Fuchsia Dunlop on the Story of Chinese Food

Hi everyone, this is Tyler Cowen. This podcast is my favorite thing to do. I look forward to learning from each guest and having the opportunity to ask them questions, the questions that I'm most curious about. I look forward to sharing these conversations with you. One way you can help us keep these conversations going is by sponsoring an upcoming transcript. You can make a one-time donation of $500 or more before January 1st. Your generous contribution will cover the production cost of one of next year's transcripts, with your name featured prominently at the top. There are only a few spots left, so please don't wait. For those of you who can make a one-time donation of $1,000 or more, you will be invited to an exclusive virtual "Ask Me Anything" session with me, our dedicated production team, and the wider CWT community. It's your contributions that help us continue to offer this podcast for free, to host future listener meetups, to hold live events, and to continue to record episodes with the world's top thinkers and doers today. So please consider making a donation of any amount to Conversations with Tyler. To donate, visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate. And thank you once again for your support. Now, onto the show. Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today we're sitting in Mama Chang Restaurant in Fairfax, Virginia, one of my favorite restaurants of all time anywhere. And we are here with Fuchsia Dunlop. Now Fuchsia is the only individual we have done 3 Conversations with Tyler with, and that should tell you everything. Fuchsia quite simply writes the best books. I don't mean the best books on Chinese food, I mean the best books. And there is a new one. Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, which is just out. Fuchsia, welcome. We're delighted to have you here.

Thank you, Tyler. Great to be back.

Let's just start with very quick introductions of everyone at the table going around this way. Lydia.

Hi, everyone. I'm Lydia. I am the business owner. This is my family business. And welcome, everyone, to my Manchian.

Hi, my name's Fergus. I work on the Fitzwilliam, an online publication of Irish ideas.

I'm Sam.

I'm an economics undergrad and I work on the Fitzwilliam with Fergus.

I'm Rashid and I help Tyler at Mercatus with Emergent Ventures.

I'm Dan Wong. I've spent the last 6 years in China. Now I'm at the Yale Law School as a visiting scholar.

Very simple question to start for Fuchsia. How is real soy sauce better than what we might buy in the store?

Well, I guess naturally fermented artisanal soy sauce has a kind of tang to it and a richness which would be much more impressive than your average sort of mass-manufactured soy sauce. If you're lucky enough to get some.

And how many different soy sauces do you either make or own?

Oh, I don't make them, but I have—

I don't have that many actually.

You don't have that many?

I select few. You know, there are other decisions to make when cooking apart from, you know, choose between 50 soy sauces.

And where in China has the best soy sauce or your favorite in your opinion?

Well, Fujian is supposed to be best for artisanal soy sauce, but I suppose there's an amazing, really traditional soy sauce sauce factory in Hejiang in southern Sichuan, and it's this magical place on the banks of the river with all these clay pots, tanzha, with straw hats covering them when it rains, laid out with sort of traditional buildings. And they do traditional, old-fashioned, no, you know, modern innovation soy sauce. And a combination of the flavour and the place is just exceptional.

Now, many of your books, they're cookbooks, they're history books, they're also a kind of cultural studies set of books. But your latest book, again, "Invitation to a Banquet," it is primarily a history, right? It's not a recipes book. So after having gone through so much history of Chinese food, what updates have you made or what have you changed your mind about? What do you now see differently?

Well, I suppose the striking thing about Chinese culinary history is that there are these extraordinary continuities going back thousands of years in some cases, like steam for example, since the Neolithic Age, or making fermented soybean products going back more than 2,000 years, but that it's also always been so multicultural and so sort of innovative. Like, you know, the Han Dynasty about 2,000 years ago was a period when lots of new ingredients and technology actually critically for milling flour from wheat, which brought noodles and so on to China, but came in. And I think while researching this book, it was just a real reminder of how receptive Chinese food has been to other influences and how it's a kind of composite of many different places and ideas.

So we're here in 2023. You've been to China recently. You went all over. Perhaps you had a few meals. During pandemic times, it was hard to get there. Over those years, what has changed or what has struck you as different?

Well, so going back, the first thing that was really striking, there were many fewer foreigners. So, you know, when I was there in the '90s, there weren't many foreigners at all, and I felt very conspicuous. And then there's been a period period with loads of expats and visitors and tourists, and sort of in the wake of the pandemic, again, I was feeling like I was the only foreigner around. And food-wise, well, one thing that I found hilarious and surprising was having takeouts delivered to a hotel room by robots. So that's never happened to me here. So technological advances. And then also everyone I met was talking about 'Yu Zi Cai', like semi-prepared dishes. And so it's been a real trend in China that restaurants are having central kitchens that are supplying dishes that are either fully made and just need reheating or partially made to be finished in a restaurant. And it seems to be a really hot topic of conversation. And of course, all these concerns about sort of the erosion of culinary skills if chefs are not learning to cook from scratch but are just finishing dishes.

I have more questions, but now we turn to Lydia to tell us what just arrived.

Right.

So welcome to Mama Qian, and today we're having a banquet meal. So invitation to a banquet. We typically like to start our banquet meal with something cold, a cold platter. And today we have a platter of 4 different kinds. We have the fava beans with goji berry. We have the braised shiitake mushroom. We have some tofu skin and mala beef jerky.

Fuchsia, are Chinese eating habits individualizing? So we're here together as a group. We're going to share a lot of dishes. It's how it should be done. But as you know, birth rates are declining. More people in many countries spend more time alone. That makes it harder to have that kind of meal. How is that evolving in China?

Well, I think it's very noticeable that restaurants in cities, there are more restaurants with small tables designed for couples and smaller groups. But I mean, you still have the kind of round table, big gang, but also alternatives.

I have more questions, but let me now turn to Dan Wang to my left. Who will ask a question or two.

Fuchsia, in your book, you quote Ferran Adria as saying, "Who is the most important culinary figure of the last 50 years? Well, surely it is Mao Zedong, because the chairman sent all of China's farmers and all of China's chefs to work in factories, thus destroying the preeminence of Chinese cuisine." Is he right? How much do we really understand what culinary culture was between, you know, before the People's Republic? And can we recover a lot of those traditions now?

Well, I think it's, I mean, one of the reasons that I wrote this book is that it seems to me extraordinary that China has this exceptional cuisine, which is so diverse and sophisticated, and also which resonates with so many contemporary concerns. And, you know, there are parallels in China of going back to the 10th century of people making imitation meat from plant foods. You have this tremendously creative transformational cuisine which echoes the avant-garde cooking of modernist chefs in the West. All this stuff, and yet China has been the sort of terra incognita for many people in the food world. And this is, I think it's purely historical reasons. The Chinese food that most people in the West know stems from American Chinese food, which was created by immigrants from one particular region, the Cantonese South, who were working in very different, difficult circumstances. You know, they were facing racial prejudice. They probably didn't have access to all the ingredients that they were used to. And they were often cooking for people who had no acquaintance with Chinese food. So you have this simplified, very appealing, fantastically popular and successful, but not really a good representation of this amazing culinary nation. Throughout the 20th century, war, revolution, Cultural Revolution. And so China was just, you know, not part of international culinary exchanges. And I think also prestige food is often about money. You know, Japan got rich first. Japanese food is very prestigious. People will spend loads of money on Japanese sushi, but not so much on Chinese food. So I think that, yeah, Farah Najia is right that Chinese food doesn't have the recognition, the acknowledgement that it really should have. I think now it's possible really to have a fresh look.

Can we cook a 10th-century meal from Hangzhou today, or is that mostly lost to us?

Well, the frustrating thing is that there are some— there's an amazing source, well, actually of sort of, what is it, 12th, 13th-century Hangzhou describing all the food served in city restaurants. And it is dizzying. You know, there were all different kinds of restaurants, regional Buddhist vegetarian restaurants, restaurants for students, and snack shops of of different kinds. And the author lists all these delicacies, but there are no recipes or descriptions. So there's tantalisingly not very complete information, but you could, you know, I know chefs, I know a chef in Hangzhou actually who has created banquets of Song Dynasty food as far as possible from the texts. So I think we have to partly use imagination and, but some, you know, there are some you know, continuities in ingredients and techniques. So—

Fuchsia, we'll give you a moment to eat. So I'll ask you, Dan, a question. Much of pandemic you spent in China, some of that in Yunnan. What did you learn about Yunnanese food during those months?

I wonder whether Yunnanese food can be considered a cuisine as such. I think it is mostly not a very convenient label. So Yunnan is a very mountainous region that is historically Tibet in the north, and that is close to being culturally Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar in the south, which it borders. And so, you know, how do we make sense of a cuisine that is basically Tibet in the north and Thailand in the south? I don't really think that there's such a thing as possible, that it is such a mountainous zone perplexed with intricacies. And so, you know, I think this is mostly mountain food, depends on where you go. I don't think we can recognize it as a coherent cuisine as such.

A question for Rashid. We'll get back to Fuchsia in a moment, but you're from Barbados. Chinese food is different in every country, every region. How is Chinese food different in the Caribbean?

Chinese food in Barbados is actually quite dull, unfortunately. However, in Panama, which I also live, Chinese food is probably as exuberant as you would go with some parts of China. There are parts of Panama where, if you— El Dorado area— where dim sum is— the Chinese restaurants are packed. They are full, not only with local Chinese but mixed up with other Panamanian races. And it's just like a very big aspect of culture. And to me also, Chinese food in Panama has a much more authentic flavor than even most parts of Europe if they had Chinese food. That's, I think, quite surprising, almost like a hidden secret in Central America.

And you have a question for Fuchsia.

Yes. So recently, given the, often the surprising boom of Sichuan food globally even. There's been a movement by some elements of the government, for example, to publish these Sichuan requirements. I'm curious how that has impacted some of the culinary styles in Sichuan.

