have this simplified, very appealing, fantastically popular and successful but not really a good representation of this amazing culinary nation. Yeah, I think, and then 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 Japanese sushi but not so much on Chinese food. So, I think that, yeah, Farinagia is right, that Chinese food doesn't have the recognition, the acknowledgement that it really should have. And yeah, and I think now it's possible really to have a fresh look. Can we cook a 10th century meal from Hangzhou today or is that mostly lost to us? Well, the frustrating thing is that there are some, there's an amazing sauce. Well, actually, of sort of, what is it, 12th, 13th century Hangzhou, describing all the food served in city restaurants and it is dizzying. You know, there are all different kinds of restaurants, regional Buddhist vegetarian restaurants, restaurants for students and snack shops of different kinds. And the author lists all these delicacies but there are no recipes or descriptions. So, there's tantalizingly not very complete information but I know a chef in Hangzhou, 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 but there are some continuities in ingredients and techniques. Fuxia, we'll give you a moment to eat so I'll ask you Dan a question. Much of the pandemic you spent in China, some of that in Yunnan. What did you learn about Yunnanese food and its originals? I wonder whether Yunnanese food can be considered a cuisine as such. I think it is mostly not a very convenient label. So, Yunnan is a very mountainous region that is historic Tibet in the north and that is close to being culturally Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar in the south and so how do we make sense of a cuisine that is basically Tibet in the north and Thailand in the south? I don't really think that there's such a thing as possible that it is such a mountainous zone splintered by perplex with intricacies and so 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 Rashid. We'll get back to Fuxia 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 Barbados is actually quite dull, unfortunately. However, in Panama, which I also live, Chinese food is probably as zubrant as you would go with some parts of China. There are parts of Panama where the El Dorado area where dim sum is the Chinese restaurants are packed. They are full, not only with local Chinese but also other Panamanian races and it's just a very big aspect of culture. 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, I think, quite surprising almost like a hidden secret in Central America. Do you have a question for Fuxia? 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 Sichuan. Well, yeah, so as you said, there's been a bid to standardize and categorize classic dishes. So, you know, the local government also in Chongqing, they've produced publications which say this is Marple Dorful and this is the ingredients. So, you know, we're doing a sort of, you know, Appalachian Controlé for Wine or something. 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 a Marple Dorful. Maybe some key characteristics, but you don't have every chef measuring to the gram the amount of minced beef or the amount of Sichuan pepper. So, I think I would say they're not having that much influence and also because Sichuanese cuisine, one of the great things about it is that it's so dynamic. I mean, people in Sichuan love eating and they're creative and they're always, you know, doing things like making Sichuanese dishes with okra, which was not around when I was a student there in the 90s. So, I think that there's always this tension between, you know, we all feel nostalgic and we love tradition and there's nothing 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, yeah, so the difference between practice and theory is quite, you know, quite deep. You have observations on what we're eating so far. Mmm, well, it's certainly delicious and it's lovely to have some vegetable dishes and that's one of the things that Chinese food in the west with the sort of concentration on shrimp and chicken and, you know, beef and fried food 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 malar 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 shiitake mushrooms and this is gorgeous, these white beans with Laozi fermented glutinous rice wine and these are all quite unusual to have in an 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're quoting Yuan Mei, the great 16th century Chinese girl made. Well that's another thing that's really interesting because 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 American ham and 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 stark in this market where people don't go to Chinese restaurants for fine ingredients which is completely mad and in this book there's a whole chapter about this really that the Chinese practically invented the concept of terroir the obsession with seasons with provenance, exactly which land your vegetables are produced in and so on in traditional Chinese cookery certainly a vitally important part of it is sourcing seasonal fresh quality ingredients so it would be nice to recognise that and this is clearly happening here, we've got all these 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 the Maryland crab that paired with our tofu skin we also go out of our way trying to look for seasonal really good quality white beans what we are about to have, we have some Amish pork dumplings we try to source the best ingredients, whatever we can find and use it to make quality dishes and I think my opinion is that 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. You mentioned the terror concept, but for example there's a very high-end tea for example and they force a lot of the terror aspect I wonder how much of that is a quality difference or is it really a big chunk of marketing itself? Well, I mean it's like wine isn't it, it's exactly the same so I think that to an extent probably there is the exact, 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 longjing tea from the longjing hills around Hangzhou 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. So I went to India for the first time over the summer and the food was wonderful 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 nothing in their cuisine was sort of shocking to me in a way that I suspect it would be traveling around different countries of China. So I mean you mentioned Chinese food in the west being so Cantonese but is there kind of more to it than that or like more factors that determine which cuisines translate with higher fidelity? Yeah, so the first thing is that China is absolutely vast and it has a very stunning diversity of different terrains and climates with all the implications for produce so there are so many ingredients from different places and we'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 Sichuanese food and different regional cuisines there is so much more. I mean I've been researching this for about 30 years and I'm still discovering entire new styles local traditions practically every time I go to China. So yeah and in terms of fidelity I think Chinese food I said in the book it's a kind of victim of its own success and it's all about timing so Chinese was one of the earliest immigrants cuisines at a time when western palates were probably more conservative and it was 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 cities like this and all over the place 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 Sichuanese so it's now possible for Chinese restaurants in the west to you know they don't have to tailor to western taste they can just start off doing food for a Chinese clientele so then it's more faithful one should also say that one of the your Yunnan cuisine for example the marvellous thing about Yunnan cuisine is all these 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 you can't really reproduce