We visit Taiwan Cultural Kitchen in Kao­hsiung’s Zuoying District. Proprietor Yang Chao-chin formerly served as dean of the School of Culinary Arts at National Kaohsiung University of Hospitality and Tourism. Since retiring from the university, Yang has turned the first floor of her house into an independent restaurant, inviting a succession of alumni to exhibit their culinary ingenuity here as guest chefs.

A veteran exponent of food culture, Yang draws our attention to her kitchen’s dishes of the day. She has concocted these flavorsome delicacies by consulting the histories of the ingredients, organizing the menu in a chronological way.

The first course is a soup that encourages us to contemplate bygone eras. The parcels in the soup are made of large fish which were common in Taiwan’s surrounding seas during the Age of Discovery—along with shrimps and squid. The emerald-green snow peas floating in the soup were introduced by the Dutch in the 17th century. Another dish features sweetfish, a species that first began to be farmed in Taiwan under the influence of Japanese culinary preferences. Yang’s fish has undergone a complex cooking process involving frying, braising, steaming, and grilling, and is filled with Hakka pickles to enrich its taste. Other dishes served concurrently include seaweed-flavored moon shrimp cakes and cinavu, an indigenous millet dumpling.

A fusion of Hokkien, Hakka, indigenous Taiwanese, and even Japanese and Southeast-Asian elements, the feast perfectly embodies the Taiwanese people’s everyday dining experience.

Well versed in food culture, Yang Chao-chin tells us stories about common dishes in Taiwanese cuisine.

Immigrant cuisine

Back in the days when the Taiwanese economy was dominated by agriculture, most people had limited resources and contented themselves with a simple, frugal diet. The uncomplicated savoriness of fish rubbed with salt and then dry-fried is a quintessential flavor that everyone in Taiwan used to recognize. It was only after living standards improved that cooks were able to start tossing in a spoonful of soy sauce just before removing the fish from the pan—a coup de maître that brought out the savory aroma. As society became wealthier, braising, which requires large amounts of soy sauce mixed with sugar, began to gain wide currency as a cooking method.

With the retreat of the government of the Republic of China to Taiwan in 1949, the island received a massive influx of immigrants from across the Taiwan Strait. Bringing with them a great diversity of culinary traditions, these people enriched Taiwan’s food culture with time-honored family recipes, but the period also saw innovations that reflected the distinctive characteristics of Taiwanese produce. This was an era of drastic transformation and assimilation in our culinary landscape. As agriculture gave way to industry and commerce in the 1970s, dishes invented during the postwar period began to reach large swathes of the public thanks to the growing demand for eating out. Market forces filtered out less popular types of food; those that survived the competition eventually became classics cherished by all.

“So, strictly speaking, I wouldn’t describe these dishes as ‘exotic.’ Rather, I’d call them ‘innovative Taiwanese dishes,’” Yang Chao-chin says.

The popularity of sweetfish in Taiwan reveals the influence of Japanese culinary preferences.

The snow peas, Spanish mackerel, billfish, and tuna in this soup hark back to the Age of Discovery.

Cinavu is a millet dumpling which indigenous Taiwanese people offer to guests. We also come across cinavu at weddings and on festive occasions.

Imagining Taiwanese cuisine

The most renowned of these innovative foods is probably General Tso’s chicken, which was dreamed up by Peng Chang-kuei, an eminent Chinese-born chef who specialized in the cuisine of his home province of Hunan. Reportedly, Peng invented General Tso’s chicken in 1953 for a banquet organized by the ROC Ministry of National Defense for Admiral Arthur W. Radford of the United States Navy. The dish was named after Zuo Zongtang, the famous commander of the Hunan Army in the 19th century, to resonate with the military rank of the illustrious guest.

General Tso’s chicken achieved immense popularity in the USA even before it became a widely loved dish in Taiwan. In 1973 Peng moved to New York, where he opened Uncle Peng’s Hunan Yuan. It was from there that General Tso’s chicken started to gain classic status as a representative of American Chinese cuisine.

At Peng Yuan—a restaurant established by Peng in Taiwan in 1983—we meet up with Clarissa Wei, a second-­generation Taiwanese American who now works in Taiwan as a freelance journalist.

While savoring General Tso’s chicken, Wei tells us with a smile that most Americans have no idea where this dish comes from, and that their understanding of Taiwanese cuisine remains deeply stereotypical: soya milk, sesame seed cakes, scallion pancakes, and even a “penchant for spicy food.”

Drawing on her intimate knowledge of both American and Taiwanese cultures, Wei writes about food for publications such as the New Yorker and Bon Appétit. To break culinary stereotypes, she has teamed up with Ivy Chen, owner of Ivy’s Kitchen, a cookery school in Taipei. Together they have published an English-language cookbook entitled Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation (2023).

Nearly 400 pages long, the richly illustrated hardback encompasses Taiwanese snacks like braised pork over rice and egg pancakes, homely dishes such as pan-fried milkfish belly and braised napa cabbage, foods imported by post-World-War-II Chinese immigrants including ­xiaolongbao dumplings and scallion pancakes, Hakka-style recipes such as Hakka stir-fry and steamed preserved greens and pork, and even indigenous cuisine, represented by pigeon pea and pork soup and abai (“a parcel of millet, glutinous rice, and fatty ground pork tied up and steamed in two layers of leaves”).

Made in Taiwan is more than just a recipe book. Wei says that it aims not only to introduce Taiwanese foods to English-language readers but also to capture the richness and complexity of Taiwan’s culture, history, and ethnic composition. “The most salient trait of Taiwanese cuisine is actually akin to that of America—it’s fusion,” she says. “Our foods have absorbed influences from various eras, but they have to use Taiwanese ingredients and flavorings. That makes for their uniqueness.”