Well, yeah, so as you said, there's been a sort of bid to standardize and categorize classic dishes. So, you know, the local government also in Chongqing, they've produced publications which say this is mapo tofu and this is the ingredients. Like having a sort of, you know, Appellation Contrôlée for wine or something. But I think the point is that, I mean, it's an interesting and noble endeavour, but people cook in a much more free, ad hoc, creative way. So, there are many different ways to actually make a mapo tofu, maybe some key characteristics, but you don't have every chef measuring to the gram the amount of minced beef or the amount of Sichuan pepper. So I think I would say they're not having that much influence. And also because Sichuanese cuisine, one of the great things about it is that it's so dynamic. I mean, people in Sichuan love eating and they're creative and they're always, you know, doing things like making Sichuanese dishes with okra, which was not around when I was a student there in the '90s. So I think that there's always this tension between, you know, we all feel nostalgic and we love tradition, And there's something worthwhile about trying to document classics and traditions. But at the same time, you have to recognize that a cuisine is a very vital living form of culture, which is recreated in every kitchen every day. So the difference between practice and theory is quite, you know, quite deep.

You have observations on what we're eating so far?

Mm, well, it's certainly delicious. And it's lovely to have some vegetable dishes. And that's one of the things that Chinese food in the West, with the sort of concentration on on shrimp and chicken and, you know, beef and fried foods and so on. But actually the glory of Chinese cooking is that there are so many vegetables, it's healthy and balanced and refreshing. So you might have a rich intense dish like this mala beef, numbing and hot beef, very delicious and rich and meaty. But also we've got this lovely tofu skin with a sort of very light dressing and a bit of crab meat and some very refreshing shiitake mushrooms. And this is gorgeous. White beans with laozao, fermented glutinous rice wine. And these are all quite unusual to have in an American Chinese restaurant, I would say.

For a typical quality Chinese meal, let's say in the United States or maybe London, what percent of the credit should go to the chefs and what percent of the credit should go to the people who bought the ingredients? How do you think about that?

You're quoting Yuan Mei, the great 18th century Chinese gourmet. Well, that's another thing that's really interesting because I think Chinese food in the West is not associated with premium ingredients. So if you go to a sort of fancy Spanish restaurant, they'll be trumpeting their Ibérican ham, so on and so on. If you go to a new Californian restaurant, they'll be talking about which farm they got the produce from. But Chinese restaurants generally don't say much about the ingredients. And that's just because they've been kind of stuck in this bracket where people don't go to Chinese restaurants for fine ingredients, which is completely mad. And, you know, in this book, there's a whole chapter about this really, that the Chinese practically invented the concept of terroir, you know, the obsession with seasons, with provenance, you know, exactly, you know, which land your vegetables are produced on in and so on. Yeah, I think that in traditional Chinese cookery, certainly a vitally important part of it is sourcing seasonal, fresh quality ingredients. So it would be nice to recognize that. And this is clearly happening here. We've got all these, you know, Amish farm ingredients, right?

Yes, I would say it comes maybe in both ways. We appreciate and we use a lot of local ingredients from the Maryland crab that paired with our tofu skin. We also go out of our way trying to look for seasonal, like really good quality white beans. What we are about to have, we have some Amish pork dumplings. We try to source the best ingredients, whatever we can find, and use it to make quality dishes.

And I think my feeling is that, you know, if Chinese cuisine in the future, in contemporary times, manages to unite the exceptional culinary skills of Chinese chefs with the old obsession with ingredients, they're just going to blow everyone else away.

Bouchard, you mentioned the terroir concept, but for example, there's a very big, it's a very high-end tea, for example, and they focus a lot on the terroir aspect. I'm wondering how much of that Do you think that is a quality difference or is it really like a big chunk of marketing itself?

Well, it's, I mean, it's like wine, isn't it? It's exactly the same. So I think that, you know, to an extent, probably there is, you know, that the exact, the soil and the weather in a particular place will influence an ingredient. But clearly there's also a sort of cultural and an imaginative aspect. And so there's a lot of fakery as well. So people pretending that they're supplying Longjing tea from the Longjing Hills around Hangzhou, when it's not actually that, but probably people who drink it still feel that it's finer because of the label.

Sam, do you have a question for Fuchsia?

Yeah, so I went to India for the first time over the summer and the food was wonderful, but it sort of struck me that it was Indian food had transferred with relatively high fidelity to like very high-end Indian restaurants in Glasgow or Birmingham, so on. Nothing in their cuisine was sort of shocking to me, in a way that I suspect it would be traveling around different areas of China. So, I mean, you mentioned Chinese food in the West being so Cantonese, but is there kind of more to it than that or like more factors that determine which cuisines translate with higher fidelity?

Yeah, so the first thing is that China is absolutely vast and it has a very stunning diversity of different terrains and climates with all the implications for produce. So there are so many ingredients from different places. So you are only ever going to see small snapshots of this great richness of Chinese cuisine abroad. So even though now we're beginning to see, you know, Sichuanese food and different regional cuisines, there is so much more. I mean, I've been researching this for about 30 years and I'm still discovering entire new styles, you know, local traditions practically every time I go to China. And in terms of fidelity, I think Chinese food, I said in the book, it's a kind of victim of its own success. And it's all about timing. So Chinese was one of the earliest immigrants' cuisines at a time when Western palates were probably more conservative and it was, you know, more difficult to try and faithfully reproduce Chinese food abroad. And it got stuck— public perceptions of Chinese food have got stuck there. But now things are changing and there are so many immigrants, students, visitors from other parts of China living in, you know, cities like this and all over the place who want to eat proper Chinese food. They want to eat the food they eat at home, whether it's from their hometowns or its trendy cuisines like Sichuanese. So it's now possible for Chinese restaurants in the West to, you know, they don't have to tailor to Western taste. They can just start off doing food for a Chinese clientele. So then it's more faithful. But I think one should also say that some of the, I mean, like your Yunnan cuisine, for example, the marvelous thing about Yunnan cuisine is all this local produce. There are so many ingredients that you simply can't find anywhere else in China, let alone abroad. And so it's harder to, I mean, you can't really reproduce many aspects of Yunnan cuisine, wouldn't you say?

Yeah, that's right. If I can ask a follow-up question on this comparison between India and China, you know, maybe this is half a question also for Tyler Cowen. Why do we associate Indian cuisine so much more with long simmers? Whereas Chinese cuisine, of course, it is a little bit of everything as Fuchsia Dunlop knows so well, but it is is often a little bit more associated with quick fries. You know, what is the factor endowment here of, you know, these two very big countries, very big civilizations having somewhat divergent paths as we imagine with culinary traditions?

That's a really interesting question. It's hard to answer because I don't really know anything about Indian food. I did have a really interesting conversation with an Indian who came on my tour to Yunnan earlier this year. Because I was kind of speculating that one of the reasons that Chinese food is so diverse is that the Chinese are really open-minded with very few taboos. So apart from, you know, Muslims eating halal food and some Buddhists not eating meat, there's a kind of great adventurous open-mindedness to eating. Whereas in India, you have lots of taboos and sort of religious and ritual restrictions. And that's one reason that you would think it would be a constraint on the creativity of Indian food. But this Indian I was talking to who's a food specialist, he reckoned that the restrictions actually forced people to be more creative. So he was arguing that Indian food was, you know, had all the conditions for diversity that Chinese does. But in terms of cooking methods, it's hard to say. And I, again, I don't know about Indian food, but the thing about China is that there's been this intense thoughtfulness about food really for a very long time. I mean, you know, you see it in descriptions of food from 2,000 years ago and more. And then in the Song Dynasty, this incredible restaurant, restaurant industry in places like Hangzhou and innovation and creativity. And so I suppose that when you are thoroughly interested in food like the Chinese and thinking about it creatively all the time, you end up having a whole plethora of different cooking methods. And that's one of the striking things about Chinese cuisine, right? That you have slow-cooked stews and simmered things and steamed things and also stir-frying. So that might explain why several different methods have achieved prominence.

Before I comment on that, Lydia, on the new dish, please tell us.

Oh, what we— apparently it's an empty plate now. We have a vegetarian spring roll. So spring roll is something that we love to have as a holiday special. We have it over spring, the Lunar New Year, or, you know, it's actually you wrap things together. Sometimes you add shrimp, pork, pork. And for this one, we use vegetarian, and that's a really amazing vegetarian dish.

On your India-China question, this is pure speculation, but my sense has been China was wealthier earlier for a longer period of time and on average stayed wealthier. So it had more in the way of meats, and you had people eating in large groups. So the idea that you would chop up the meat and divide the meat and feed it to people and then flash stir-fry the meat in some way. India, it's more likely you're cooking vegetables. You're on various spice trails to a greater degree. The Indian spices work very well being simmered for a long period of time. You're less concerned with, well, how am I going to cook this meat? Because Hindus are not eating beef, and it seems that pigs are much harder to raise in India than in China. That would be my guess. But do you have a take?

I have no take.

Okay.

But another idea that I was thinking of was that also, and again, I don't know about India, but China very early on, like in the Song dynasty from about 12th century, had a really lively and developed and diverse restaurant scene with restaurants at different levels. And so eating out was a real thing. And I should imagine with eating out that, and there were restaurants with menus where you would order your dishes, you know, not just fixed menus and so on. And so in those conditions, you do want dishes that can be made quickly to order. So maybe that would encourage the development of fast cooking methods as well as home cooking and you know, slow the pot on the stove in the home kitchen.

What about yi tang di san xian? So the hot food would beat 3 times over the flavours, or Chinese people love to eat quick hot food.

Yeah. Well, I suppose, and also—

Greater urbanisation.

But actually another thing, and is the emphasis on texture, and I don't really know about the history of this, but one of the really distinctive things about Chinese gastronomy is that the Chinese totally appreciate and understand texture to a degree that is unheard of anywhere else, really. Really, and that's why they enjoy eating so many slithery, rubbery, and also often tasteless foods that have interesting textures. And there are certain textures. So, for example, one of my sort of old favourites, Sichuanese dish, pu'er bao yao hua, fire exploded kidney flowers. So, that's made with pork kidneys, which are cut into little frilly pieces and stir-fried very fast. And you actually have to cook them fast to keep them thin and a little bit sort of crisp, right? So I think perhaps when people have this obsession with texture, there are certain ingredients that require fast cooking. Also vegetables, right? Absolutely. So that you don't have everything very soft, but you have this briskness, liveness, crispness in the bite.

