A Sketch of Neimen

It’s six o’clock on a quiet Sunday morning. Next to the auditorium of Dong­men Elementary School in Mei­nong District, Kao­hsiung, chef Xue Ming­hui and his wife Leng Dian­lin with four or five assistants are hurriedly chopping vegetables and meat in preparation for a banquet. As the midday deadline approaches, stove fires burn intensely as workers’ voices are raised in urgency.

Xue is stir-frying dried shrimp and dried squid, adding partially steamed sticky rice, then adding soy sauce. After a second steaming, freshly-cooked mud crab is added to the rice, and Crab Sticky Rice is ready to serve.

Ban­doh is a sophisticated process, and in Nei­men it is quite common to see chefs working outdoors preparing the ingredients for a roadside banquet. Chef Lin Rong­ren, age 41, has set up a temporary kitchen on the roadside, and is cooking deep-fried pork knuckles, preparing for a banquet to be held in a few days at a temple in Nei­men. Half-cooked crispy pork fillets are placed in a container to cool, and then kept in the freezer for the big day.

In front of a warehouse containing catering utensils, dining tables and chairs, Lin’s mother skillfully makes spring rolls with ground pork and vegetables.

Taiwanese people traditionally hold a banquet to celebrate major events like engagements, weddings, and a baby’s first month of life.

Lacking resources

Like the master chef in a top restaurant, a ban­doh chef is responsible for the entire meal: from purchasing ingredients, designing the menu, and cooking the food, all the way to controlling the timing of the banquet. Geographical and environmental factors have tended to contribute to the reputation of the Nei­men District as the home of Taiwan’s ban­doh chefs.

Compared to neighboring districts such as Mei­nong, which has flat and fertile land suitable for rice, and Qi­shan, known for its banana exports to Japan, Nei­men lacks such resources. The area is not suited to farming because of its highly alkaline chalky soil. And when the rains come, the soil is often washed away leaving only muddy rocks. So the locals have traditionally harvested bamboo to make baskets and containers and sold their products to the banana farmers in Qishan.

From the 1960s, however, Qi­shan’s farmers replaced their bamboo baskets with cheaper packing materials like cardboard and plastic, so Nei­men’s economy was hit hard. But at the same time, the ban­doh business was growing, and it soon became a major career path for local residents.

Other initiatives helped. Nei­men tried to develop pig farming, but it didn’t last due to the impacts of foot-and-mouth disease in 1997 and new government animal husbandry policies. Then they tried growing fruit including longan and guava, and about a decade ago, began cultivating anthurium flowers, which now account for 40% of the Taiwan market, providing some support for the local economy.

Over the past forty years, as people in Nei­men tried out different ways of making a living, the ban­doh business took deep root, and became a way of life for many locals.

Speaking of history, chef Xue Qingji, who can boast four decades of experience in the ban­doh business, says that in the early years ban­doh didn’t have the same division of labor that it has today. Chefs weren’t really qualified, but were often the host’s relatives and friends who happened to be good at cooking. They would come to help, cooking simple dishes like fried rice noodles.

Xiao Shui­chi was a farmer through the 1950s, but because he was well known in the community as a good cook, he became the first ban­doh chef in Neimen. At that time, chefs only needed to bring a few kitchen knives, a long-handled ladle, and a spatula to the banquet venue. The host of the banquet was responsible for providing the ingredients, along with the dining tables and chairs. In such a traditional rural community, poor in material terms, a family ban­doh event often involved the participation of the entire community.

Xue Minghui (second from right), a second-generation chef, inherited his cooking skills from his father Xue Qingji, who has 40 years of bandoh experience. The younger Xue maintains local bandoh ­culture despite its gradual decline.

Chef boom

This form of ban­doh began to change during the 1960s. In 1963, chefs Tang Sifu and Tang Zhu­jiao, with vegetable seller Guo ­Zhangqi, banded together to create a ban­doh business. They called their firm Guo San Tang (putting their family names together). They were the first in the ban­doh business to purchase dining tables and chairs to rent out to customers, and to provide all the essential cooking utensils and cutlery. These new initiatives rewrote the ban­doh culture in Nei­men.

In 1976, Xue ­Qingji, who learned his cooking skills in Nei­men’s first restaurant, followed the model created by Guo San Tang. Working with chicken seller ­Huang Wan­lai, pork vendor ­Huang Lao­chang, and Xue’s apprentice Deng Zheng­ping, each invested NT$20,000 to establish the Si He Yi (“four in one”) company. Xue and Deng were in charge of cooking, while the two ­Huangs provided the pork and chickens, and they bought dining tables and chairs to rent to customers. This model was followed by others, eventually becoming normal ban­doh business practice in the area.

This integrated business model was much admired. Nei­men’s ban­doh business was booming in the 1980s when Taiwan’s economy was just starting to take off. They were not only in great demand for traditional events like engagements, weddings, birthdays, housewarmings and funerals, but also catered for celebrations like end-of-year company banquets, stock-market successes and passing university ­entrance exams.

Around that time, many locals even gave up their main job of farming to work in the ban­doh business chopping vegetables, washing dishes or serving at table. Over time, a number of these assistants (who tended to gain cooking skills as they worked with experienced chefs) decided to branch out on their own.

Nei­men has since cultivated many well-known chefs, the number peaking in 2005 with a total of 150. One in every five households in Nei­men made their living by operating a ban­doh-related business at that time. The name of Nei­men as the home of master caterers spread widely, with the ban­doh business taking its place beside that other pride of the local culture, Song ­Jiang Zhen.

