To me, being customer-oriented is ultimately what preparing food is all about, but customer orientation advances with the times.

No one tires of light, fine food. Rather than stressing deft technique, modern chefs are putting the spotlight on engaging in a "dialogue" with their ingredients. (Sinorama file photo)

The three stages of culinary advance

The development of cuisine could be split into the three stages of eating one's fill, eating well, and fine dining. If you look back over the last 40 years of food in Taiwan, the era has definitely largely been a time of eating rice to complement main dishes, with "getting enough to eat" being the focus. How the food tastes with rice has naturally been extremely important. To accompany three bowls of rice, food requires a strong flavor and must be cooked with liberal amounts of oil. Some people say, "Only families that have been wealthy for three generations know what fine cuisine means." Even if things are progressing a little faster these days, it's still going to take some time.

Accustomed to these strong flavors, you can progress to the stage of appreciating what it is to "eat well." People begin to eat such delicacies as abalone, swallow's nests, and shark's fin. A lot of this kind of dining is connected to business meals, and sometimes it becomes burdensome. Yet going from this stage of "eating well" to "fine dining" is harder and requires more time.

Fine dining requires a kind of wisdom based on greater selectivity and discernment. If you want to be healthy, you've got to use less oil in your food, and the flavor has to be cleaner, with less overpowering spices to cover it up. The quality of the ingredients becomes very important. When all-you-can-eat buffets are still popular, it shows that the desire to "eat one's fill" hasn't been satisfied yet, and that there is still a large distance to bridge to the third stage, in which "the art of eating" comes to the fore.

If you look at the restaurants that have made the leap from one side of the strait to the other in terms of these three stages, the restaurants that have gone from Taiwan to the mainland are mostly those that put a lot of emphasis on the quality of ingredients, whereas the few that have come from the mainland to Taiwan are restaurants looking to win with large portions and heavy flavors, such as the restaurants Tanyutou, Dajinghua and Dahongpao. From this you can see that restaurants in Taiwan and on the mainland are at different stages of development.

Gourmet revolution

We know that in the past fine dining was confined to the kitchens of wealthy households. How was it that shark's fin and swallow's nest soup emerged into the general market? In 1949, when the Chinese Nationalists moved the ROC government to Taiwan, it brought about an important revolution in Chinese food. As a result of this huge migration, independent chefs from all the different provinces were now gathered in Taiwan, and they left the households of the wealthy and came out into the marketplace to display their magic and check each other out. Take the owner of Pengyuan: He used to be the private chef for the president of the Central Bank of China.

Furthermore, Taiwan cuisine went through a period of study, when it was absorbing the advantages of various Chinese regional cuisines, and it created a new kind of cuisine. This represents an even bigger revolution than the one that occurred after the southward migration during the Song dynasty, when the wealthy all moved to Hangzhou and developed "northern cooking with southern ingredients."

In mainland China the mixing of flavors from different provinces has necessarily taken a long time, and the entrance of Taiwanese food has speeded up the process. When Taiwanese restaurants open up in mainland China, I don't consider them as competing with mainland restaurants, because it's very hard for poor restaurants today to become good ones tomorrow. In fact good restaurants today will not necessarily be good tomorrow. Your culinary competitor should be yourself. When food and restaurants come in from outside in one wave after another, you are forced to constantly take in new things and transform yourself. If you can't change, you naturally end up lacking flavor.

Taiwan's Sichuanese beef noodles

Food preparation is ever-changing. French cooks have begun to use raw fish, and the mainland chefs who came to Taiwan to open Tanyutou have reintroduced an "old" conception of spiciness. This expands the horizons of everyone's taste buds.

The culture of food is one that moves and has revolutions. Apart from preserving the special character of the original flavor of Chinese food (we shouldn't, for instance, stop using fermented soy beans or soy sauce), it's even more important when creating a nouvelle Chinese cuisine to absorb the good points from the cuisines of every locale and nation. When preparing Sichuanese food in this era that puts a premium on healthy and light food, you can't make the same old kind of oily sweet and sour boneless pork. This is what is causing the old restaurants to close one after another.

Take, for instance, the Hangzhou food sold at the Tienhsiang Lou, "Heaven's Scent House." Its flavor isn't that fatty. Hangzhou chefs might object, but an objective look would show that we are making advancements. Or take another example: Taiwan's beef noodle soup is better than beef noodle soup in Sichuan, because on the mainland they don't pay much attention to what cut of beef to use. You could say that the various regional cuisines of China were all modernized in Taiwan.

Let me cite still another example: can you remember the early version of pineapple cake in Taiwan? It was harder. But today's makes use of Western butter-basting methods, which has made it more crumbly and better tasting. After having been improved, it is still one of Taiwan's most famous dishes-it's just better. If you insist on sticking with tradition, and insist on your own way, your food will just end up being inferior.

The new liberation of the taste buds

A special character of Taiwanese history is that at first the Han Chinese immigrants to Taiwan were entirely male, and in the early period Taiwan's food was extremely simple-basically just simple boiled foods like boiled sliced pork, fish balls and chopped boiled chicken. With this kind of foundation, it was very easy to accept any kind of foreign food. Absorbing diverse influences became the culinary culture.

On the other hand, there is strong regional character on the mainland, and it is quite a bit slower at opening up and absorbing new things, especially food. If you go to Shanghai, for example, you will find that more than 90% of the restaurants there offer local cuisine.

In the past few people from Sichuan ever got the chance to travel outside. It was very provincial, and people were quite conservative about their food. Yet times have changed. When locals go outside of their areas, and outsiders come in, people begin to make comparisons and contrasts. Their horizons broaden and they start to become more discerning.

For instance, it used to be that our breakfasts were only fried dough sticks, steamed buns and soymilk, but kids today can eat hamburgers or sandwiches, and there are all kinds of flavors. Things don't stay where they started. Of course a Chinese-style steamed bun is a fine thing, but Western-style bread requires a greater understanding of how to make dough rise with yeast, and it allows for greater variations. And as a result, Chinese-style steamed buns have been marginalized. Today's chefs can't just understand Chinese food and hold to tradition. In certain situations, "tradition" is just another kind of obstacle and can stymie the development of culinary culture.

In the past cooks only had to work hard and be deft of hand with their technique. But that allowed for a blind spot. The new generation of chefs is different. They need to have sensitivity of taste. This is why many of the best chefs today didn't study as apprentices. To be able to jump over to a new career track requires a bit of genius. That genius is having a good sense of smell and taste and understanding how to create flavors from ingredients. It's like how a musician's genius doesn't come from committed practicing but from sensitivity to music.

Chinese food is alive

The trend in culinary directions is in creating a dialogue with ingredients. When good cooks look at a fish, they can almost converse with it: Where does it come from? How old is it? When did it die? A good chef will know these answers just by looking at it. Is the salmon from Japan, Canada, or Norway? A good chef must understand the seasonal changes occurring in every corner of the world, understand the culinary map of the world, know that in France during the summer oysters aren't fat and can easily go bad, so that you should go to the southern hemisphere to Australia to get oysters.

In the past Taiwanese food absorbed the flavors of regional cuisines throughout China. Recently, Taiwanese food has been boldly innovating, embracing the best flavors and ingredients.