But what's your speculation on why this kogan is such a big feature of the Chinese food?

Okay, speculation again. But I mean, but I think the thing about China, like there was this ancient philosopher Gaozi who said, 'Food and sex are human nature.' And there's this unabashed pleasure in the physicality of eating. Like English people traditionally are a bit sort of buttoned up and, you know, it's impolite to make noises when you eat and it's not very proper to show too much exuberant delight in food, right? But in China, you see this absolute joy in eating, in ancient poetry, in the way people eat today. And I think part of that is feeling uninhibited about it as something physical. So like when you eat in China, you can make little noises, you can put something like a duck's tongue that's grapples and a bit bony and complicated to your lips, and you can enjoy the game with your teeth and tongue. And that's all perfectly acceptable and enjoyed. I think perhaps when you don't mind a little noise and you're not shy of the physicality, then you can have things that are slithery and crunchy and, you know, require a bit of engagement when you eat them.

Really makes you wonder about the English approach to sex.

Yes. Well, let's pass swiftly on this subject.

Lydia, please tell us about the new dish.

Oh, we're having a dim sum soup with what looks like tofu, but it's actually chicken.

And the vegetarian version of it that Sam has, what can you tell us?

Oh, unfortunately, Sam, we don't have a vegetarian version here. It looks like tofu. It's actually not.

And this is a classic Sichuan banquet dish, which goes back at least 100 years. It's sort of written about in a very famous text, early 20th century. And it's just a reminder that Sichuan food is not all spicy. You know, like any other Chinese cuisine, it's about balance. So if you have very, you know, intensely flavored and hot dishes and oily dishes, you always have refreshing light things like this lovely broth.

And this is Amish chicken, right? Why is that?

Right.

How and why is that different than better?

Well, let's just say that the environment has a lot to do with how things are raised, and you know, it's when Dad first met the Amish community, he felt a strong tie to the way they live. It reminded him a lot of the time, you know, he was raised as a boy in the village in China in the '60s. My grandmother was a farmer. She used to be the one that's earning all the credits and contribute that to the local, the village government. And in return, they don't really have a lot to eat on the table. So it's the humble life of the Amish community reminded that a lot of nostalgia.

Sam, do you have another question?

Well, I was going to say Tyler recently told me that the third best chicken he ever had was an Amish chicken, which pleased me a lot because it implies you have an encyclopedic ranking of every chicken you've eaten. Yeah, I mean, to continue on the train of extremely speculative things, there's this famous or perhaps infamous observation about how whether areas of China engaged in mostly wheat-based or mostly rice-based agriculture has effects centuries later on various social outcomes, SAT scores, et cetera. And thinking about Ireland, where I'm from, even just beyond the famine, it seems like there are many ways in which the presence of the potato and the dominance of it affects culture and landholdings and so on. How do you think about the role of the staple crop in creating the culture or cuisine of a certain place?

Hmm.

Well, an easy question. And you thought I asked hard ones.

Well, I suppose, I mean, China was a whole civilization that grew around the staple grain, which was originally millet. And all the rituals of the state, the ancient Chinese state, were about offering food to gods and ancestors. So wheat and alcohol and, sorry, so millet and alcohol and so on. And roasted meats. Yeah, I mean, I suppose what's interesting about that is that millet went on being the sacred grain right up until the end of, you know, the Chinese Imperial period in about 1911. But it had actually disappeared from people's daily diets. So people in North China went on to eat wheat and noodles and breads, but millet remained the staple grain. So I guess there's a gulf between what people are actually eating and ideas about ritual and so on.

What remains of Manchu cooking in Chinese food today?

Well, I mean, there's a bit in the book about this idea that, I mean, one of the distinctive thing about Chinese cooking going back about 2,000 years is the habit of cutting food into small pieces and eating it with chopsticks. And yet there are some dishes which are presented whole. Like a Cantonese ceremonial suckling pig or Peking duck. And of course, they're cut up before they're served because you don't have knives at the Chinese dinner table. The Manchus were sort of rugged northern nomads who liked eating huge chunks of sheep meat, which they would then cut apart with their own personal knives. And this was something that was still part of high-level society in the Qing Dynasty when China was ruled by Manchus. And you can see these little eating sets that people slung onto belts or tucked into their boots where you have a pair of chopsticks and a knife so that people could eat both Chinese and Manchu food. The sort of whole roast meats, particularly in northern cuisine, may have been a legacy of this Manchu predilection for meat. And there's a scholar, Isaac Huer, who I cited in the book, who looked at an 18th-century Chinese banquet menu, and there were whole servings of what were clearly Chinese dishes with food cut up very fine and served in soups and stews. And then these whole services of real sort of, you know, charred and roasted and boiled meats, which were Manchu. And then also actually in Beijing cuisine, there is some legacy of the Manchus in dairy foods. So, like sort of other nomads, they ate dairy foods. And so, you have very fascinating something in Beijing imperial cuisine called nai nao, 'junket,' which is like a steamed custardy dessert made from milk. And also another very interesting dish when nai nao gan, when it's cooked at a very at very low heat that it turns to a kind of fudge, a bit like dulce de leche, but solid. So there are traces of Manchu food in Chinese cooking, particularly in the north.

Lydia, what is new on the table, please?

It's our homemade pork dumpling, and we use Amish pork. Now maybe you can tell me what the difference is.

Fuchsia, why doesn't pork in particular have a higher status in China? Why doesn't it? Because Chinese eat so much of it. It's maybe the best pork in the world, right? The best pork dishes. But it's not the highest status food or close to it.

Well, because it's popular and ubiquitous, pork is the celebratory food for anyone traditionally. But in China, if you want to get to the really highest echelons of gastronomy, you need rare and exotic and particular and sought-after foods. So things like deer tendons, you know, these are imperial delicacies, camel's hump, you know, hashima, the ovarian fat of the snow frog, all these unusual delicacies and bird's nest. Rare and fabulously expensive. So these things are more prestigious in China because they're scarce and expensive and extreme luxuries.

Does bear's paw actually taste good?

You better ask someone else.

Because you've never had it.

Yeah, you don't have bear's paw really served these days. It was, it appears in cookbooks right until the 1980s, you know, even of state banquets, but it's now something. But you have lots of bears in America, don't you?

We do, but I don't think you're allowed to eat bear's paw.

I'm not sure.

Sure.

Can you eat it? I've never tried it.

It seems awkward to eat at the very least, right?

Well, but I mean, if you're Chinese, that's no problem because, you know, people in China eat camel's feet and pig's feet and they cook them to make the most of these gristly and gelatinous textures. So the fact that it's highly grappulous and not appealing to a Western palate is no problem at all.

Fergus, do you have questions?

Yeah, so as we sort of alluded to earlier, there's this regional divide in China where in the north wheat is sort of primarily grown rather than rice, which is obviously much the same as Europe. So what is the kind of explanatory factor that means that in China people tend to make noodles rather than bread, and obviously bread in Europe rather than noodles? Is there a kind of factor or single factor that explains that?

There's a very interesting book, A Cultural History of Chopsticks by Edward Q. Wang, who looks a bit at this. But it seems that the Chinese very early on, apart from eating food that was cut into small pieces, they really liked eating food that was plucked out of hot liquid, right? And so the classic ancient Chinese dish, long before stir-fries and the more sort of famous modern Chinese dishes, was the gung, which was a sort of soupy stew made from lots of ingredients that were cut into small pieces floating around together in liquid. This sort of evolved with the use of chopsticks, which are very suited for eating that kind of dish. It seems like some, you know, early forms of pasta appear to have been, you know, bits of dough dropped into hot liquid. And that would've fitted into the China, you know, a way of eating that was already becoming, you know, a bit distinctively Chinese, you could say. And I think that's still the case that, wouldn't you say, Lydia, that Chinese people really like liquids in their food more than Westerners? So, a classic Chinese, you know, in England we say meat and two veg is like a basic standard meal. In Chinese, it's si cai tang 4 dishes and a soup. And when I was living in Sichuan, you know, you never have a meal without soup. It might be really, really basic, but it's just going to be a light broth to cleanse the palate and sort of, you know, refresh you after the other dishes. So, I think perhaps, you know, and in modern China, you know, Westerners much prefer chow mein, stir-fried noodles. Chinese, it's all soupy noodles, and fried noodles are much, much less common really. So, perhaps this is what, why, and also just in China, until very recently, and still in most cases, Chinese people don't have ovens at home. They do not roast or bake. So, everything was done on a stovetop, a design that really hadn't changed much for 2,000 years. You can still see in farmhouses in China, these stoves with two openings for woks or steamers, and that's how you cook. And so, bread in China traditionally is usually steamed and sometimes cooked on a kind of griddle, maybe with a lid like shaobing. Yeah, the absence of ovens as a common kitchen implement and the love of hot liquid.

Now you live in London. If I'm looking for good Chinese food in London, conceptually, how should I go about it? Should I run to Chinatown? Should I go to the outer boroughs or what's the right schema apart from any particular place you might recommend?

Well, I mean, I would look at where Chinese students are eating partly. So then you'll get the sort of more recent trends in China.

But how do I find that out? Out. If I just ask ChatGPT, will it tell me where the Chinese students are eating or?

No, you need someone who reads Chinese to go on social media and find what is being talked about. I think that would help.

Maybe the app Xiao Hong Shu is going to—

Xiao Hong Shu, yes, that's true. It's popular among students.

Uh, Fu Xia, how much cumin is too much for Dong Bei barbecue?

Oh, I mean, that's a matter of taste, right? I have no idea. Yeah. Yes. Have you been assaulted by excessive amounts of cumin then, or?

For me, it varies so much because sometimes I, the cumin is like, it's just cumin flame essentially.

Yes.

And then sometimes it's not at all. And I ask people, you know, how do you determine? They say, well, guess taste. But it feels like, I felt it was something more than just, I decide today to put more cumin than not. Right. It's very unstandard in that is?