many aspects of Yunnan cuisine wouldn't you say? if I can ask a follow up question on this comparison between India and China and also for Tyler why do we associate Indian cuisine so much more with long simmers where he asks Chinese cuisine of course it is a little bit of everything as Fuxia knows so well but it is often a little bit more associated with quick fries what is the factor endowment here of these two very big countries very big civilizations having somewhat divergent paths as we imagine with culinary traditions that's a really interesting question and it's hard to answer because I don't really know anything about Indian food I did have a really interesting conversation with an Indian who came on my tour to Yunnan earlier this year 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 Muslims eating halal food some Buddhists not eating meat 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 that's one reason that you would think it would be a constraint on the creativity of Indian food but 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 had all the conditions for the diversity that Chinese does but in terms of cooking methods it's hard to say and 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 a very long time I mean you know you see it in descriptions of food from 2000 years ago and more and in the Song dynasty this incredible restaurant industry in places like Hangzhou and innovation and creativity and so I suppose that when you are thoroughly interested in food like the Chinese and thinking about it creatively all the time you end up having a whole plethora of different cooking methods and that's one of the striking things about Chinese cuisine right you know cooked stews and simmered things and steamed things and also stir-frying so that might explain why you know several different methods have achieved prominence before I comment on that Lydia on the new dish please tell us apparently it's an empty plate now we have the vegetarian spring roll so spring roll is something that we love to have as a holiday special we have the over spring the Lunar New Year or you know it's actually you wrap things together sometimes you add shrimp pork 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 the Indian spices worked very well being simmered for a long period of time you're less concerned about 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 another idea that I was thinking of was that also and 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 it with eating out that and there were restaurants with menus where you would order your dishes not just 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 home cooking and slow the pot on the stove in the home kitchen what about itang di sen shen so the hot food would beat three times over the flavors or Chinese people love to eat quick hot food yeah well I suppose great urbanization and the emphasis on texture and I don't really know about the history of this but one of the really distinctive things about Chinese gastronomy is that the Chinese totally appreciate and understand texture to a degree that is unheard of anyone 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 favorite Sichuanese dish 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 none and a little bit sort of crisp so I think perhaps when people have this obsession texture there are certain ingredients that require fast cooking also vegetables right so you don't have everything very soft but you have this briskness liveliness, crispness in the bite but what's your speculation why this colgan is such a big feature of the Chinese food okay speculation again but I think the thing about there was this ancient philosopher who said 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 it's impolite to make noises when you eat and it's not very proper to show too much exuberant delight in food but in China you see this absolute joy in eating in ancient poetry in the way people eat today and I think part of that is feeling uninhibited about it as something physical so like when you eat in China you can make little noises you can put something like a duck's tongue that's grapples and a bit bony and complicated to your lips and you can enjoy 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're not shy of the physicality then you can have things that are slithery and crunchy and you can have engagement when you eat them really makes you wonder about the English approach to sex yes well let's pause swiftly on this Lydia please tell us about the new dish oh we're having a ginseng soup with what looks like tofu but it's actually chicken and this is a classic Sichuan banquet dish which goes back at least 100 years it's sort of written about in a very famous text early 20th century it's a reminder that Sichuan food is not all spicy like any other Chinese cuisine it's about balance so if you have very intensely flavored and hot dishes and oily dishes you always have refreshing things like this lovely broth and this is Amish chicken right how and why is that different and better well let's just say that the environment has a lot to do with how things are raised and you know it's he felt a strong tired to the way we leave it reminded him a lot of the time he was raised as a boy in the village in China in the 60s my grandmother was a farmer she used to be the one that's earning all the credit and contributed that to the local village government and in return they don't really have a lot to eat on the table so it's the humble life of the Amish community reminded that a lot of nostalgia Sam do you have another question well I was going to say Tyler recently told me that the third best chicken he ever had was an Amish chicken which pleased me a lot because it implies you have an encyclopedic ranking of every chicken you've eaten to continue on the train of extremely speculative things there's this famous perhaps infamous observation about how whether areas of China engaged in mostly wheat based or mostly rice based agriculture has effects centuries later on various social outcomes SC2 scores etc and thinking about Ireland where I'm from even just beyond the famine it seems like there are many ways in which the presence of the potato and the dominance of it affects culture and land holdings and so on how do you think about the role of the staple crop in creating the culture or cuisine of a certain place hmm well an easy question and you thought I asked hard ones well I suppose I mean 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 delivering food to gods and ancestors so wheat and alcohol so millet and alcohol and so on and roasted meats and yeah I suppose what's interesting about that is that millet went on being the sacred grain right up until the end of the Chinese imperial period in about 1911 but it had actually disappeared from people's daily diets so people in North China went on to eat apples and breads but millet remained the staple grain but yeah so I guess there's 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 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 2000 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 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 the Manchus were sort of rugged northern nomads who liked eating huge chunks of sheep meat which they would then cut apart into personal knives and this was something that was still part of high level society in the Qing dynasty when China was ruled by Manchus 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 sort of whole roast meats particularly northern cuisine may have been a legacy of this Manchu production for meat and there's a scholar Isaac Yue 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 soups and stews and then these whole services of real sort of you know charred and roasted and boiled meats which were Manchu and then also actually in Beijing cuisine there is some legacy of Manchus in dairy foods so like nomads they eat dairy