In Taiwan everything changes all the time--the economy, the technology, even the basic assumptions that underlie society itself. Now comes news that the restaurant scene is undergoing a transformation, too. Is nothing sacred?
Taiwan residents have reason to be unhappy about a number of things: corrupt politicians, inadequate public safety, terrible traffic, worsening juvenile delinquency...the list goes on and on. Few people, however, are heard to complain about the food. Why? Well for one thing, there are so many hotels, restaurants, cafes, and hawker stalls that the pickiest gourmets are almost bound to light upon their favorite dishes eventually.
The odds are certainly stacked in their favor. According to statistics from the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting, and Statistics (DGBAS), at the end of last year Taiwan could offer no fewer than 49,645 food-and-beverage (F&B) operations, 85 percent of which were predominantly food outlets such as restaurants, while the remaining 15 percent comprised beverage-oriented businesses--teahouses, bars, and so on. Fifteen years ago, the industry was generating annual sales of approximately NT$23 billion (US$741.9 million). By 1990 that had risen to NT$50 billion (US$1.6 billion), and last year's figure was a whopping NT$148 billion (US$4.8 billion).
But these figures are, if anything, underestimates. Once the numerous neighborhood noodle stands and night-market snack vendors that neither register with the local government nor pay taxes are taken into account, sales figures shoot off the chart. Tony Hsu, publisher of Taiwan's Chinese-language Gourmet World Magazine and owner of two restaurants, estimates that there are at least 100,000 F&B businesses on the island. Anyone who thumbs the yellow pages or logs on to an Internet guide can well believe it; hungry people have a choice of every different style of Chinese cuisine, French, German, Italian, Thai, and Vietnamese cooking, Western fast food, and much else, in establishments ranging from the most expensive to those where a couple of US dollars is more than enough for a meal.
In Taiwan there is a saying: "You'll find a shrine every three steps you take, a temple every five." Hsu, who has been in the business for nearly four decades since completing his primary education, adapts this to: "A food stall every three steps, a restaurant every five." He can scarcely be accused of exaggeration.
Eating has been a serious matter throughout Chinese history, when the burning question all too often was not how to conduct foreign policy but where the next meal was coming from. The most common greeting became and in many places remains "Have you eaten yet?" rather than "How are you?" Chinese people talk of "the seven items," staples they need to concern themselves with as soon as they wake up each morning: firewood, rice, cooking oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea. More than two thousand years ago, a Chin-dynasty prime minister, Lu Pu-wei, wrote a treatise that ostensibly dealt with control of the stove and the use of seasonings. Although his actual theme was the governance of a country, his artful use of metaphor showed that there was already a well-developed dietary culture at that time.
Since then, the Chinese have become familiar with thousands of ingredients that can be prepared in a multitude of different ways, but today's hard-core regional cuisines are thought to involve no more than three thousand elements and forty methods of preparing them. There are eight principal styles, based on the foods and seasonings available in different areas: Beijing, Cantonese, Chaozhou, Fujian, Hakka, Jiangzhe, Shanghai, and Sichuan. Another popular classification identifies five different groups: lighter tastes in eastern China, sour in the west, sweet in the southern provinces, salty in the northern part of the country, and spicy in the center.
The Fujian style arrived in Taiwan first, brought by early immigrants several hundred years ago. Steaming, stewing, and frying are the main cooking methods, and many of the dishes are soupy in texture. The style was later influenced by the Japanese during their occupation of the island between 1895 and 1945. For example, the sliced raw fish known as sashimi; a dipping sauce made of ketchup, garlic, ginger, soy, and sugar used to spice up seafood; and preserved radish are all Japanese imports and can still be found in restaurants islandwide. Many older Taiwanese who remember the occupation like to go to Japanese restaurants, where they can order their food and chat with the chef in the language they grew up with.
When mainland China fell to the Communists in the late 1940s, people from every province fled to Taiwan to begin life anew, bringing their cooking skills with them. Some started up restaurants, transplanting the old regional traditions. They imported dumplings and steamed bread, for example, and other foods made with wheat flour, which for thousands of years has been the staple in China north of the Yangtze River, with rice playing the corresponding role in the south.