Yang Chao-chin invites alumni of National Kaohsiung University of Hospitality and Tourism to serve as guest chefs at Taiwan Cultural Kitchen.

The wontons named after the Chinese city of Wenzhou are served in a soup with dried seaweed, pleasing the eye as well as the palate.

Thai restaurants in Taiwan

Chi Heng-chang, associate professor of geography at National Changhua University of Education, has investigated Taiwan’s Thai food. He observes that most of the mainstream Thai restaurants in Taiwan owe their distinctive flavors to immigrants with Chinese heritage who arrived from Thailand and Myanmar after World War II. These cooks capitalized on the international fame of Thai cuisine even while they inherited cooking traditions entrenched in Southwest China’s Yunnanese and Dai cultures, where their own ancestral roots lay. Coming to Taiwan via Myanmar, they also adopted elements of traditional Burmese diet.

“They rely on Thailand for their businesses. Yunnan gives them their cultural identity. Myanmar witnessed the history of their families’ migrations,” Chi sums it up for us. Even though these restaurants are advertised as “Thai,” the foods they serve are mixtures of diverse culinary cultures. On their menus we notice common Thai items such as tom yum soup, green curry, and green papaya salad, but there are also dishes with Yunnanese origins—pork scalp slices, pea jelly, rice noodles, and flaky steamed buns—and even Indian flatbreads, which are popular in Myanmar. “I’m almost certain we can’t find similar Thai restaurants elsewhere in the world,” Chi says.

It is from this particular historical context that the famous pepper chicken (jiaomaji) emerged. Lily Yang, whose ethnic-Chinese parents immigrated to Taiwan from Myanmar when she was a child, runs Sanji Teahouse in New Taipei’s Zhonghe District. She conjectures that jiaomaji was probably invented by the ethnic-­Chinese Burmese community. The defining feature of this dish is the marinade used for the fried chicken, which comprises black cardamom and Sichuan pepper, and these spices, Yang tells us, are favorites with people whose families have roots in Yunnan.

Peng Chang-kuei was a disciple of Cao Jinchen, personal chef to the eminent early-20th-century Chinese politician Tan Yankai. He established Peng Yuan Hunan Restaurant in Taiwan and invented several famous dishes, such as General Tso’s chicken, minced shrimps with lettuce, and fugui shuangfang, a sandwich filled with honey-glazed ham and a roasted bean curd slice.

To break culinary stereotypes, Clarissa Wei has teamed up with Ivy Chen to publish Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation (2023), a book that sheds light on the diversity of our food culture.

Taiwanese or Thai?

What about moon shrimp cakes?

Many Taiwanese people used to think that this popular snack—typically comprising garlic, shrimp pulp, and pork fat sandwiched between pan-fried spring roll wrappers—was of Thai origin, but those who have traveled to Thailand would know that it is actually another kind of shrimp cake—tod mun goong—that is widely available there. The latter is smaller and coated with breadcrumbs, with a shrimp paste filling. The noticeable difference has led some to believe that moon shrimp cakes were actually invented in Taiwan.

In order to unravel the mystery of moon shrimp cakes, Chi interviewed several chefs and went to Thailand for field research. He says that Sudsaidee Phonlaphat (a Thai-born chef at Sukhothai, the Thai restaurant in the Sheraton Grand Taipei Hotel), Zhou Mali (the second-­generation owner of Sara Thai restaurant in Taipei), and Zhou’s father, Mingyang (who brought his family to Taiwan from Santikhiri in northern Thailand), all thought that moon shrimp cakes came from Thailand. To verify the truth of this belief, Chi traveled to Chiang Mai and Bangkok, where he indeed discovered the same dish—called “fried moon”—at high-end restaurants.

However, as recipes are not easily protected by intellectual property rights, we do not have irrefutable evidence to pin down the exact provenance of moon shrimp cakes. Whether they originated in Thailand or in Taiwan remains open to debate. Nevertheless, one thing is for sure: food culture is always on the move. The presence of a certain dish in a specific place suggests the movement of people and offers clues to historical and cultural contexts, as well as to the transmission and innovation of ideas and technology. Rather than fixing our attention on the question of who invented what, we may find it rewarding to explore larger issues behind particular dishes.

Moon shrimp cakes may or may not have been invented by Taiwanese people, but the significance of this question pales in comparison with the fact that this snack has become far more popular in Taiwan than in Thailand. Not only can moon shrimp cakes be found in Thai restaurants across Taiwan, but they are also sold frozen in local supermarkets and even convenience stores, so that customers can cook them at home. They have indeed put down roots in our daily lives.

Chi tells us that if chicken tikka masala, with its strong associations with Indian cuisine, can be regarded as a “national dish” in Britain, there’s no reason why we can’t refer to moon shrimp cakes as a Taiwanese dainty. Dishes like xiaolongbao steamed dumplings, General Tso’s chicken, and jiaomaji pepper chicken have not only won the hearts of Taiwanese people but also charmed the palates of gourmands around the world. Taiwan comes to mind whenever these dishes are mentioned. Without stretching the truth, we may legitimately call them “Taiwanese.”

Most of Taiwan’s Thai restaurants combine elements of Thai, Burmese, and Yunnanese food cultures, reflecting the island’s cultural and ethnic diversity.

Chi Heng-chang has investigated Taiwan’s Thai cuisine.

Regardless of whether they are Thai or Taiwanese in origin, moon shrimp cakes have become very popular and common in Taiwan.