When President Chen Shui-bian hosted the president of the Dominican Republic in 2003, the state banquet included Ilan dishes such as pressed smoked duck, salted pork liver, and minced pork cake. The man who brought these innovative new takes on favorite local dishes to a state banquet is Chen Chao-lin, an Ilan native and a fourth-generation chef.

Walking into Doo Hsiou Yueh Restaurant in Ilan, the high-ceilinged main room is divided using Chinese-style lattices, with traditional sculptures, porcelains, and other antiques displayed throughout. When the meal is served, each of the ostrich-egg-shaped glass dishes is filled with finely cut, glistening slivers of tender sashimi. Combined with silvery ice cubes and green pieces of fern, the dish combines surprising new tastes with eye-catching colors.

After over 40 years in the business, Doo Hsiou Yueh sets the standard for fine food in Ilan. Its menu includes innovative new dishes and traditional Ilan favorites, and its unique serving dishes and attentive service all meet the standards of major restaurants. All of this is the result of careful management by fourth-generation chef Chen Chao-lin.

Grandfather's spatula

The Chen family's involvement in the culinary arts can be traced to Chen Chao-lin's great-grandfather. In the 1900s and 1910s, his great-grandfather sold streetside snacks. Chen's grandfather started a catering and banquet business besides the original street-snack business, and his father Chen Chin-hsiang started to work exclusively in catering, earning a reputation as Ilan's best caterer.

"As far back as I can remember, my life has always been involved in cooking," says Chen. He recalls that when he was in elementary school, he and his brothers often used little hammers to crack open dried scallops; by the time he was in middle school, he was going out at dawn before school to help with shopping. After graduating from middle school, he devoted all his time to working in the family catering and banquet business. Even though his father was the boss, Chen Chao-lin was treated the same as other apprentices, starting with basic tasks like washing vegetables, butchering chickens, and killing fish.

"My father often says that to become skilled at something, you have to start by putting one foot in front of the other," says Chen. Born into a family of chefs, he has both the innate skills passed on through his family and tough, practical experience, making him familiar with every aspect of the art of cooking.

Tricks of the trade

Chefs who serve everyday people have to work differently than they would at a large, fancy restaurant. Aside from strong skills in the kitchen, they also need to know all about local customs and folk beliefs, and thus in designing their dishes they must look for ways to make their food provide guests both with good taste and good fortune.

For example, for the "Banquet of Lost Spirits" festival, one must also follow the ritual of setting a table of offerings, which means first putting the raw ingredients for the evening's meal out in separate dishes, creating a unique setting that pays respect to spirits and ghosts.

Chen Chao-lin recounts that the set of banquet dishes that made his father famous was called "Five Lakes and Four Seas": In the center of the round table was a stew served in a chalice elegantly sculpted from a winter melon; in a ring surrounding the center, chicken, duck, fish, shrimp, crab, sculpted fruits and carved ice; in a second ring, shaomai (steamed dumplings with a savory glutinous rice filling), tortoise cake, baozi (steamed filled buns), and other snacks; and in the outermost ring, all kinds of candies and melon seeds.

The difference between this type of cooking and what is found in big restaurants is that outdoor caterers have to set up their equipment at the banquet site, and there are many crucial factors to watch out for. For example, they need to control the direction and strength of the flow of air to get a full flame from the stove and to keep themselves from being burned as oil and flame come dangerously close together. When stacking steaming baskets, one false move can result in the baskets spilling out all over.

In times when money and resources were tight, chefs needed to work with limited ingredients to produce a variety of flavorful dishes. Chen Chao-lin likes to cite a dish called "Sun and Moon Chasing One Another" to describe his forebears' skill in this regard. According to Chen, the main ingredients for this dish are five duck eggs, cut in half, coated with a paste of minced cabbage and pork and formed into ten egg-shaped balls. When cut up again into 20 halves and put on a bed of Napa cabbage, these simple ingredients were enough to make a dish to serve two separate tables!

Master of two knives

Aside from his chef's knife, the artistic Chen Chao-lin is also highly skilled with the sculptor's knife. In his carvings on vegetables and fruits, his patterns are never cliched, and his incredible skills have earned him several national prizes in food-carving contests.