For the most part, however, these "mainland" restaurants were beyond the reach of the average Taiwanese in what was pre dominantly a poor and simple agricultural society. "When I was a child, it wasn't a question of what we wanted to eat but what was available," says housewife Wang Min, who was born in Ilan on Taiwan's east coast in the mid 1930s. "There's a Taiwanese saying, 'Forget about saving for a rainy day when there isn't enough to eat now.' That pretty much summed it up." Wang, as the eldest child of the family, had to learn to prepare meals for her seven younger brothers while their parents labored in the fields. Her repertoire consisted mainly of homegrown sweet potatoes, rice, and vegetables. Meat was for special occasions such as the Lunar New Year, or when one of the hens in the yard was ready to give up the ghost.
Wang moved to Taipei about forty years ago, when she got married. Most people continued to count their pennies and eat at home, but wet-market supplies started to replace homegrown produce. (To this day, wet markets remain slightly more popular than supermarkets. According to a 1999 survey conducted by the Council of Agriculture, 83 percent of consumers buy their daily supplies at wet markets, with a corresponding figure for supermarkets of 81 percent.)
To please her husband, Wang learned how to make traditional Fuzhou recipes, such as dumplings where the skin consists of slices of pork rather than pastry. She also pooled her cooking skills with friends from mainland China and other parts of Taiwan. "We were all housewives, and preparing meals for our families was one of the biggest things in our lives, so prices and recipes were about the only topic of conversation," she says. "In those days, how well you cooked largely determined how good a wife you were."
But that formerly essential skill is becoming much less important in an era of microwavable food and double-income families. "Forty years ago, dining out was a sin," Tony Hsu says. "Twenty years ago, it turned into a family leisure activity, something that people might enjoy once or twice a week. Nowadays, lots of families have fancy kitchens that are so spotless they look as though they've just come out of the box--because nobody ever cooks." Given the data, this is not surprising. DGBAS statistics show that annual per-household expenditure on eating out rose from NT$31,523 (US$1,017) in 1994 to NT$44,510 (US$1,436) in 1999, while at the same time the number of households increased from 5,649,000 to 6,532,000. Looking at this in another way, Taiwanese were spending a staggering NT$112 billion (US$3.6 billion) more on dining out in 1999 than they were just five years previously.
It was perhaps inevitable that, as the pace of life increased, the world shrank, and more people started to visit other countries, fast food should have caught on in a big way, especially with people under thirty. Compared with traditional Chinese cuisine, Western fast food has had a relatively short history in Taiwan. McDonald's made landfall here in the spring of 1984, KFC came in the following year, and several others soon followed. Not everything caught on with the locals to quite the same extent, however. Dairy Queen, Hardee's, and Wendy's, for example, failed to dent the market and eventually quit.
Those that managed to stay the course have grabbed a sizeable share of the expanding F&B market. "We're fast, affordable, and clean," says Lee Chin-chen, 19, a student who has been working part-time at a Taipei branch of McDonald's for more than two years. "A lot of people come here because of the easygoing atmosphere that we want them to experience the moment they walk in."
Lee knows that McDonald's is not just somewhere to eat; it is also a place for reading, doing homework, and simply hanging out. For younger children, the playpen is an irresistible attraction. "Whenever I ask my four-year-old daughter where she wants to go for dinner, the answer's always McDonald's," says sales engineer Leo Fan. "I'm too old for hamburgers, and I know the playpen interests her much more than the food, but how can I say no?" Such words are music to any franchisee's ears, of course. From the business point of view, loving parents like Fan and a whole army of doting grandparents represent a huge and growing profit center for Taiwan's fast-food restaurant chains.
Pizza is also big in Taiwan. Pizza Hut opened its first store in 1986, Domino's Pizza came two years later, and between them they already have more than two hundred outlets islandwide. Their scaled-down requirement for store space gives these home -delivery and take-out operations a definite advantage over their competitors when it comes to finding good locations in Taiwan's crowded cities. Delivery personnel speed through the traffic-clogged streets on motorcycles, ensuring pleasingly prompt deliveries.
