Sherilyn Fan: The High Art of Comfort Food

Walking into Oz Traiteur Français, a French pop-up restaurant and catering kitchen, as it is flooded with autumnal afternoon sunlight, one encounters a small blackboard announcing the day’s offerings: The cold dishes include a salad of mushrooms marinated in aged vinegar, German-style potato salad, and Spanish garlic shrimp. The soups on offer are “roasted tomato” and “mushroom cappuccino.” For the main course of meat, one finds steak stewed with fennel and other herbs, pork butt with white sauce, and beef stewed in a burgundy sauce....

Beyond a sliding wooden door behind the hot food counter is a dining room where you find Oz’s “chef’s table,” for which reservations are taken for eight to ten guests at a time. Apart from enjoying their view of chef Sherilyn Fan at work, they can also hear her describe each dish’s special qualities and provenance in Chinese, French and English.

As imparted by the restaurant’s Chinese name, which means “European-style home food workshop,” the food here has the taste of mama’s home cooking, with a stress on health, flavor and freshness. There are no displays of culinary pyrotechnics or fancy decorations, and customers needn’t dress up nor concern themselves with silverware etiquette. Instead, they dine in just as relaxed a manner as if they were at home.

The chef’s table, for which reservations are required, offers a Taiwanese take on continental European cuisine with fresh local ingredients. The photos show a fish and vegetable aspic with pickle mayonnaise, as well as pan-fried Cherry Valley duck breast with fried-day-lilies vol-au-vent.

Born in 1968, Fan started to take an interest in cooking while she was attending Tai­pei’s First Girls High School. Her method of relieving stress in those days was to go to a bookstore and flip through cookbooks. The film Babette’s Feast provided more inspiration. She marveled at the intense preparation for a single delicious meal. Food truly provided an incomparable ability to bring comfort to people, she concluded.

After graduating from National Taiwan University’s political science department, she passed the civil service exam to land a high-paying job as an air traffic controller with the Civil Aeronautics Administration. Her position required frequent trips abroad, and since she loved to travel, by the time she was 30 she had already widely traveled throughout the world and had tried the cuisines of many nations. By then she was of the firm belief that “nothing makes more beautiful music than the clinking of glasses, plates and cutlery.”

When she was 30, she felt she could no longer set aside her culinary dreams and decided to go all in. Although her French was far from fluent, she enrolled in the Institut Paul Bocuse, a cooking school run by the renowned French chef, where she threw herself into her classes. At home, she would practice her skills with knives until both hands grew swollen, and she slept only four or five hours a night. She ended up graduating fifth in her class and went on to work successively in two Michelin-starred restaurants.

Fan says that in the highly competitive workplaces of prestigious French restaurants, women are almost always consigned to the sweets, breads or cold dishes. “I understood that amid such sexual stratification you had to be bolder about grabbing hold of opportunities, and I made the most of my abilities to become the only woman in that kitchen standing in front of a hot stove.”

Immersed in the realm of French haute cuisine for five years, Fan then returned home to Taiwan. Here she first opened a private kitchen with her husband, who is also a chef. It served fine French cuisine, and earned plaudits from European diplomats in Taiwan. It also catered for events at the president’s official residence and for banquets put on by the French representative office in Taipei, as well as other formal occasions.

The chef’s table, for which reservations are required, offers a Taiwanese take on continental European cuisine with fresh local ingredients. The photos show a fish and vegetable aspic with pickle mayonnaise, as well as pan-fried Cherry Valley duck breast with fried-day-lilies vol-au-vent.

Five years ago, at the invitation of Nelson Chang, CEO of the L’Hotel de Chine Group, she began to work in the Western restaurant of the Palais de Chine hotel. She started as assistant executive chef and ended up with the top post, becoming the first female head chef at a five-star restaurant in Taiwan. Under Fan’s skillful leader­ship, the hotel was the first to introduce the concept of providing individual kitchen-prepared main courses, and buffets for everything else. The buffet bar’s design was classic and enchanting, and the food was even more exquisite.

The experience of running a hotel restaurant also taught Fan a hard lesson: “I became more practical and more mindful of the importance of teamwork.”

“The advantage of the hotel group’s division of labor is that it takes advantage of synergistic efficiencies to successfully overcome huge challenges. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Fan recalls how an individually designed six-course Western meal for 400 guests was once requested for a wedding banquet. An undertaking of that kind, which doesn’t allow for a single mistake, could only be realized with precise planning and fine-tuned coordination.

Moving from handling ingredients to managing people also posed challenges. The biggest adjustment was that she could no longer change the menu on a whim. She now needed always to be mindful of the workflow: asking the purchasing department to acquire ingredients, asking her corporate superiors to try the food, calculating the costs and then setting the price. At the same time, as head chef she had to teach the proper cooking methods for new dishes to her subordinates. “With such complexity, is it any wonder that many hotel chefs go with the tried and true and become rather change-averse?”

Hey girls, look here! An afternoon tea costume party at Oz makes customers feel sweet and beautiful inside and out.

While she was with the hotel group, Fan came to an understanding about a predicament of many Taiwanese chefs: Quite a few of them, even those senior to her, were still using cooking magazines and cookbooks as the basis for their own culinary research and experiments. They were trying to create dishes that were “exactly the same” as those of the masters. When she tried their imitations, she couldn’t help but shake her head: “I discovered that many of these chefs had never had an opportunity to travel abroad or go to a prestigious restaurant. They had never been able to gain first-hand knowledge of how dishes were really supposed to taste, so they really couldn’t discern what was good or what was bad.” Fan urged them to go taste the real thing and repeatedly emphasized that when customers eat at a restaurant, delicious food, not a fancy presentation, is what leaves the most lasting impression.

After Palais de Chine, Fan spent some time doing restaurant planning for the Sherwood Hotel and the soon-to-open Eslite Hotel. But at a moment when her career future looked bright, she once again showed great resolve by jumping tracks, opening the low-key private kitchen Oz in April 2014.

Fan says that her reason for opening Oz was simple: to have more time to spend with her family, especially her infant daughter. She is also pushing to expand the clientele beyond the originally targeted high-income customers to small families and singles who put an emphasis on quality of life. Oz’s enticing classic European dishes can even be taken home in vacuum-sealed packages. A family of four can have a delicious meal for about NT$1000. “Cooking for yourself is best of all, but getting healthy prepared hot food to go isn’t a bad choice either.”

Without any publicity since its opening, Fan’s private kitchen has nonetheless been accumulating good reviews. She remains idealistic and passionate, traveling to the mountains and the seashore to source the best ingredients. Sometimes the restaurant opens a small fruit stand from which she sells some of the outstanding produce she brings back. Recently, she has playfully launched “afternoon tea costume parties,” which are limited to women. The guests eat sweets while being transformed by make-up artists. The teas speak to something deep inside the chef herself: “Sometimes I too want to change gears—to stop being a good girl for a day and become a sexy lady!”

For Sherilyn Fan, visiting farms and smelling the aroma of the sunbaked soil stimulates her culinary creativity.