foods and so you have very fascinating something in Beijing imperial cuisine called Nailao Junkit which is like a steamed custardy dessert made from milk and also another very interesting dish where Nailao Gan when it's cooked at a very low heat that it turns to kind of fudge a bit like Dolce de Leche and 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 pork dumpling and we use our mesh pork now maybe you can tell me what the difference is Fuxia why doesn't pork in particular have a higher status in China Chinese eats so much of it it's maybe the best pork in the world the best pork dishes but it's not the highest status food or close to it it's popular and ubiquitous and so pork is the celebrity 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 sought after foods so things like deer tendons these are imperial delicacies camels hump the ovarian fat of the snowfrog all these unusual delicacies and birds nest are obviously expensive so these things are more prestigious in China because they're scarce and expensive and extreme luxuries does bears paw actually taste good you better ask someone else because you've never had it you don't have bears paw really served these days it appears in cookbooks right until the 1980s you know even of state banquets but 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 I'm not sure 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 people in China eat camels feet and pigs feet and they cook them to make the most of these grizzly and gelatinous textures so the fact that it's highly grapples and not appealing to a western palette is no problem at all Fergus you have questions yeah so as we sort of alluded to earlier there's this regional divide in China where in the north wheat has sort of primarily grown rather than rice which is obviously much the same as Europe so what is the kind of explanatory factor that means that in China people tend to make noodles rather than bread and obviously bread in Europe rather than noodles is there a kind of factor or single factor that explains that so it seems that there's a very interesting book a cultural history of chopsticks by Edward Q Wang who looks a bit at this but it seems that the Chinese very early on apart from eating food that was cut into small pieces they really liked eating food that was plucked out of hot liquid right and so the classic ancient Chinese dish long before stir fries and the more sort of famous modern Chinese dishes was the gung which was a sort of soupy stew made from lots of ingredients that were cut into small pieces floating around together in liquid and of course this sort of evolved with the use of chopsticks which are very suited for eating that kind of dish and so it seems like some early forms of pasta appear to have been bits of dough dropped into hot liquid and that would have fitted in to the a way of eating that was already becoming a bit distinctively Chinese you could say and I think that's still the case wouldn't you say Lidu that Chinese people really like liquids in their food more than westerners so a classic Chinese you know in England we say meat and two veg is like a basic standard meal in Chinese it's four dishes and a soup and when I was living in Sichuan 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 palate and make sure you finish the dish so I think perhaps in modern China westerners much prefer chow mein stir fried noodles Chinese it's all soupy noodles and fried noodles are much less common so perhaps this is why and also just in China until very recently and still in most cases Chinese people don't have ovens at home they do not roast or bake so everything was done on a stove top a design that really hadn't changed much for 2,000 years so 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 xiaobing but yeah the absence of ovens as a common kitchen 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 what's the right schema apart from any particular place you might recommend well I mean I would look at where Chinese students are eating partly so then you'll get the sort of more recent trends in China but how do I find that out at GPT will it tell me where the Chinese students are eating no you need someone someone who reads Chinese to go on social media and find what is being talked about that would help maybe the app xiaohongshu is going to help xiaohongshu yes it's a popular amount yeah students fuxia how much cumin is too much for a dongbei barbecue I mean that's a matter of taste right I have no idea yes have you been assaulted by excessive amounts of cumin then to me it varies so much because sometimes the cumin it's just cumin flamed essentially and then sometimes it's none at all and the apps people how do you determine they say well guess taste but it feels like I felt something more than just I decide today to put more cumin than not it's very unstandard in that sense hmm yes I have no idea I'm afraid a follow up question so a very standard Caribbean dish is jerk chicken and a very strong component of that is soy sauce and people don't always consider it as a Chinese influence but of course it is and I'm curious if there are any other areas of standard dishes across the world where it has a very strong Chinese influence people don't really realize it itself I suppose that I mean all soy products is the influence of China right because China domesticated the soy bean very early on and soy foods have been incredibly important also they came to Japan from China right making tofu and soy sauce so wouldn't Mexican mole be an example those original Pueblo recipes from the 17th century what came on the galleon from Philippines a lot of Chinese influence I have been told speculatively I'm trying to think of examples I'm really not sure if a reader is using their recipes your recipes and they make a mistake what's the most likely mistake for them to make I mean 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 if you know something that's cut into slivers or slices the whole point of stir-frying is meant to be very fast and the reason that it's effective is that if the food is cut finally 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 overcooked 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 but technically important in Chinese food why might an older Chinese chef be reluctant to stir-fry himself or herself well that's yeah because several people have told me that stir-frying is perhaps the most difficult of all cooking methods in any cuisine because it's so fast there's no room for maneuver there's no margin for error so if you have food that's finely cut and that is sensitive to heat so like you know stir-fried scallops for example 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 start making a hollandaise 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 wu shu 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 apprentice to cook and people have said that's because you know the elder chefs have more management role they're not cooking 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 was Chinese food different in the United States versus Canada? I think Canada depends on where you go but where I grew up in Ottawa there wasn't a terribly great amount of Chinese cuisine and I think there was a little bit more of the Cantonese influence you know something like 11% of Canadians live abroad and that was I believe that is the highest ratio in the world and that is because in the 90s the Canadian government just offered extraordinary numbers of visas to Hong Kongers to basically escape Hong Kong before the return to the mainland and so that has a very big Cantonese influence 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 because of just the amount of 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 Cantonese 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 they were much weaker right. Virgisander 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 Ireland is similarly not very