But even with fast food, creeping "Taiwanization" is manifest. Hamburgers and pizzas come in all the standard flavors, but there are some surprising new ones. Porkburgers with Japanese-style spicy sauce, and Thai-style pizzas liberally sprinkled with sweet corn are among the marketing ploys adopted to reel in the customers. On the other hand, some of the concepts that have made fast food such an outstanding success in the West are now spilling over into the Chinese restaurant sector. "Fast-food outfits im ported the concept of chain restaurants, where business builds up much faster," Tony Hsu says. "And even more importantly, they brought in quality, service, cleanliness, and value, which prodded local operators into changing their food-stall mindsets and becoming proper restaurateurs."
The key word there is "import." The past fifteen years or so have seen huge growth in the number of outlets using foreign foodstuffs. Imports of prepared foods, for example, increased nearly ten times, from US$86 million in 1985 to $852 million in 1999, while imports of milk products shot up from 88,560 to 232, 316 tons in the same period.
"Taiwan's internationalization has drawn more foreigners, and economic growth has enabled local people to travel abroad and try new foods," says Shen Sung-mao, who in 1988 founded the Chinese Food and Beverage Institute, a private organization that focuses on Taiwan's F&B industry. "When demand increases, supply follows. Nowadays, you can find almost any kind of foreign restaurant here, and you can buy almost any kind of foreign ingredient or seasoning." He does point out, however, that many overseas restaurants use imported ingredients at first, to maintain authenticity, but then gradually shift to cheaper local substitutes once they have built up their reputation.
According to Tony Hsu, diners in their thirties and forties make up the bulk of the clientele in restaurants serving non-Chinese food, because they can afford it, have had greater exposure to the outside world, and feel themselves to be too old for McDonald's. One consequence has been increased interaction between chefs and diners. Customers of a Chinese restaurant never used to meet the chef, but it is quite common for Western culinary artists to do the rounds of the tables and ask the guests how they feel about the food and service. Nowadays, more and more Chinese chefs accept that talking to diners is part of the job. "Customers feel good when they can express their likes or dislikes to the cook," says Hsu, himself a chef. "Even if they don't particularly enjoy the food this time around, they'll still come back, because they've talked to the person responsible for preparing the meal and hope that he'll listen."
It would be a mistake to think that outlandish ways of dining are taking over completely, however. A large sector of the public still disdains the use of a knife and fork. Senior citizens in particular, who make up most of the clientele in old-fashioned, "orthodox" Chinese restaurants, want consistency rather than change. Many of them are doomed to be disappointed.
"I can order from one menu a Sichuan-style hot spicy tofu dish, fish head done Shanghai style, a Beijing hotpot, and Cantonese fried rice," says Hsu Wen-hua, 70, a native of Shanghai. "They're all there, but they're not all right, because the taste of everything's changing bit by bit. I'm not talking about changing from better to worse, but about an old woman no longer being able to get things that taste the way they did in her hometown."
Shen Sung-mao, author of some thirty books on cooking and F&B management, points out that one reason for the disappearance of traditional flavors may be that many chefs nowadays bring a highly critical eye to bear on classic dishes. They feel that all cuisines have to evolve over time, so they experiment with different ingredients and try alternative methods of preparation. The results can often be found at the Taipei Chinese Food Festival.
This event, Taiwan's largest "foodie fest," has been held annually since 1990. It is organized by the Taiwan Visitors Association with the help of the Tourism Bureau, and the idea is to exhibit Chinese food culture in its best light. The organizers promote international culinary exchanges, arrange events designed to upgrade and exchange culinary skills, and generally try to improve communication between F&B professionals drawn from all parts of the world. In the previous three years the dominant themes were tea, fruit, and tofu banquets respectively, while the eleventh Taipei Chinese Food Festival, held in August 2000, focused on seafood banquets. Other highlights this year included cuisine and history, flower banquets, and "unusual flavors," a broad category that included such rare additions to the kitchen as ants, beetles, cacti, grasshoppers, scorpions, snakes, spiders, and woodworms. Small wonder, then, that today's chefs relish the freedom to experiment.