Hmm. Yes, I have no idea, I'm afraid.

Okay. Follow-up question. A very standard Caribbean dish is jerk chicken.

Yeah.

And a very strong component of that is soy sauce. And people don't always consider it as a Chinese influence, but of course it is. And I'm curious if there are any other areas of standard dishes across the world where it has a very strong Chinese influence that people don't really realize it itself.

Well, that's hard to say. I mean, I suppose that, I mean, all soy products is, you know, the influence of China, right? Because China domesticated the soybean very early on. And soy foods have been incredibly important also in, you know, they came to Japan from China, right? Making tofu and soy sauce.

Wouldn't Mexican mole be an example? Those original Pueblo recipes from the 17th century? Century, what came on the galleon from the Philippines, a lot of Chinese influence.

Oh, really? Yeah.

I have been told.

Okay.

Speculatively.

Yeah. I'm trying to think of examples. Yeah. I'm really not sure.

If a reader is using your recipes and they make a mistake, what's the most likely mistake for them to make?

I mean, not, not paying attention to cutting things evenly with stir-fried food, maybe. And how does that influence the final taste or what goes wrong Well, it's just, if you're stir-frying something that's cut into slivers or slices, the whole point of stir-frying is meant to be very fast. And the reason that it's effective is that if the food is cut finely and evenly, then everything will be perfectly done at the same moment. And if the cutting is clunky and uneven, then some pieces of food will be overcooked while others are still raw. So I think that's maybe something that people don't necessarily realise, that it's not just aesthetically important, it's also technically important. Important in Chinese food.

Why might an older Chinese chef be reluctant to stir-fry himself or herself?

Oh, well, that's, yeah, because, and this is something that several people have told me, that stir-frying is perhaps the most difficult of all cooking methods in any cuisine because it's so fast. There's no room for maneuver, there's no margin for error. So if you have food that's finely cut and that is sensitive to heat, so like, I don't know, stir-fried scallops, for example. So if you overcook them, it's a complete disaster. Faster. So you have to cook very quickly and you have to add your seasonings absolutely correctly because you can't— it's not like making a hollandaise sauce when you can have a taste and then add a bit more lemon juice or whatever. You have to just have this instinct. So it's like wushu, it's like martial arts. You have to be on the top of your game. And it's incredible seeing, you know, when you see a really accomplished chef with a professional cooker stir-frying, it is so fast and it's so instinctive. There's no measured thought. They're just doing it correctly, and it's a kind of miracle when it turns out right. And yes, I found that sometimes when chefs have been explaining even their own personal classic dishes to me, their preferred method is to stand by the wok and get a younger apprentice to cook. And people have said that's because, you know, the elder chefs have more a management role. They're not cooking every day. So like a martial artist or a dancer, they're they don't have that fluidity and sharp instinct that you have when you're doing it.

So you may eat your dumpling. I have a question for Dan. Dan, you're a Canadian citizen. You've also spent plenty of time in China. How is Chinese food different in the United States versus Canada?

I think Canada depends on where you go, but where I grew up in Ottawa, there wasn't a terribly great amount of Chinese cuisine. And I think there was a little bit more of the Cantonese Cantonese influence. You know, something like 11% of Canadians live abroad. I believe that is the highest ratio in the world. And that is because in about, you know, in the '90s, the Canadian government just offered extraordinary numbers of visas to Hong Kongers to basically escape Hong Kong before the return to the mainland. And so that has a very big Cantonese influence. Now, I haven't really tested this, but people would say that Vancouver at some points had the best Chinese food in the world because of just the amount of influx there. But I haven't really tasted enough in Vancouver to say.

I've only been there 3 times. My sense was they had first-rate Cantonese food, not quite as good as Hong Kong, but clearly the best in this hemisphere. But in the other areas, at least at the time, they were much weaker. Fergus Anders Sam, do you have comments on Chinese food in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, or anywhere else you've been.

Yeah, I mean, I suppose Chinese food in Ireland is similarly not very developed like in Barbados. If there is any sort of non-generic Chinese restaurant in Ireland, it's probably Sichuan. I'm interested, how did Sichuan become, maybe this is not an accurate description, the prestige cuisine, like the one if a first regional Chinese restaurant opens in a city city, it's most likely to be that one.

How did that happen?

Well, I think that Sichuanese food travels really well. So there are some cuisines like the food of the Jiangnan region or Yunnan, we already said. There, there are so many really unique local ingredients that you can't get elsewhere. And when you think about Yunnan food, you think about these extraordinary ingredients. But Sichuan food, the heart and soul of Sichuanese cooking is in the artful combination of flavours. So not just mala, numbing and hot, but also yu xiang, which which is, you know, a bit of sweet and sour, pickled chili, ginger, garlic, spring onion, all these wonderful combinations of flavors. And I think that if you have, because the sort of identity of Sichuanese food is in the flavors, you can apply a Sichuanese yu xiang, fish fragrant sauce, to the kind of fish that you can get in, that you can get, say, in England. It doesn't have to be a local carp. It'll still feel like Sichuanese cooking because the flavorings and the techniques there. So I think that with, you know, Sichuanese cook just needs a sort of small battery of key ingredients, Sichuan pepper, dried chilies, pickled chilies, doubanjiang, pickled chili paste, soy sauce, vinegar, and then you can cook whatever's to hand. So I think for that reason, it's quite accessible and transportable as a sort of concept and a practice.

Livia, could you speak to the new dish, please?

Absolutely. So we have a seafood stew with crispy rice. Rice. And this is one of the typical dishes that you think, oh, it's— you have a rice crispy on the top and cook everything so fast. But I would probably call this one of the gong fu cai because we homemade the fish ball, and that process on its own is probably 8 to 10 hours. You know, you see some jumbo shrimp in there, scallops, and they're all cooked at different times for it to be at perfect condition.

And what region is that from?

Well, this is something my dad holds very dear to his heart. The fishball, we eat it back at home in Hubei. Yeah, this is a, I would call this a Hubei cai.

And how do you think about not just any single dish, but how you put this meal together? The combination of dishes. What would you tell us?

Well, I have to say, if you go to any Chinese restaurant, I would tap probably It really takes a mastermind to put a banquet menu like this. So either someone that's really knowledgeable in the ingredients, in the methods that things are prepared. You get a good balance of something mild, something with soup, something crispy, different poultry. It's really like putting puzzles together. Chinese people eat pretty picky. So any end of the meal, I'm sure the guests will have something to say, "Oh, I didn't like this and that pair together." So it really takes a lot of skill to put a banquet menu on the table. So today's meal, Jeff Peter, my dad, actually put everything.

Great. Fergus, comment or question?

Yeah, going back to the sort of exotic ingredients aspect. So I think we even mentioned, say, deer tendons earlier are in the West, at least it's, they're typically wild. It's quite difficult to domesticate and farm them. So what does the kind of economy of accessing those ingredients in China look like? Presumably some are intensively farmed if possible, but presumably others are very difficult to get your hands on.

Well, they're quite unusual and some of them are imported as well and some of them are wild. And then of course, you know, one of the problems that China has is also with an illegal trade in wildlife, but that's under the table. Table that's not in the open. So you're unlikely to find these things on sale in markets. Yeah, most people would never eat any wild food because it's expensive and scarce. Yeah. So, you know, when I was saying about things like the deer tendons, I mean, that's a grand old imperial delicacy and not something common at all. And then some ingredients are imported. So like, well, bird's nest is farmed. A lot of it's farmed in Malaysia, right?

Now, when I go to China, sometimes I'm disappointed disappointed when I see so many hot pot restaurants. They're typically pretty good, but they're a bit all the same. And maybe I'll go eat there once during a trip, but after that, it's just a kind of plague. What's your view on this? Why is this happening?

I totally agree with you, and I call it the hot potization of the Chinese restaurant scene. And it's just, you know, hot pot is great fun. It's a really convivial, lively, inexpensive— it can be very inexpensive way to eat and, you know, to share food with your friends. But in terms of cooking technique, it's definitely low-skilled. So, and that of course makes it hugely appealing for restaurateurs. I mean, you know how difficult it is to get good chefs, right? Wok chefs especially, it's a nightmare because it's so difficult to do. With hot pot, you just need a good soup base. You can even buy it in, and then you just need staff to slice up bits of food and your customers cook it themselves. And so I think it's partly that hot pot is very popular and partly for economic reasons that it's actually just a lot easier from the point of view of the restaurateur, right? But yeah, it's a poor— particularly with Sichuan, I mean, Sichuan has such amazingly diverse and exciting food, and hot pot is a poor reflection of all that.

And may I add, I think hot pot restaurants are like the McDonald's in China. It's really considered as a fast food restaurant.

Yeah, well, they— a lot of them are, but they— you also have incredibly high-end ones. With, you know, seafood and incredible—

Abalone. Waitress.

Yeah.

So it's sort of, you find them at all levels of the market, but it is a bit of a plague. Nice in moderation. By the way, I have to say, the technique of this dish is fantastic. Explain please. Well, so you've got an assembly of all different ingredients, and as you said, they're cooked separately. So these fish balls have a lovely, light, delicate texture, but they're not completely flaccid. They have a bit of liveliness to them. Bit of scallop in mine, sort of juiciness. The prawn is beautifully silky and also a bit crisp, and you have the vegetables that are crisp and not overcooked. So that shows you that they've all been cooked separately to the peak, then combined together, and then you have the lovely contrast between the crisp crunch of the guoba, the rice crust, and the liquid. And so there's a lot that has gone into that technically, right?

The new dish, please explain. Excuse me. And tell us what's the difference between chicken of this sort on the bone and not I'm about.

This is not chicken. We're having scallops today. Oh, okay. So we elevated it. Yes, you are right. Typically we would serve this as lazi ji, red chili pepper chicken. And some people would like to call it the treasure chicken because you have to find the chicken among a pile of red peppers. And to elevate it today, we're eating wild scallops. That has a good heat to it.

It's rather lovely. Do you see the garnish? These very deftly, intricately cut cucumbers. And that's something that you hardly see these days. So it's a real sort of classic old school Chinese cooking, but it's labour intensive. Most people, did your father do it himself or one of his chefs?