After he graduated from middle school, Hsikuan Temple next to his home was starting a major remodeling project, and Chen Chao-lin found time to watch the sculptors and carvers at work. Since the master carvers would not let people watch, Chen would wait until they had left to secretly study their handiwork, learning all kinds of techniques with different sculpting knives.

While doing his three years of mandatory military service, Chen spent time learning line drawing and painting. Studying on his own, he taught himself to carve a lifelike dragon's head from a pumpkin. In his time off duty, he once carved 1,000 dragon heads in just three days.

For catering chefs, each banquet was like a competition of culinary skill. The host would often invite several chefs to compete with each other in putting together a menu from the same ingredients. Each would come up with different dishes to serve, with the host and well-known local guests judging their performances and giving out prizes.

Doo Hsiou Yueh Restaurant, relying on the finely-wrought flavor of dishes passed down for generations as well as its innovative cuisine, was the first to introduce such dishes as "Buddha Jumping over the Wall" and grilled chicken to be eaten by hand to its outside banquet menu. Experienced guests always hope to eat at a table served by Doo Hsiou Yueh, and with an average of 40 outside banquets per month, the restaurant has come to be known as Ilan's "king of banquets."

Traditional vs. new flavors

Drawing on family tradition, Chen Chao-lin's traditional Ilan cuisine is well crafted and authentic. Take, for example, the Ilan dish called "Hsilu Pork": for this combination of Napa cabbage, pork strips, mushrooms, carrots, and dried duck egg, many chefs simply stir-fry all of the ingredients together and then steam it in a deep basket. Chen Chao-lin's method is different. First, he sautes the cabbage together with flash-fried flounder, and then add the other ingredients one layer at a time. This way, the slight sour taste that comes from sauteing the cabbage will not mix in with the other ingredients, and this gives the dish a rich layering of clear, distinct flavors.

Four generations of hard work in Ilan gives Chen Chao-lin a particularly deep understanding of local ingredients. "You have to do the best with what you have--and to do that, you need to understand what ingredients are produced nearby," says Chen.

With his practised skill, Chen makes a wonderful dish with the wild rice stems nourished by Ilan's Chiaohsi hot springs. After quickly boiling the stems in water, he wraps them in bacon and then barbecues these fragrant "beauty's legs" to create an irresistible dish that combines the clear, sweet taste of the wild rice stems with the pungent flavor of the bacon. In other innovative creations, Chen mixes the thick stalks of Ilan hot-spring-grown water spinach with octopus sauce, while in another dish, he brings together the unique flavor of Ilan kumquats with fresh shrimp.

Old songs sung anew

As the times change, eating habits also change. If its chefs only concerned themselves with making traditional dishes, how could Doo Hsiou Yueh have achieved such things as preparing banquets for various county chief executives over the years, or cooking for a state banquet?

Chen Chao-lin has found new ways to make traditional foods--which most people ate just to satisfy their hunger--into the stuff of fine cuisine. For the 2003 state dinner, Chen Chao-lin served up his Ilan minced pork cake. Cool on the outside, warm on the inside, this local pate has often been used to describe the personalities of Ilan people. The dish is based on the knowledge of generations past: it uses the indispensable slow-cooked chicken and duck bone broth as its base, with a combination of minced chicken breast, pork, and fresh shrimp. This is then thickened with a flour batter and cooked down to a sticky consistency, put into a pan to cool, cut into pieces, dredged in flour, and deep-fried. Rather than serving it on a large platter, Chen placed fresh scallop meat on top of each piece, serving them individually in refined ceramic dishes. In this new package, a somewhat rough-and-ready downhome food became an entirely new dish, fit for heads of state.

Even if he is the boss now, with a staff of over 20 cooks, Chen Chao-lin often stands in front of the hot stove, cooking away. "Grandpa said, 'If you go three days without practicing, you'll start to lose your skills,'" says Chen. He can sense that right now he is at a point where his experience and creativity are putting him at the height of his powers as a chef. Even if a customer came to the restaurant every night for a month, he would still be able to eat different dishes each time.

Chen Chao-lin still keeps his great-grandfather's century-old spatula in his office. As he picks it up today, the fire in his kitchen is truly bright and pure.

Chen Chao-lin fact file