Another, even more important reason for the waning of some classic dishes is that people's preferences change from time to time, in food as in most other areas of life. When the Nationalist government moved to Taiwan, for example, Jiangzhe-style dishes were popular. Sichuan cooking became "hot" between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s. And when the stock market was at its peak, whatever cost top dollar sold best.
"In order to survive, a restaurant has to take in a little of this and a little of that," Shen says. "The good thing is, you can order the most famous dishes from different styles in one place. The price you pay is that there's no longer a feeling of individuality with restaurants, chefs, and styles." He notes that style is rarely the top consideration when choosing a restaurant these days. In a congested city like Taipei, for instance, parking is a much more important factor. Then come the atmosphere, food, and service--in that order.
Price is low on most people's list of priorities, because ethnic Chinese have a tradition of entertaining their guests in the most expensive restaurant they can afford. When the economy is booming, so are restaurants serving lobsters and abalone; but when things turn relatively quiet, these places are in trouble, because many Taiwanese would rather forgo dining their friends than take them somewhere cheaper. "This pretty much comes down to a question of timing," Shen says. "Depending on the ups and downs of the economy, it's either jackpot or cleanout."
Tony Hsu estimates that each day a constantly varying pool of about five hundred people keep Taipei's most expensive restaurants going. All of the top eating houses have to share this select group of customers, who usually spend around US$80 and up on a meal, so when the economy is not that good the going in this rarefied atmosphere can get extremely tough. A few upmarket restaurants try to survive by reducing their prices. When the stock market was riding 10,000, for example, a meal including shark-fin soup might have cost a diner US$50-60. Nowadays, it is possible to eat the same meal made with only slightly inferior ingredients for US$15, if you know where to look.
If opening a ritzy restaurant can be likened to playing the NASDAQ, running a small neighborhood estaminet, where there is no decor or atmosphere but a diner can get out the door for less than a couple of bucks, is more the equivalent of investing in government stocks. "People eat in those places because they don't have the time and energy to cook for themselves," Shen Sung-mao says. "That's a habit that won't change with the economy. And Chinese people are much more thrifty when [they're not entertaining guests and so] face isn't involved."
Squeezed in between these two extremes are ordinary middle-class, middle-of-the-road restaurants that have their own problems. They are a little bit too expensive for an everyday meal, but not fancy enough to attract the wedding banquet and office party crowds. It is not unknown for such establishments to stoop to a little chicanery in an attempt to boost flagging business. According to Shen, "a whiff of cosmetics" (a Taiwanese phrase evoking pretty female wait staff in short skirts) can work wonders.
Tony Hsu agrees that running an inexpensive restaurant is less risky than going for broke with a posh one, but stresses that some considerations are common to just about every successful retail business. Take location, for example--a restaurant must be a good fit with its neighborhood. Selling dumplings or foods prepared in the northern Chinese style would not make a lot of economic sense in an area occupied by predominantly elderly residents of Taiwanese ancestry.
Something that blights all F&B businesses these days is a chronic skills shortage. In the past, the only way to become a chef was to spend three to five years in the kitchen as an apprentice, learning the basic skills, and another three to five years mastering them. Today's vocational schools often stand in for restaurant kitchens, but the new kids are not always as good as their school report cards make them out to be. "More theory than experience," is how Hsu sums them up. "They know how to input every step and all the ingredients into the computer, but unfortunately computers can't cook."
This problem will probably lessen as the increasing numbers of vocational schools offering culinary courses improve their strategies. But what sort of world those new chefs are going to inherit is an interesting question. It would be nice to think that Taiwan's F&B industry will keep on growing, offering an increasingly varied mixture of styles to an expanding number of ever more sophisticated diners. Or not. According to the cynics, the relevant questions are two in number: How many years will pass before the last "orthodox", single-style restaurant is swallowed up by the nearest chain? And how long will it be before the microwave becomes the only cooking utensil in the average Taiwanese kitchen?