developed like in Barbados if there is any sort of non-generic Chinese restaurant in Ireland it's probably Sichuan so I'm interested like how did Sichuan become maybe this is not an accurate description like prestige cuisine 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 Sichuan these food travels really well so there are some cuisines like the food of the Jiangnan region or Yunnan we already said there are so many really unique local ingredients that you can't get elsewhere and when you think about Yunnan food you think about these extraordinary ingredients but Sichuan food the heart and soul of Sichuanese cooking is in the artful combination of flavours so not just ma la, numbing and hot but also yu xiang which is a bit of sweet and sour pickled chili, ginger, garlic, spring onion all these wonderful combinations of flavours and I think that if you have because the sort of identity of Sichuanese food is in the flavours you can apply Sichuanese yu xiang fish fragrant sauce to the kind of fish that you can get say in England it doesn't have to be a local car it will still feel like Sichuanese cooking because the flavourings and techniques are there so I think that with Sichuanese cook just needs a sort of small battery of key ingredients Sichuan pepper, dried chilies, pickled chilies doubanjiang, pickled chili paste soy sauce, vinegar and you can cook whatever is to hand so I think for that reason it's quite accessible and transportable as a sort of concept and a practice Lidia can 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 you have a rice crispy on the top and cook everything so fast but I would probably call this one of the gong fu cai because we cook the gong fu cai and that process on its own is probably 8 to 10 hours and you know you see some jumbo shrimp in their scallops and they are all cooked at different time for it to be at perfect condition and what region is that from well this is something my dad holds very dearly to his heart the fish ball we eat it back at home in Hubei yeah this is a 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 if you go to any Chinese restaurant it would probably take a master mind to put a the menu like this so either someone that's really knowledgeable in the ingredients in the methods that are things are prepared a good balance of something mild, something with soup something crispy different poultry it's really like putting puzzles together and Chinese people eat pretty picky 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 Chef Peter can actually put everything great, Fergus comment or question yeah going back to the exotic ingredients aspect so I think we even mentioned deer tendons earlier in the west at least deer are typically wild it's quite difficult to domesticate and farm them so what is the kind of economy of accessing those ingredients in China look like presumably some are intensively farmed if possible is it 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 one of the problems that China has is also with an illegal trade in wildlife but that's under the table and you know that's not in the open so you're unlikely to find these things on sale in markets but yeah most people would never eat any wild food because it's expensive and scarce and yeah so you know when I was saying about things like 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 well birds nest is farmed a lot of it's farmed in Malaysia right so 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 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 does this happen I totally agree with you and I call it the hot potization 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 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 restaurateurs I mean you know how difficult it is to get good chefs right walk chefs especially it's a nightmare because it's so difficult to do 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 but yeah it's a poor particularly with such one I mean such one has such amazingly diverse and exciting food and hot pot is a poor reflection of all that and may I add I think hot pot restaurants are like the McDonald's in China it's really considered as a fast food restaurant yeah well a lot of them are but 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 in moderation by the way I have to say the technique of this dish is fantastic and well so you've got an assembly of all different ingredients and as you said they're cooked separately so these fish balls have a lovely light delicate texture but they're not completely flaccid there's a bit of liveliness to them a bit of scallop in mine a bit 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 been cooked separately to the peak then combined together and then you have the lovely contrast between the crisp crunch of the the guoba the rice crust and the liquid and so there's a lot that has gone into that technically right Lady of it the new dish please explain it excuse me and 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 yes you're right typically we would serve this as lazi ji red chili pepper chicken and some people would like to call it the treasure chicken because you have to find the chicken among a pile of red peppers and to that today we're eating while scallops that has a good heat to it it's rather lovely do you see the garnish these very deftly intricately cucumbers and that's something that you hardly see these days so it's a real sort of classic old school Chinese cooking but it's labor intensive most people did your father do it himself? he did it himself and let me say about 40 years ago he was actually in a national competition to just to compete on the knife cutting skill really? apart from the technical aspects of cutting the practical aspects you have to cut to eat with chopsticks the technical ones even as for stir frying there's also the aesthetic aspects and there's this whole other thing like the French sugar art of completely frivolous art history with vegetable cutting Dan do you have a view on hot pot? I think it's terrible but what else is there to say I think that hot pot is a great social activity but it is never really my first choice to eat but on the point about chains one of the things I've observed over the last few years is that there has been a pretty growing scale of chain restaurants featuring basically slow casual cuisine I'm thinking about sea bay noodles I'm thinking about the more crowd fish restaurant that is achieving remarkable consistency across all of these different restaurants which is a pretty difficult thing to do I understand and I wonder do you see that these restaurants can be something like Ding Tai Fung to become major exports at some point or do you think that will be they can't quite figure out the international market? Well I don't see one on I think they'd be very popular if they could export 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 the pre-prepared dishes which is something that is not necessarily a good thing but also I met a very high level chef in Beijing who was showing me a robo wok an electric wok that was trying to automate the process of stir-frying which I'm sure is at the early stages but yeah I think if they can achieve the consistency and standardisation which they are doing in China then yes but one thing about Shibae particularly this is a noodle restaurant that specialises in north western sort of country cooking right and in particular Oat Pasta which is a speciality of Shanxi province and when Shibae 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 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 pasta 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 standardise 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 hand crafting noodle arts of Shanxi 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 guide or anywhere in China I guess I would look a little bit more just at the apps and look at the photos is Michelin guide useful