He did it himself. And let me say about 40 years ago, he was actually in a national competition to just compete on the knife cutting skill.

Really?

Yeah.

Because apart from the technical aspects of cutting, like you have to cut, I mean the practical aspects, you have to cut to eat with chopsticks, the technical, ones, evenness for stir-frying. There's also the aesthetic aspects, and there's this whole other thing like the French sugar art of completely frivolous artistry with vegetable cutting.

Dan, do you have a view on hot pot?

I think it's terrible. What else is there to say? I think that hot pot is a great social activity, but it is never really my first choice to eat. But on the point about chains, one of the things I've observed over the last few years is that there has been a pretty growing scale of chain restaurants featuring basically slow casual cuisine. I'm thinking about Xi Bei noodles. I'm thinking about the sauerkraut fish restaurant that is achieving remarkable consistency across all of these different restaurants, which is a pretty difficult thing to do, I understand. And I wonder, you know, do you see that these restaurants can be something like Ding Tai Fung, to become, you know, major exports at some point? Or do you think that will be, they can't quite figure out the international market?

Well, I don't see why not. I think they'd be very popular if they could export. And I think that this sort of technical innovation in Chinese food is something that's gonna be more and more of, like we mentioned, you know, the pre-prepared dishes, which is something that is not necessarily a good thing. But also, you know, I met a very high-level chef in Beijing who was showing me a robo wok, you know, an electric wok that was trying to automate the process of stir frying, which I'm sure is at the early stages. But yeah, I think if they can achieve the consistency and standardization, which they are doing in China, then yes. But one thing about Xi Bei particularly, this is a noodle, a restaurant that specializes in northwestern sort of country cooking, right? And in particular, oat pasta, which is a specialty of Shanxi province. Province. And when Xi Bei opened the first branches in Beijing, they had all these people on tables outside doing incredible— it's a bit hard to describe, but they, they have a big lump of oat pasta in their hand with a little bit going between their fingers, and they rub it onto the board, and they get a tongue of pasta on the board, they whip it up into a tube, and they stick it in a steamer, and you end up with all these tubes of pasta together in a steamer like a honeycomb, and then you steam them. But I have to say that when I've been recently, they don't have those people anymore. So, I don't know whether they're dropping the real artisanal, high-skilled aspects so that they can standardise and expand it. But that's a bit of a shame because it was lovely when it started that they were showcasing one of the amazing sort of handcrafting noodle arts of Shaanxi. Hmm.

Either Fuchsia or Dan, do you have an opinion on how good the Michelin Guide is for China, and I guess Shanghai in particular might be where you would use it.

I guess I would have never tried to look at the Michelin Guide.

That's—

yeah, in China, you know, I, I guess I would look a little bit more just at the apps and look at the photos. Is Michelin Guide useful for you?

Well, I think they do identify some of the very best restaurants in Shanghai, in Chengdu, and, and it's helpful for people who don't know Chinese to have some kind of guide. But the downside is that I think, although, I mean, the classic Michelin methodology is to send a single inspector to a restaurant to have a meal, and that means that eating like this, which is more typical of many very excellent Chinese restaurants, is a little impractical. I did interview someone from Michelin recently, and they said that on occasion they do allow inspectors to go out in groups, which— but certainly with the early Michelin Guide to Shanghai, for example, They did pick lots of excellent restaurants, but they missed some that were equally good, but that did not have tasting menus suitable for individual diners. And I'm guessing that may be partly why, places where you have to book a private room and have a big dinner. So I would say that's one issue with it, but they have got better also at recognizing even small noodle shops in Chengdu. And I think they're trying to be closer to the pulse of what people actually want to eat. But the downside is that I know a lot of Chinese chefs I know are a little bit preoccupied with Michelin, and I think that when— and it's the problem in the West too— but when people start aiming at Michelin stars, then it has certain implications for Chinese cuisine, like a sort of pushing people towards individual plating rather than this style, which there's nothing wrong with, but this is lovely eating like this too. So I sort of hope that it doesn't sort of distort the way that Chinese chefs are actually cooking and presenting food.

How are social media changing Chinese food? In the US, people Instagram their food, I would say far too often. So there's an incentive to create Instagrammable dishes. What's going on in China?

Totally. In China, I mean, everyone's on their phones like maniacs, like people everywhere else. And yes, and certainly very visually exciting food. And that's one problem actually with Sichuanese food that I think it's the real drama dishes like, you know, this sort of lazi chicken normally, which are great, but they're just one facet of a very diverse cuisine. Again, I think maybe they encourage restaurants, not just in China, but everywhere, but it's the same pressures of social media and—

Podcasts. Exactly.

It brings people in, but when they're in the restaurant, I guess it's a whole menu dictates if we can keep them. A lot of the time restaurants suffer with, oh, we have a lot of one-time diner. They came because of Instagram. The food is— programmable, but actually it doesn't taste amazing. So what is the reason for them to come back that goes beyond social media?

What is the new dish?

Oh, it looks like we have a— so in Chinese, umami has half fish and has half lamb. So this is a dish with full umami with our fish ball and lamb stew.

Love it.

I heard about that as a Shanghai dish, and when I first heard about lamb and fish stew, I did not quite believe it. As a real soup.

Have you been converted?

I have been converted. I think it's awesome.

Maybe you should go first.

Okay.

Yes, please.

And also, again, we were talking about the importance of soup. This is a proper Chinese meal with a soup.

It's not just one soup. It's courses of soups.

Right. And the non-soupy dishes. Sorry, Tyler.

Where in China have you not eaten the food?

I have never been to Jiangxi Province.

Mm-hmm.

Also, one place I really want to go is Heilongjiang in the Dongbei Northeast because there it's sort of bordering Russia and that's gonna be a whole other lot of local ingredients and traditions and a bit of Russian influence.

It's a very good restaurant in Duhua right on the border of North Korea that has a very, very strong North Korean Chinese cuisine combination. And it's the only place you can go to get that particular food.

Yeah. I mean, that's again, the diversity of Chinese cuisine that you don't only have the sort of branches of classical Chinese gastronomy, but also you said in Yunnan you have food that is like Vietnamese, Thai, Laotian, and then in the northeast, Korean, Russian. I mean, it's very extraordinary. Mongolian.

Shenyang, I quite like the food. Spicier than I was expecting it to be. Right. Wonderful dumplings.

Mm.

Maybe the best dumplings I'd had in China.

Oh yeah, there are kind of Shenyang dumpling restaurants on there in other places. Yeah. Yeah.

Since Korea was mentioned, my Korean friend has a theory that a lot of, perhaps most of, sort of global variation in cuisine can just be explained by temperature in different countries. In particular, that Western and Northern Europe, it's too cold to cook outdoors. And if you're cooking indoors and you don't want to poison yourself from the fumes or the smoke, you have to rely a lot more on covered pots cooking vessels that create kind of less smoky, flavorful dishes. Yeah. How do you kind of think about the geography or temperature of places as a variable?

Wow. I was just trying to think sort of, so Chinese wok cooking does create a lot of smoke and so on, but I mean, in lots of Chinese modern apartments, they would have a kitchen that's almost like a balcony. Balcony that where you can open all the windows so you don't actually influence the place where people are sitting and eating, but it's adjacent, right? But I suppose in, yeah, in the north, Dongbei north, you have lots of hearty stews and soups. So maybe to an extent, very interesting question.

The Sichuanese say they need to eat a lot of spicy foods because it's such a humid and hot environment. Environment. I've never understood that. What actually, why is that helping with the heat environment?

Because it makes you sweat. So you have to, because it's humid, you have this unhealthy dampness in your body. So you have to have ginger, chilies.

Peppercorn.

Peppercorns to make you sweat. And that drives out the unhealthy humidity and restores a lovely equilibrium. Yeah. But I mean, the funny thing about that, that is a little inconsistent is that the Cantonese South is also pretty humid, it seems to me. And yet chilies are not advised there for eating.

But sweet water is tang shui.

Oh yes, that's true. Yes, you do other things for the— This is a lovely texture too with the sort of slithery crisp wood ear mushrooms.

Yes.

As well.

You've noted very well, Fuchsia, that Chinese cuisine has a bit of an elitist bias. These 8 great cuisines are very much concentrated in the more rich coastal provinces I wonder, can you gesture towards what a people's history of Chinese cuisine could look like? You know, what, how do we actually incorporate these folk traditions a little bit better into our conception of Chinese food? So it is not so Cantonese and Jiangnan focused.

Well, I think, so the first thing to say is the Eight Great Cuisines is a very recent scheme. You know, people talk about it as if it was something really old, but I think it only, I've said in my book, but I think it only goes back to about 1980. 1980 or something. So there are many different ways of trying to express the regional diversity of Chinese food, all of them totally inadequate because it's such a sort of intricate patchwork. But I think already, as you said, Jiangnan, which is the food of the eastern sort of region around Shanghai, very elitist. Fine Cantonese food is very elitist, but Sichuanese already has a reputation for being a sort of hearty folk cuisine, right? So it is represented represented. But I think that, yeah, I mean, I don't— the 8 Great Cuisines incorporates like Anhui, which is not regarded as a very great culinary region now. And I think it's— the categorization of that scheme is actually quite irrelevant. And it doesn't rep— I think if people took a fresh look at it, they would include— and also in the 8 Great Cuisines, Hunan cuisine is one of them, but that they're talking about elite elitist Hunan food and not the wonderful spicy home cooking. So, I mean, I think in terms of what people actually want to eat, it's not elitist, right? So the cuisines that are most popular now, Sichuan, what else? Hunan, no.

The spicy ones are more popular.

Spicy ones. Yeah. Guizhou is also, and that's not an elitist cuisine. I think that, you know, the people writing about food are no longer the sort of Confucian gentlemen Chinese scholars tell me. So it's—

Why has Hunan food fallen behind in the West? So you used to have so many restaurants that claimed to be Sichuan, Hunan. You know, they weren't really either one, but nominally there was some connection. And now many more people want real Chinese food. There's plenty of more or less broadly authentic Sichuan places, but I don't see broadly authentic Hunan places. What happened?