Delectable dishes served up by a bandoh chef, ­including teriyaki pork, crab sticky rice, and cold entrees—the makings of an enjoyable banquet for all.

Inheriting a simple heart

With nearly six decades of ban­doh history, when people in Nei­men talk about the tradition, everyone has their own story.

Xue ­Qingji is the most senior ban­doh chef in Nei­men, and is very familiar with changes in ban­doh culture. He remembers that ban­doh was a big occasion in small communities. The date for a wedding banquet had to be chosen a year before the event. As the day approached, the host had to make bricks by mixing mud and rice straw and drying them in the sun. Then they built an outdoor mud-brick stove on a good spot at the best time, chosen according to the rules of feng shui.

On the day, the host expressed appreciation to the ban­doh chef by giving him a red envelope with money in it. A tray containing towels, tealeaves, cigarettes, matches, a bundle of incense, and sweets was also prepared for the chef as an offering to the Stove God. Then they prayed for a smooth banquet. At the end of the feast, they repeated the ritual before dismantling the stove. The whole process demonstrated a sincere respect for god and chef in traditional society.

In addition to wedding celebrations, ban­doh was often used for religious ceremonies at Nei­men’s temples, which nourished Taiwan’s Song ­Jiang Zhen culture, and where the local community gathered to worship. ­Huang Bi­gong, director of the management committee of Zi­zhu Temple, says that in order to thank the gods, villagers would hold ban­doh at home, inviting relatives and friends to join them. It wasn’t unusual for people to receive several invitations for the same day, so they were often kept busy visiting one home after another.

“Guests would often stay for only a few minutes, and had to move on to the next household,” says ­Huang. In order to avoid this, the community gradually changed the practice, instead gathering together to have one big ban­doh in the temple courtyard.

Aside from its renown as the origin of Song Jiang Zhen culture, Neimen is known as the home of bandoh chefs, with the greatest concentration of chefs in Taiwan.

Word of mouth

Although today the business is not what it was, many families are still passing on the skills and ban­doh tradition to the younger generation.

Xue Ming­hui, a second-generation chef, inherited his cooking skills from his father. He says that after receiving an order, the ban­doh chef has to discuss the menu and the order of serving with their customers, and then organize and prepare everything for the banquet within a month. With success depending exclusively on word of mouth, “Even just a simple error could ruin the firm’s reputation,” says Xue.

Ban­doh chefs also need to be aware of, and strictly follow, traditional culinary procedures. For example, the first dish in a banquet celebrating a move into a new house must be chicken, symbolizing the establishment of the new home. For a funeral, however, the chicken dish indicates that what is past is past: the mourners should reestablish their home and restart their lives without their loved one.

The dish Feng Rou (stewed pork) is a must for wedding banquets. The food takes four to six hours to prepare, a process involving the boiling, frying, stewing, and steaming of ingredients.

Abiding by ban­doh ritual ensures that the host and their guests go home happy. Xue Ming­hui has experienced times when things did not go according to plan. Once at the beginning of his career, he served up a dish undercooked, making the host very unhappy. The hardest part is time management. Xue notes that with an average preparation time of six to seven hours for a large banquet, workers have to start at around 5 a.m. to get a banquet ready for midday. Unexpected disasters with such a deadline can occasionally create a nightmare for the chef. “Physicians hate trying to cure a cough, plumbers dislike locating leaks, and ban­doh chefs fear cooking for a midday banquet,” says Xue.

In the book Bandoh Chef, respected chef Lu Zhen­zhi notes that attention to detail is the key to the ban­doh business. Everything involved in ban­doh needs to be precisely planned. This includes having all the ingredients to hand, achieving the anticipated flavors with appropriate cooking times and temperatures, and finally serving the food. So while a ban­doh business may look as easy to run as a roadside food stall, two elements are critical: time management and cost control. People who have never worked in this field cannot hope to understand all the tricks of the trade.

It’s 6 a.m. Chef Xue Minghui and his assistants are hard at work in a tent set up next to the Dongmen Elementary School auditorium, busily preparing ingredients for a banquet.

The decline of bandoh

But things have changed as time has passed—the prosperity of ban­doh has gradually declined. At its peak, Neimen boasted over one hundred chefs, but today only about 70 to 80 remain.

In the movie Zone Pro Site, after seeing the Silly Chef create a ban­doh banquet for free, the female lead poses a question: “What can a ban­doh chef earn?” And in fact, many people are today asking the same question.

“We gain friendship and good feelings, and a great deal of joy,” the Silly Chef says in the film. His words touch people’s hearts, and in fact express the core spirit of the ban­doh tradition.

This is why in the foothills of southern Taiwan, Nei­men people continue to embrace the pure and simple spirit of the olden days, and attempt to preserve the legacy of the ban­doh chef, passing down traditional Taiwanese cooking from generation to generation.

It’s 6 a.m. Chef Xue Minghui and his assistants are hard at work in a tent set up next to the Dongmen Elementary School auditorium, busily preparing ingredients for a banquet.

It’s 6 a.m. Chef Xue Minghui and his assistants are hard at work in a tent set up next to the Dongmen Elementary School auditorium, busily preparing ingredients for a banquet.

Aside from its renown as the origin of Song Jiang Zhen culture, Neimen is known as the home of bandoh chefs, with the greatest concentration of chefs in Taiwan.