for you? I think they do identify some of the very best restaurants in Shanghai in Chengdu and it's helpful for people who don't know Chinese to have some kind of guide but the downside is that I think although the classic Michelin methodology is to send a single inspector to a restaurant to have a meal and that means that eating like this which is more typical of many very excellent Chinese restaurants is a little impractical I did interview someone from Michelin recently and they said that on occasion they do allow inspectors to go out in groups but certainly with the early Michelin guide to Shanghai for example they did pick lots of excellent restaurants but they missed some that were equally good they 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 so I would say it's that's one issue with it but they have got better also at recognizing even small noodle shops in Chengdu and I think they're trying to be closer to the pulse of what people actually want to eat but the downside is that I know a lot of Chinese chefs I know are a little bit preoccupied with Michelin and I think that when and it's the problem in the West too but when people start aiming at Michelin styles 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 Instagramable dishes What's going on in China? Totally in China, I mean everyone's on their phones like maniacs, like people everywhere else and yes, I'm certainly very visually exciting and that's one problem actually with Sichuanese food that I think it's the real drama dishes like this sort of lard or chicken normally which are great but they're just one facet of a very diverse cuisine and again I think maybe they encourage restaurants not just in China but everywhere but it's the same pressures of social media and one point It brings people in but when they're in the restaurant I guess it's a whole menu dictates if we can keep them a lot of the time restaurants suffer with a lot of one-time diner they came because of Instagram the food is Instagramable but actually it doesn't taste amazing so what is the reason for them to come back? That goes beyond social media What is the new dish? It looks like we have a yang so in Chinese umami has half fish and half lamb a dish with umami with our fish ball and lamb stew 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 have been converted, I think it's awesome Maybe you should go Okay, yes please And also again we were talking about the importance of soup This is a proper Chinese meal with a soup Not just one soup, it's courses of soups Right Where in China have you not eaten in the food? I have never been to Jiangxi province Also one place I really want to go is Heilongjiang in the Dongbei northeast because there it's sort of bordering Russia and that's going to be a whole other you know a lot of local ingredients and traditions and a bit of Russian influence It's a very good restaurant in Duhua, right on the border of North Korea that has a very very strong North Korean-Chinese cuisine combination and it's the only place you can go to get that particular food 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 Yunnan you have food that is like Vietnamese Thai, Laotian and then in the northeast Korean, Russian Mongolian Shenyang I quite like the food spicier than I was expecting it to be Wonderful dumplings maybe the best dumplings I've had in China Oh yeah there are kind of Shenyang dumpling restaurants on there in other places too Since Korea was mentioned my Korean friend has a theory that a lot of perhaps most of global variation in cuisine can just be explained by temperature in different countries In particular that 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 you have to rely a lot more on covered pots and cooking vessels that create less smoky flavorful dishes How do you kind of think about the geography or temperature of a place that's a variable Chinese walk cooking does create a lot of smoke but I mean in lots of Chinese modern apartments they would have a kitchen that's almost like a balcony 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 the north you have lots of hearty stews and soups so maybe to an extent The Sichuanese say they need to eat a lot of spicy foods because it's such a humid and hot environment I've never understood that but actually why is that helping with this environment? Because it's humid you have this unhealthy dampness in your body so you have to have ginger chilies, peppercorns to make you sweat and that drives out the unhealthy humidity and restores a lovely equilibrium but I mean the funny thing about that that is a little inconsistent is that the Cantonese south is also pretty humid it seems to me and yet chilies are not advised there What are you doing? A sweet water is That's true you do other things This is a lovely texture too a sort of slithery crisp woody mushrooms You've noted very well that Chinese cuisine has a bit of an elitist bias these eight great cuisines are very much concentrated in the more rich coastal provinces I wonder can you gesture towards what a people's history of Chinese cuisine could look like how do we actually incorporate these folk traditions into our conception of Chinese food so it is not so Cantonese and Jiangnan 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 goes back to about 1980 or something and so there are many different ways of trying to express the regional diversity of Chinese food which is quite inadequate because it's sort of intricate patchwork but I think already as you said Jiangnan which is the food of the eastern region around Shanghai very elitist fine Cantonese food is very elitist but Sichuanese already has a reputation for being a sort of hearty folk cuisine so it is represented The eight great cuisines incorporates like Anhui which is not regarded as a very the categorization of that scheme is actually quite irrelevant I think if people took a fresh look at it they would include and also in the eight great cuisines Hunan cuisine is one of them but they're talking about elitist Hunan food and not the wonderful spicy home cooking I think in terms of what people actually want to eat it's not elitist so the cuisines that are most popular now Sichuan what else Hunan the spicy ones are more popular yeah Guizhou is also and that's not an elitist cuisine so I think that the people writing about food are no longer the confusion gentlemen scholars why is Hunan food fallen behind in the west so you used to have so many restaurants that claimed to be Sichuan, Hunan they weren't really either one but predominantly there was some connection and now many more people want real Chinese food there's plenty of more or less broadly authentic Sichuan places but I don't see broadly authentic Hunan places what happened? not so many I don't know I mean what do you think? my understanding was that Hunan food became quite popular after Nixon's visit to China I think I'll call it Chairman Mao and then everybody just started advertising their Chinese restaurants as Hunanese cuisine I think that kind of shaped distorted our view and so maybe people have caught on personally I enjoy Hunan food a little bit less than Sichuan food I find Hunan food a little bit too oily and the flavors are a little bit too much instead of more refined and tingling and teasing in a way that Sichuan often is Liddy do you have a view on this? are you tempted to serve Hunan dishes? yes may I introduce you to what we're having this is a Sam special but it's not fair to serve it only to Sam that's why our table gets a separate platter this is Chef Peter's signature dish it's a dry fried egg plant he has done so many ingredients the dry fried way we call him a dry fried master he can do it with fish with shrimp with okra, cauliflower with shiitake mushroom it's the special batter that he coat anything with makes it very crispy outside but still juicy and tender inside with great balance of cilantro Sichuan pepper sometimes he likes to add