Not so many. I don't know. I mean, what do you think?

My understanding was that Hunan food became quite popular after Nixon's visit to China. And, you know, this was all Chairman Mao. And then everybody just started advertising their Chinese restaurants as Hunanese cuisine. I think that kind of shaped, distorted our view. And so maybe people have caught on. Personally, I enjoy Hunan food a little bit less than Sichuan food. I find Hunan food Chinese Sichuan food a little bit too oily and that the flavors are a little bit too much instead of more refined and tingling and teasing in a way that Sichuan often is.

Lidi, do you have a view on this? Are you tempted to serve Hunan dishes?

Yes. May I introduce you what we're having? This is a Sam special, but it's not fair to serve it only to Sam. That's why our table gets a separate platter. This is Chef Peter's signature dish. Dish. It's a dry fry eggplant. He has done so many ingredients the dry fry way. We call him a dry fry master. He can do it with fish. He can do it with shrimp, with okra, with cauliflower, with shiitake mushroom. It's the special batter that he coat anything with makes it very crispy outside, but still like juicy and tender in inside. Side with great balance of cilantro, Sichuan pepper. Sometimes he likes to add cumin. Other times it's just a lot of flavors.

If you think about all the family empire, how many restaurants is it now?

I stopped counting.

Stopped counting. Exactly. Obviously the food is wonderful, but in terms of business principles, what has made the difference? What have you all done that has been the difference maker? Viewing them as commercial enterprises. Surprises?

All right, I have to start with the things that we have tried but are not in a way financially successful. It's we keep trying to offer new concepts. We wanted to in a way offer modernized Chinese cuisine. You know, people will call that more fusion or not really as authentic. This is something I really want to ask the people sitting on the dining table. So when it comes to to the tradition, the classics, the authenticity versus modern ambiance. What is the balance? What is your ratio when it comes to like, if I'm going to pick a place for a meal, what do you guys look for?

The floor is open.

I don't think I'm a very usual diner, so I don't care that much for ambiance. Usually I like to very— dao place. I love Filipino food also. And because usually it's very demure location, just go in, everyone's— it's like a family restaurant. So they cook everything very simple, homemade, done. And you go in, they don't have time for the other aspects of it. But I know when you go to those kind of places, the only other people there are just other Filipinos. And similarly, 'cause right now in London, I live in, live in Madrid, and oftentimes the best Chinese restaurants I find, actually mostly Hunanese, actually are just very simple restaurants. And that's usually where the most people from Hunan typically go and have food. But the ones that look very nice, very up to the sinks, typically cater to just the average consumer. And because of that, they don't really tend to put that much effort on the food. But you know, that's most people I think would prefer a nice looking restaurant?

I am against nice-looking restaurants because it attracts too much Instagramming. I'm there for the food and we're there for the food. You know, we don't want the photos.

Well, one of the key tenets in the Tyler Cowen theory of how to select a restaurant is looking for spelling mistakes on the menu.

Similarly, I think some combination of Chinese clientele, not a particularly nice venue, menu. I think just kind of, I guess also when you're in a restaurant, typically if in the UK, if the service is kind of not as warm and I guess polite, you like to be treated mean. Yeah, that's usually a very strong signal about the food being good. And I find that to be very true.

I don't think you should take any of this advice.

Exactly. So this is a constant debate. Well, I mean, Xu Xia will probably— what do you look for? Do you look for the dining room full of at least 90% Chinese audience?

Well, I think having a Chinese audience is a good sign, but I like everything. And I sometimes, I like to go to beautiful places with amazing service and beautiful china and elegant presentation. And sometimes I like to go and have street food. And that's the joy of eating and of Chinese food that you have something at every level. Yeah. Yeah. And I think also just this thing about classics versus innovation. You know, all the classics are actually the product of innovation. Somebody was saying to me the other day, you know, Mapo Doufu, it's only 100 years old. You know, it's not an ancient dish. The Sichuanese didn't have chilies until a couple of hundred years ago. And so I think you, you know, you can't be too conservative really.

I like it when the diners are grumpy. When they're too happy, I start to get suspicious. Like, why are they here? Are they here to have a good time? Time. There's something about food. You mentioned sex earlier. When you film people doing it, they don't necessarily look happy.

Wow. So it's true. I shouldn't take any of this advice. Or Fu Shao, who is maybe closer to our day-to-day customer. It is absolutely true when it comes to a business success is we look at what brings people back. So yes, you can have a very peacocky, showy dish that maybe lights up in flame or, you know, something that people look at it, they're like, wow, I want to see what they're really like. But once they are in the door, you know, we think about what makes them stay. It really goes down to the ingredients, their personal feelings. You know, some of you guys like to be treated in a mean way. Maybe that's a strong association with how you are being treated, but I believe there is a lot of perception about Chinese cuisine. We're trying to make a change too. And again, I know that everyone on this table is a foodie and takes a lot of pride on standard and quality. We're trying to expand that audience. We want anyone that doesn't know much about Chinese cooking coming to a restaurant and feel good about being here. Here. It's not just them, it's everyone they're eating it with. Yes, our dining room is a little loud, but we tend to, you know, offer them appetizers before the entrée comes out, and we offer them a little like matcha or ice cream at the end of the meal, kind of in a way fill them, make them feel comfortable and familiar with what they're eating. Otherwise, you know, we stay pretty true on the flavors. We like to offer bold flavors, especially how Dad started his career in the US is really not afraid of using peppercorn. At the time it was banned in the US. There's no legal way of getting peppercorn or sources. I remember the restaurant owner would ask their family member in China to send it over from Fujian. So yes, things have changed quite a lot in the past 20, 30 years. Years, and now we're looking at, oh, there's a lot of options. What is, from a business perspective, what makes us different that we get customer to come back for occasion, special celebration, or for their day-to-day carryout and delivery?

Tell us about the new dish, and should one eat it with chopsticks?

Everyone should eat with chopsticks. Yes, we have a pork belly dish that is from start marinated and then coated with rice flour. After it's steamed and cooked 80-90%, then we want it to create a crispy texture. That's when we start to put in the wok very quick double side pan sear and then add all the green jalapeño, the scallion, the red chili pepper, peppercorns.

This is my favorite dish so far. This and the numbing beef. But Fuchsia, would you comment on this?

I was just thinking this is the first time— so this thing when you marinate the pork belly and you coat it in rice crumbs and you steam it is a very classic Chinese country dish. And it's the first time I've had it fried like this. And it's delicious. It's a sort of like a new version of hui guo rou, back in the pot pork, twice cooked pork.

If I can add, this is a dish that is very known in the household family when you you have something steamed, like at home, my mom or my grandma will steam it for the first time and serve it as a beautiful first-time dish. But for something to be consumed later in the day or the next day, people tend to get tired of eating the same thing over and over. So they get really smart on why don't we pan-sear it so it becomes a new dish.

Mm, I'm gonna have to try it. Yeah. Yeah.

Lydia, are you seeing a difference between Chinese restaurants in the DC area, in the LA area, and the New York area? Is there a distinct difference with these things or they're just kind of, you know, Sichuan restaurants or something in each of these places that are kind of consistent?

I feel like restaurants or restaurant owners are very smart to see what the trend is. As you guys can probably see, Sichuan restaurant, you know, if we're talking about in the 2000s, but there has not been many. And that's probably how Dad got his reputation on being a master Sichuan American chef, although he's really a classic trained Chinese chef cooking all the regional cuisines. Now I want to say it first started in the 2010-ish. This is when the new immigration from China started to merging. A lot of them went to LA, a lot of them went to New York, a lot of them came to DC. So we're starting to see nà jiā in Orange County. We see Jiu Li, which is a very Jiangsu zhuojiangcai in New York. And I'm just naming a few. There's actually a lot more regional cuisine. Like some, I remember my friend Chef Simone Tong was making Yunnan noodles by NYU, and it's vastly popular.

Sam, any comment on the eggplant?

It's very good.

Fergus Rashid, what's been your favorite dish so far? So far?

Oh, the eggplant has been very good, actually. Um, I've also liked the, the scallions have been excellent.

I think I'll go with the pork.

This one?

This one?

My favorite. Yes. Why?

I usually like a very subtle ma tingling sensation. Usually that's not kind of overpowering. And also the combination with the, the fry is very very good.

If you had to pick a favorite so far, do you have a nomination?

Well, so for me, I love the pork and I love that soup with the fish balls. And, but for me, the reason this is such a lovely meal is that it's such a well-planned menu. And this is the thing that I think foreigners have the most difficulty with, with Chinese food, is how to assemble a menu. And you've really thought about different cooking methods, different ingredients, textures, some wet, some dry, fry, and that's what makes it not only delicious, but also shu fu, comfortable, because we have this, you know, something very sizzly and then a lovely light refreshing soup. So the pleasure of the meal is sort of physical as well as just, I mean, yeah.

And how did you learn that? Just by induction? You were served a lot of meals and you ran the mental regressions? Yeah. Or is there a way it can be taught to someone like you?

Well, mainly I've learned through just constant eating, but that is, but yeah, I think, I mean, I try to write about this really, and the idea that, you know, a well-planned Chinese menu, it's not just about delicious tastes. And I think if you think about going out for a classic French meal, you think about having lots of rich food, pudding, cheese, and feeling quite heavy afterwards. With a well-planned Chinese meal, you can have dozens of dishes and still feel comfortable. But I think it's just, you know, as a foreigner, once you start considering that the light and delicate dishes are just as important as the razzle-dazzle exciting dishes, then you're on the way to be able to plan a nice meal, right?

I would say start with picking out your favorites and look at, oh, what am I missing from there? And that's a good way to go.

And your father taught you?

I guess so. I am very influenced by both great chefs at home, Mom and Dad. Mom is a pastry chef, Dad is a wok chef. And they trained me to have a very picky palate.

