Fuchsia Dunlop: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Also, Taipei is a little bit more concerned about provenance of ingredient. [laughter] I would say that in the early days, so 1949, the defeated nationalists fled to Taiwan with, as you were saying, the chefs and their food traditions. At that time, the nationalists all thought they would go back. They were all missing their home provinces. They wanted to eat the classic traditional food of the elites of these provinces. The restaurants, by all accounts in the ’50s and ’60s, were very, very traditional and authentic. But what’s happened since then is that there’s been a lot of mixing up. The younger generation of chefs are Taiwan-born, so they might work for a bit in a Hunan restaurant, then go into a Jiangnan restaurant. They’re all very mixed up. You go to a regional restaurant in Taiwan, and they’re either very old school and somehow not so good anymore, or they tend to be a bit more fusiony in Chinese terms. Also in Taiwan, you have this whole Japanese influence from the colonial occupation. Right.…

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