cumin other times it's just if you think about all the family empire how many restaurants is it now? I stopped counting 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 I have to start with the things that we have tried but not in a way financially successful we keep trying to offer new concepts we wanted to in a way offer modernized Chinese cuisine people would 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 the tradition the classics the authenticity versus modern ambience what is the balance what is your ratio if I'm going to pick a place for a meal what do you guys look for? the floor is open I don't think I'm a very usual diner so I don't care that much for ambience usually I like to very dull place often times especially with the I love Filipino food also and because it's usually a very demure location every once it's 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 to those kind of places only other people there are other Filipinos and similarly because right now I live in Madrid and often times the best Chinese restaurants I find actually most of the Taiwanese actually are just very simple restaurants and that's usually where the most people from Holland typically go and have food they want that look very nice very obstructive things 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 most of I think would prefer a nice looking restaurant I am against nice looking restaurants because it attracts too much Instagramming I'm there for the food we're there for the food we don't want the photos but the key tenants in the Tyler Carran theory of how to select a restaurant is looking for spelling mistakes on the menu very good thank you yeah similarly I think some combination of Chinese plantel not a particularly nice venue and I think just kind of I guess also when you're in a restaurant typically in the UK if the service is kind of warm and I guess polite you like to be treated 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 TV well I mean Tricia will probably what do you look for do you look for the dining room full of at least 90% Chinese audience well I think having a Chinese audience is a good sign I see everything and I sometimes I like to go to beautiful places with amazing service and beautiful China an 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 Mapo Dolfo it's only 100 years old you know it's not an ancient dish the Sichuanese didn't have chilies until a couple hundred years ago and so I think you you know you can't be too conservative really 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 they don't necessarily look happy wow so it's true I shouldn't take any of this advice for a few shows who is maybe closer to our day-to-day customer 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 peep cocky showy 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 they're really like but once they are in the door 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 new way maybe that's a strong association with um how you're being treated but I believe there is a lot of perception about Chinese cuisine we're trying to make a change too and again I know that everyone on this table is a foodie we're all a pride on standard and quality we're trying to expand that audience we wanted anyone that doesn't know much about Chinese cooking coming to a restaurant 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 but we tend to you know offer them appetizers before the entree comes out and we offer them a little or ice cream at the end of the meal kind of in a way make them feel comfortable and familiar with what they're eating otherwise we stay pretty true on the flavors we like to offer both flavors especially how that started his career in the US it's really not afraid of using peppercorn at the time it was banned in the US there's no legal way of using peppercorn or sourcets I remember the restaurant owner would ask their family member in China to send it over from Fujian 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 customers to come back for occasions special celebration or for their day to day carry out a 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 from start marinated and then coated with rice flour after it's steamed and cooked 80-90% then we want to create a crispy texture that's when we start to adding the wok very quick double side pan sear and then add all the green jalapeno, the scallion the red chili pepper peppercorns this is my favorite dish so far this and the numbing beef I was just thinking this is the first time 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 fried like this and it's delicious it's a sort of a new version of hui guo rou back in the pot pork, twice cooked pork if I can ask this is a dish that is very known in the household family when you have something steamed like at home my mom or my grandma will steam it for the first time serve it as a beautiful first time dish but for something to be consumed later in the day or the next day people tend to get tired of eating the same thing over and over so they get really smart why don't we pan sear it so it becomes a new dish we're going to have to try it Lydia are you 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 where they're just kind of you know such like restaurants or something in each of these places they're kind of consistent you feel like restaurants or restaurant owners are very smart to see what the trend is as you guys can probably see Sichuan restaurant you know if we're talking about in the 2000 there has not been many and that's probably how that got his reputation being a master Sichuan chef although he's really a classic Chinese chef cooking all the regional cuisine I want to say if you ever started in the 2010 this is when the new immigration from China started to merging a lot of them went to LA a lot of them went to New York a lot of them came to DC so we're starting to see Na Jia in Orange County we see Zhui Li which is a very Jiang Su Zhuo Jiang Cai in New York in a few there's actually a lot more regional cuisine like some I remember my friend Chef Simong Tong was making Vina Nudos by NYU and it's vastly popular Sam any comment on the eggplant It's very good Fergus Rashid what's been your favorite dish so far the eggplant has been very good actually I've also liked the scallions they've been excellent I think I'll go with 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 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 I love that soup with the fish balls 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 sureful comfortable because we have this something very sizzly and then a lovely light refreshing soup the pleasure of the meal is sort of physical as well as just I mean yeah how did you learn that just by induction you were served a lot of meals and you ran the mental regressions is there a way it can be taught to someone like you well mainly I've learned through just constant eating 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 light and delicate dishes are just as important as the razzle dazzle exciting dishes then you're on the way to be able to plan a nice meal right? and start with picking out your favourites and look at all what I'm 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 great chefs at home mom and dad, mom is a pastry chef dad is a workshop and they train me to have a very picky palette 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 Fuchsha's writing I think that your book is wonderfully well organized 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 in terms of making the physicality of eating very very good can you speak a little bit about is food writing this is I think it really rewards 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 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 to make it 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 grisly 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 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 