But I think also it's just, yeah, it's about not repetition, right? That's the key thing. So if you have a dish with one ingredient or one style, you just want to make sure the other ones are as contrasting as possible.

On the subject of Fuchsia's writing, I think that your book is wonderfully well-organized to have 30, to introduce the cuisine through 30 dishes. And to use that to talk about knife work and the diversity and everything else. I thought it worked really well. And furthermore, what worked well was that you are just a fabulous writer in terms of making the physicality of eating very, very good. Can you speak a little bit about, you know, is food writing— this is, I think it really rewards, food really rewards good writing. Can you talk about how you learned that other craft that you've picked up so well?

Well, thank you very much. I don't know how, I mean, it's just instinct and trying to, I mean, I suppose what I've been trying to do all this time is find ways of describing the intricacies of Chinese food to make it sort of illuminating and delightful for people who didn't grow up with it. And so trying to find ways, things like texture, which is a quite difficult subject in the sense that many of our texture words in English are a bit disgusting, slimy, grisly, me, but trying to write sort of playfully and engagingly so that people can both sort of acknowledge these unfamiliar textures, but also see how they might be delicious. You know, I did a degree in English literature, so I read lots of good books, which is the best training for any writer, but I think also I just try to have fun with it, to just be playful and have a laugh. And also I just, I love eating, and I have since I was a teenager, I've always kept journal, and it's always turned into sort of epic descriptions of meals. So I've had a lot of practice.

When you worked for BBC World Service, you learned how to write then or before, or?

Well, I mean, I suppose I've always written. I mean, you know, I had a certain training for how to think about language and trying to be very fair and thinking how it will be in, you know, how it will be understood in different cultures. But I think more of it is just practice. Practice, just writing, having a notebook, writing your impressions, and it's just a craft that you develop through use. Yeah.

What did your parents do?

So my mother taught English as a foreign language, so she had a huge food influence on me. So she's a great cook, and we always had lots of foreign friends in our home, so I had a very unusual gastronomic upbringing. And my father was in sort of the first generation of IT people.

There is bit of anxiety I get when I go to a new Chinese restaurant because I feel like when you want the good food, you have to perform. You have to perform yourself. You gotta say, "Lao ban, I'm here to actually consume the correct food." But people who can't just, you know, turn on some Changsha dialect, how would they actually get the good food from the restaurants?

Well, so without the language, or yeah, I mean, I suppose that one of the best ways is to look at what other people are eating. Eating. But it is difficult. And even when I go to China and I order for a group in good Mandarin, knowledgeably, and I know the names of the dishes, it so often happens that the waiter will say, if I'm with foreigners, he'll say, "Oh, they can't possibly eat that." So, there's the sort of assumption that foreigners won't be able to handle certain foods. And I've sometimes have to have an argument and just say, "Look, we will eat it." And we have gone around proving that we can eat sea cucumbers and stuff, you know, on many occasions. But I think, and it's quite understandable because I think a lot of foreigners have a habit of ordering something that they can't handle and then being rude and obnoxious and just complaining, or they think that there's a, you know, there's a bone in the chicken, so that's a problem. It's not a problem, it's meant to be like that. So, I think that Chinese waiting staff, particularly in the West, but also in China, are a little wary of upsetting foreigners, and also they just want people to have a nice time. So, you have to battle against that stereotype if you really want to eat the good food. But I think things are changing, and I think, but I think just looking at what other people are eating is incredibly useful. And then also showing your appreciation when you do eat something unusual, because I have a, you know, I should imagine that all the restaurants where I've been with groups of foreigners eating unusual things with gusto, that afterwards they've thought, well, you know, this possible for foreigners to eat this sort of thing.

What is it then that you can't eat? Put aside the illegal, but where you just say like, no, I'm not gonna have that.

No, I will eat everything.

You will eat everything.

Well, I did in Yunnan actually, I did eat some, there's a very special dish in one particular region, which is raw pork, like a sort of tartare pork, shengpi, dali shengpi. And I ate that because I was, you know, local people rave about it and eat it all the time. And I was aware that there are health issues with eating raw pork, but I really wanted to try it. 'Try it.' And so I had it with some local friends. It was really delicious, but I had this terrible panic afterwards, and I kept, you know, and I probably wouldn't do that again. But I think it's a really hard thing. Like, I want to eat with people, and I want to be totally open-minded and non-judgmental. Yeah, so I suppose it's just the only things that will restrain me are possibly sort of health concerns like that, and then also sort of ethical issues. But I have a real dilemma with Harry crabs. So this is one of the great delicacies of the Jiangnan region. And oh, they're so— and one of the best ways to eat them is they're drunken crabs, suì xiè, and they're sort of pickled in rice wine and seasonings. And it's just like you just fly to heaven when you eat one. And I've been eating these for years with great delight. And then a couple of years ago, or a few years ago, the Shanghai authorities, where they're a great delicacy, they banned raw drunken crabs. And so I started sort of looking at why this was. And it turns out that they can carry parasites, freshwater raw creatures. So now, you know, somebody offers me a raw hairy crab, what do I do? You know, I've been fine so far, but I don't know that the sort of lust for eating them is the same.

You only live once.

Yeah.

Why aren't there more raw dishes in Chinese food overall?

Well, I mean, historical prejudice. So in, you know, in ancient China, the Chinese defined themselves as people people who ate cooked food, and barbarians beyond the borders of the empire ate raw food. And so there is this idea that, a very ancient idea going back to the Book of Rites, Liji, one of the classic texts, that civilization began when people learned how to harness fire to cook their food, and they left behind the era of drinking blood and eating feathers and having all the diseases from raw food. So there is a sort of idea that, you know, I remember when I took a Hunanese friend out for dinner in London and she was served a rare pigeon breast. You know, her initial reaction was anxiety. Is this going to be a bit dangerous? So it's a sort of health concerns coupled with an ancient tradition of eating cooked food.

I spent about 3 months in Dali last year and I was offered a lot of raw pork and I never took it.

Right. Probably very sensible. It was very nice. It was like, I mean, it was a bit like a steak tartare.

But you'll eat raw meat in the US or?

I would eat raw beef, sure.

Yeah.

Pork, I don't know.

But I think like in Germany, I think it's, I dunno if it's a certain region, they have Mett, which is raw pork. But when you eat this, it's, there are all kinds of rules and regulations for the temperature which it's kept and how it's served and so on. Whereas in Dali, I mean, it was very, very kind of easy. But the fact is that local people of this particular group eat it all the time. And I was always asking people if they had any problems, and most people said, oh, it's fine, you know, they check the pork, it's fine.

When and where is China most effective as a street food country, and when isn't it? So I don't, I don't eat much street food when I'm in China.

Why not?

But I might say in Malaysia, the restaurant food is good.

Yeah.

And I've never found the street food to be better, even though it can be very good. Whereas I say in Malaysia, I might find street food on average to be better than restaurant food. Is there anywhere in China where street food's the way to go?

Yeah, in the north, in— I went to Kaifeng, the old Song Dynasty northern capital, and they had— this is some years ago, but they had the most incredible night market with all kinds of food on. That was just amazing and delicious. And then I've had good— I've I mean, I think the problem is that, you know, with China's modernization, there's been this big effort to clean up the streets and they've seen sort of street food as being old-fashioned and something undesirable. And so like when I lived in Sichuan in the beginning, there were actually quite a lot of street traders doing really nice food and it's harder to find them. But actually, if you go to Chengdu, go to the Wenshu Monastery and in the streets around there, there are people serving some traditional snacks, Dan Hong Gao, these little pancakes stuffed with pork or sweet things. Yeah, tangyuan. Yeah, these lovely— So I would go there. There are certain areas where it's tolerated and where you can have really lovely street food. Yeah.

Dan, do you have a view on this?

Basically anywhere with a night market, I think, is reliably the places with great street food, and especially these nice little barbecues and noodles. I'd echo Fuchsia here that Shanghai, I believe, used to have actually quite a nice street food life, and then they cleaned all of that up. And I I think they've maybe have been borderline successful in driving that out.

I know. And sometimes what they do is they bring street food into an area, a bit like the Singaporean hawker centre idea. But the problem is that they're not individual traders anymore. They're just people working for someone else. And it's not really the kind of really good street food.

Lydia, what do we have here?

I think we missed our seafood pearl with sticky rice. That's a dish that everyone took one and it's now gone. So that's a very typical Hubei cuisine. We like to use pork as a filling, but for today's variety, that's which you crab and seafood and coat it with sticky rice, steamed, and just finishing up with a beautiful glaze. And next we have the famous squirrel fish. Today I think they're more daisy looking.

Amazing knife work. Look at that.

Yes, it is.

You know, cut like that and they're not falling apart. They're all staying in these lovely fronds.

That's right.

Oh, it's something. Yeah.

So no episode of Conversations with Tyler would be complete without implication or understanding that everything comes back to economics. What can an economist learn from eating more Chinese food?

You're asking me?

Either, anybody.

I have no idea.

A, competition. A, competition works. B, Adam Smith said division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. So as Chinese became the number one group coming to the United States, you started getting a lot of regional cuisine. But also look for places that are not too easy to get to, not frequented by too many tourists, and have grumpy diners and abusive staff. Because there's a selection effect if the place is in business at all and it It's full. That's implying the food is very good. It's being patronized often by elderly Chinese, who in my view are much fussier than a lot of younger Chinese. Younger Chinese in this country, by my standards, are too willing to go out to eat to enjoy themselves. And I just think that's wrong. Those would be my starting points, but other answers are welcome.

Trade promotes globalization. Sichuan food is slightly easier to export, as Fuchsia said, given the chilies and the peppercorns. That's why it's really easy to have that standardized across of the world.

When Fuchsia mentioned that the willingness for the government to try to standardize cuisine didn't really work, you kind of see this ability of the individual to kind of design the menu themselves. It's a very big aspect of, you know, big economic concept there.

Slightly different question for Fuchsia. I'm wondering, you write in your book about how the West, I guess the Anglosphere in particular, had this experience with Chinese food coming in, I guess, in the post-war period. Period when essentially what you end up getting in a takeaway is not real kind of proper Chinese food. So I guess, do you have a sense of other regions, other continents of the world, have they had a similar experience with Chinese food coming there or maybe some of them haven't even had it yet?