because I've always written I mean you know I had a certain training for how to think about language and trying to be very fair and thinking how it will be 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 what did your parents do so my mother taught English as a foreign language she had a huge food influence on me so she's a great cook and we always had lots of foreign friends in our home so I had a 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've got to say Laoban I'm here to actually consume the correct food but people who can't just turn on some Changsha dialect how would they actually get the good food from the restaurants well so without the language I suppose that one of the best ways is to look at what other people are eating 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 it so often happens that the waiter will say if I'm with foreigners he'll say they can't possibly eat that so there's a sort of assumption that foreigners won't be able to handle certain foods and I sometimes have to have an argument and just say look we will eat it and we have gone round proving that we can eat Sikyukumvas 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 they're not conscious and just complaining or they think that 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 waiting stuff particularly in the West but also 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 I think things are changing so how 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 should imagine that all the restaurants where I've been with groups of foreigners eating unusual things with gusto that afterwards they thought well you know it is possible for foreigners to do something What is it then that you can't eat put aside the illegal but where you just say like no I'm going to have that No, I will eat everything Well I did in Yunnan actually I did eat some there's a very special dish in one particular region which is raw pork like a sort of Tata pork and I ate that because I was you know local people rave about it and I was aware that there were health issues with eating raw pork but I really wanted to try it and so I had it with some local friends it was really delicious it was really funny afterwards 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 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 Jiangnan region and one of the best ways to eat them is they're drunken crabs 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 and I've been eating these for years with great delight and then a couple of years ago a few years ago the Shanghai authorities where they're a great delicacy they banned raw drunken crabs and so I started sort of looking at why this was and it turns out that it's fresh water, raw creatures so now somebody offers me a raw hairy crab what do I do? I've been fine so far but I don't know that the sort of lust for eating them is so great You only leave once Why aren't there more raw dishes in Chinese food overall? Well, I mean historical prejudice so in ancient China the Chinese defined themselves as people who ate cooked food and barbarians beyond the borders and the empire ate raw food and so there is this idea that a very ancient idea going back to the Book of Rights, Li Ji one of the classic texts that civilization began when people learnt how to harness fire to cook their food and they left behind the era of drinking blood and eating feathers and having all the diseases from raw food so there is a sort of idea that I remember when I took a Hunanese 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 three months in Dali last year and I was offered a lot of raw pork and I never took it Right, probably very sensible It was very nice, it was like a steak tartar But you'll eat raw meat in the US or? I would eat raw beef pork I don't know But I think like in Germany, I think it's a certain region they have met which is raw pork but when you eat this 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 Dali it was very kind of easy but the fact is that local people in this particular group eat it all the time and I was always asking people if they had any problems and most people say oh it's fine they check the pork, it's fine When and where is China most effective as a street food country and when isn't it So I don't eat much street food when I'm in China But I might say in Malaysia the restaurant food is so good and I've never found the street food to be better even though it can be very good 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, yeah in the north I went to Kaifeng the old Song Dynasty northern capital and this is some years ago but they had the most incredible night market with all kinds of food and that was just amazing and delicious I think the problem is with China's modernization there's been this big effort to clean up the streets they've seen street food as being old fashioned and something undesirable and so when I lived in Sichuan 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 if you go to Chengdu go to the Wenshu Monastery and in the streets around there there are people serving some traditional snacks Dan Honggao, these little pancakes stuffed with pork or sweet things I was wondering Yeah these are 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 especially these nice little barbecues and noodles, I echo Fuxia here at that, Shanghai I believe used to have actually quite a nice street food life and then they cleaned all of that up I think maybe they have been borderline successful in driving that out I know and sometimes what they do is 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 the kind of really good street food Lydia, what do we have here? I think we missed our seafood pearl with sticky rice and that's a dish that everyone took one and is now gone so that's a very typical Hubei cuisine we like to use pork as a filling but for today's variety that switch to crab and seafood and coat it with sticky rice steamed and just finishing up with a beautiful glaze and next we have the famous squirrel fish today I think they're more daisy looking amazing knife work look at that, you know cut like that and they're not falling apart they're all staying in these lovely fronds that's right thank you no episode of conversations with Tyler would be complete without implication or understanding that everything comes back to economics what can an economist learn from eating more Chinese food you're asking me I have no idea 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 diners and abusive staff because there's a selection effect of places 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 those would be my starting points but other answers are welcome trade promotes globalization citron food is slightly easier to export given the chilies and the peppercorns that's why it's really easy to have that standardized across the world when Fuchsia mentioned that the willingness for the government to try to standardize cuisine didn't really work you kind of see this ability of the individual to kind of design the menu themselves it's a very big aspect of the economic concept there So a different question for Fuchsia I'm wondering you write in your book about how I guess the Anglosphere in particular had this experience with Chinese food coming I guess in the post-war period when essentially what you ended up getting in a takeaway is not real proper Chinese food 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 you haven't even had it yet Well I mean I think yes I think that the sort of Cantonese simplified model in many places but with slight variations so like in Sweden they have something called four little dishes which is like a standard menu of Chinese takeaway food yeah and I think that it seems to have been a blueprint that worked very well all over the place yeah with sweet taste and fried foods with variations but I have to say I mean I haven't traveled to Peru for example where they have by all accounts are very interesting yeah local Chinese food and also Calcutta has some very interesting old Chinese dishes that I have yet to go there so both of those are very good but they're very different they don't feel to me like quite Chinese food but I would recommend them chifas but you even can get in northern Virginia though it's much better in Peru but they're like rice dishes with Chinese elements in them is the way I would think about them I spent some time in Barcelona this summer and I found first of all Barcelona to be I think my favorite city for food in Europe in part because I think it has 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 and I thought that was quite good where is the best city in Europe for Chinese food is it London? It's a survey so I have no idea but yeah if somewhere were great you would have been pulled to it right? Well I hope so but I mean I'm spoiled because I eat a lot in China so I don't feel the need to go in each Chinese food everywhere else I feel like Singapore has really good Chinese food because of the Chinese population like yeah London has great Chinese food not just the Chinatown that has been there for maybe decades but also the newer where I like to call it modern Chinese we talk about Chef Wang, Andy Wang yeah really doing an excellent idea with elevated Chinese foods being tasting menu But I think one problem and this maybe comes back to economics again but in England for example I think now the door has opened to massive public interest in regional Chinese food and people are really open to eating Sichuan, Xi'an food and so on but the real problem is that we have very stringent immigration rules so in order for 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 from China to bring different aspects of Chinese food I find that the Chinese food in Madrid is actually even better than Barcelona It's much better in Madrid than China I think because even there you get very very obscure local cuisine from China is also in Madrid where in Barcelona it's not as you can't get the obscurity that much This book, other books you've written What's the hardest thing for you about writing a book? Well I found this a lot harder than writing a book 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 can go into basic techniques and ingredients then you have recipes often grouped by ingredients and each recipe has a headnote so the structure by now I've done a few cookbooks is fairly straightforward with a narrative book it can be so I start with a vague 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 What's your most unusual successful work habit? Getting on a train And what do you do then? Through China You got on a British train and you write or you got on a British train and you cook? If I have a writing block and 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 also sitting in cafes but just a change of scene So moving and not moving are your successful habits? Getting away from being the solitary writer at your desk and sort of that breaks the deadlock But I have to say I wouldn't put myself up as a model of effective and efficient working 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 strict deadline and look at where we are Well I did have the advantage of the global pandemic which meant that I wasn't racing around the world 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'd like to go back to Japan 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 I have only dipped my little finger into that particular pie and so I would love to go in and it's so interesting because you go back 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 related 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 without even looking for it 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 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 compared to Chengdu or somewhere they'd only be middling quality among the good restaurants Is it because there's no grumpy diners? No They're cooking for Michelin diners who do have good taste but it's a little rarefied and at the visceral level there's something a bit missing, I found a little 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 Yeah, but one meal that I wrote about in this book a Chinese meal was actually cooked the stir fry chapter I went to one small Chinese modern restaurant where the Chinese technique and the sensibility and aesthetics were very Chinese and it was absolutely superb so that was just a little snapshot but it was a very interesting Chinese food cooked and served at a sort of bar like a sushi counter actually Lydia, where do you think you're going to? For food, obviously there's maybe other reasons to travel Oh my God! I'm dying to go to Peru for the food but also for the nature seeing Machu Picchu 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 then nine month year daughter we explored the city from pastries in the morning great coffee shops we haven't really had a lot of opportunity to explore the street tacos but the dining scene the restaurants are truly amazing both flavors I would say Southeast Asia for me I guess maybe more the street food that I find quite thrilling I've had quite a lot of refined Chinese food and now it's more it's street food now for me and I have not spent Mexico in all and I think that Mexico is hugely exciting Rural Mexico in particular is one of my all time favorites far 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 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 I think Japan has very high variance of food even though all of it is well done by its standards, sometimes I think they are pursuing the wrong standards What explains that variation? they pursue perfection and 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 are too gooey, they are too large too many different things piled on top of each other but they are quite popular there are people who love them and I don't think they are wrong to love them 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 that I don't eat I don't know that I'm afraid I trust that it's safe I just think it would disgust me but there I am and 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 I was in Chongqing for all the reasons you just mentioned there's an endless amount of things to discover and it seems to mine there well I've never been to China so that's the obvious answer I think Ethiopia is still very underrated when it comes to food I've only been there for the first time this year and it was blooming 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 quick answer some of the combos are so odd I can't describe them properly the only closest thing that reminds me of is some Peruvian spices for example stringent itself or Mexican spices a combination of spices they need a lot more exploration I think Lydia what do we have here we have a peach tree sap speaking of Chinese is not huge on dessert sometimes after a full meal of banquet we just eat some seasonal fruits it will be a lot of specialty cutting into cute shapes of watermelon 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 because I never saw this 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 fairy tale soups with things like silvery or mushrooms sweet goji berries and other of these lovely texture foods and it is from the peach tree and how do you source it there's a peach tree sap business 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 thank Lydia Chang or Father Peter the entire staff at Mama Chang they always treat me wonderfully I just love them I actually don't want them to be surly to me they're super nice Fuchsia of course has done the book and made this all possible again that's invitation to a banquet the story of Chinese food please do buy it, read it and I would stress buy all of her books 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 we're only able to do this because of the support of individuals such as yourself