Oh, well, I mean, I think yes, I think that the sort of Cantonese simplified model is in many places but with slight variation. So like in Sweden they have something called Four Little Dishes, which is like a standard menu of Chinese takeaway food. Yeah, and I think that it seems to have been a blueprint that worked very well all over the place. Yeah, with sweet tastes and fried foods and with variations. But I have to say, I mean, I haven't travelled to Peru, for example, where they have, by all accounts, a very interesting, yeah, local Chinese food. And also Calcutta has some very interesting old Chinese dishes, and I have yet to go go there.

So both of those are very good, but they're very different.

Yes.

They don't feel to me like white Chinese food, but I would recommend them. Chifas, which you even can get in Northern Virginia, though it's much better in Peru.

Oh, really?

But they're like rice dishes with Chinese elements in them. That's the way I would think about them.

I spent some time in Barcelona this summer, and I found, first of all, Barcelona to be, I think, my favorite city for food in Europe, in part because I think it has a very great respect for Asian cuisine. This was the first European country I've seen where there were a lot of Spanish chefs making Chinese food, Spanish chefs making Japanese food. And I thought that it was quite good. Where is the best city in Europe for Chinese food? Is it London?

I mean, I haven't done a survey, so I have no idea, but yeah.

But if somewhere were great, you would've been pulled to it. It, right?

Well, I hope so. But I mean, I'm spoiled because I eat a lot in China. So, you know, I don't feel the need to go and eat Chinese food everywhere else.

I feel like Singapore has really good Chinese food because of the Chinese population. Yeah, London has great Chinese food. Not just, you know, the Chinatown that has been there for maybe decades, but also the newer, where I like to call it modern Chinese. We talk about Chef Wang, Andy Wang. Yeah, really doing excellent excellent idea with elevated Chinese foods being tasting menu.

But I think one problem, and this maybe comes back to economics again, that in England, for example, I think now the door has opened to massive public interest in regional Chinese food and people are really, you know, open to trying now eating Sichuan, Xi'an food and so on. But the real problem is that we have very stringent immigration rules. So in order for, you know, a chef to come over and work in a restaurant in London, they have to have a certain level of English and a certain income, which is prohibitive for anyone but the big international hotels. And I think it's a shame that we don't have more trained chefs coming in from China to bring different aspects of Chinese cuisine.

I find that the Chinese food in Madrid is actually even better than Barcelona. You spend much time in Madrid for Chinese? I think because even there you get very, very obscure local cuisine from China's also in Madrid, where in Barcelona it's not as, uh, you know, you can't get the obscure as much.

This book, other books you've written, what's the hardest thing for you about writing a book?

Well, I found this a lot harder than writing a cookbook.

Why?

Because a cookbook has a slightly obvious structure. So unless you're going to do something really radical, you have a sort of introduction, you know, you can go into basic techniques and ingredients. Then you have recipes often grouped by ingredient. And each recipe has a headnote. So the structure, by now I've done a few cookbooks, is fairly straightforward. With a narrative book, it can be anything you want. So I, you know, I start with a vague idea that I want to talk about some of the great themes of Chinese gastronomy and cuisine, and then it's sort of how to organize it. It's a bit frightening because I felt that I was starting with much more of a blank page than with a cookbook. Yeah.

What's your most unusual recipe? Usual successful work habit?

Getting on a train.

And what do you do then?

No, if I have—

Through China or just you got on a British train and you write? Or you got on a British train and you cook?

If I have a writing block and I just, I'm frustrated and I feel I can't possibly do it, then I just give up. If I get moving and get on a train, then for some reason my mind starts loosening up and I have a breakthrough. Also sitting in cafes, but just change of scene.

So moving and not moving are your successful habits?

No, no, being somewhere, getting away from being the solitary writer at your computer or at your desk and sort of that breaks the deadlock. But I have to say, I mean, yeah, I wouldn't put myself up as a model of effective and efficient working.

But I want to say you finished your book on time. I remember meeting you last year in London, you said you were writing this book and you have a very strict deadline and look at where we are.

Well, I did have the advantage of a global pandemic, which meant that I wasn't racing around the world, but I had to stay home.

Other than China, now that it's quite easy to travel, where else do you want to go for food?

I'd like to go back to Japan. You know, people sometimes think I know about Asian food and I really don't because I've been so concentrated on China. And I went to Japan for the first time in 2018 and I have only, dipped my little finger into that particular pie. And so I would love to go in. And it's so interesting because obviously it relates to Chinese food, and you see some words and processes and things that have died out in China that are still in Japan expressed differently. So it's kind of related but fascinatingly different for me.

I was there a few weeks ago. I had one Chinese meal for breakfast. It was quite good. Just amazing sushi anywhere without even looking looking for it.

Yeah, some people would say that Japan now has the best French cooking, some of the best Italian cooking. Now, I'm skeptical that they can have the best Chinese cooking, but I don't think they do.

I've been to Michelin-starred Chinese restaurants in Tokyo. They're very good, they deserve their stars, but I think, say, compared to Chengdu or somewhere, they'd only be middling quality among the good restaurants.

Is it because there's no ground beef down there?

They're cooking for Michelin diners who do have good taste, but it's a little rarefied. And at the visceral level, there's just something a bit missing, I found.

But it seems so. This is a very superficial impression 'cause I wasn't there for very long, but it seemed to me that Japan also has the old school Chinatown cooking and newer cooking.

Yokohama in particular, yeah.

Yeah, but one meal that I wrote about in this book, a Chinese meal, was actually cooked, the stir fry chapter. I went to one small Chinese modern restaurant Chinese restaurant where the Chinese technique and the sort of sensibility and aesthetics were very Chinese and it was absolutely superb. Yeah. So that, that, that was just a little snapshot, but it was very interesting Chinese food cooked in at a, and served at a sort of bar, like a sushi counter actually.

Lydia, where do you think of going to for food? Obviously there's maybe other reasons to travel.

Oh my God.

Well, I'm dying to go to Peru. Peru for the food, but also for the nature scene, Machu Picchu. And I want to say I haven't really explored much of Mexico. I feel like it's so close to home where we live, but it's underrated. I was only in Mexico City the first time this August with my then 9-month-year daughter. We explored the city from pastries in the morning, great coffee shops to— we haven't really had a lot of opportunity to explore the street tacos, but the dining scene, the restaurants are truly amazing with bold flavors.

Dan, then?

I would say Southeast Asia for me. I guess maybe more the street food that I find quite thrilling. I've had quite a lot of refined Chinese food and now it's more, it's street food now for me, and I have not been to Mexico at all. And I think that Mexico is hugely exciting.

Rural Mexico in particular is one of my all-time favorites. For me, it's on a par with China. I love Mexico City. It's incredible. But just side-of-the-road dishes in small towns or on the edge of mid-sized towns, for me, that's the best food in Mexico. And I will do that in life until I can't do it anymore. And I've been to Mexico over 30 times. And every meal is a wonder in the way that it is in China and can be in India, but not too many other places. I love Japan, but Japan also has a lot of the worst food. Now, I don't go there to eat it, but it can be disgusting. Or the desserts, or I think Japan just has very high variance of food, even though all of it is well done by its standards. Sometimes I think they are pursuing the wrong standards.

What explains that variation?

They pursue perfection and in a way achieve it. But if you don't agree with all matters of taste, pursuing perfection in a sense can be a negative. So if you look at these Filipino desserts, which for me are too sweet, they're too gooey, they're too large, too many different things piled on top of each other, but they're quite popular. There are people who love them, and I don't think they're wrong I love them. Japan just takes every direction you can imagine and perfects it. And that's a little dangerous. And I won't eat raw chicken in Japan, speaking of things that I don't eat. To me, I don't know that I'm afraid. I trust that it's safe. I just think it would disgust me. And that's irrational. But there I am. And what else I can get is so good. Nominations from this side of the room?

I've only I've only been to China once, so I think I'd love to go back. I was in Chongqing. I think, I mean, for all the reasons we've just mentioned, like there's, I think, an endless amount of things to sort of discover and kind of seams to mine there.

Well, I've never been to China, so that's the obvious answer.

I think Ethiopia is still very underrated when it comes to food. We've only been there for the first time this year and it blew me away. So I wanna go back for sure and try a lot more Ethiopian dishes.

What struck you in particular?

The spice combination.

Combinations.

That was the quick, quick answer. Some of the combos are so odd, I can't describe them properly. And it's like, the only closest thing it reminds me of is like some Peruvian spices, for example, strange in itself, or Mexican spices. But that combination of spices, these need a lot more exploration, I think.

Maria, what do we have here?

We have a peach tree sap. Speaking of, Chinese is not huge on dessert. Sometimes, you know, after a full meal of banquet, we just eat some seasonal fruits. It will be a lot of like specialty cutting into like cute shapes of watermelon or apples, pears, dragon fruits. But today we're having a little tree sap. This is also a modern Chinese dessert. Fu Zha can talk a lot more about it.

It's funny because I never saw, so this ingredient, peach tree sap, I never saw it until the last 5 years or something. And suddenly it's become incredibly candy, and it's often served in sort of fairy tale soups with things like silver ear mushrooms and lotus seeds, goji berries, and, um, and other of these lovely texture foods, right?

And it is from the peach tree.

Yes.

And how do you source it? There's a peach tree sap business.

I found it from the market. You get it dried and it looks like little pieces of knobbly amber and you soak them and then they sort of swell up into this lovely Sourly.

We are at about the end of our podcast. I would just like to thank everyone for participating. Thank Lydia Chang, her father Peter, the entire staff at Mama Chang. They always treat me wonderfully. I just love them. I actually don't want them to be surly to me. They're super nice. Fuchsia, of course, has done the book and made this all possible. Again, that's Invitation to a The Story of Chinese Food. Please do buy it, read it, and I would stress buy all of her books. You cannot buy just one. And Fuchsia, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you all. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvoes. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.