Mark Miller: observation

Transcript context

…We just had a dialogue with Fuchsia Dunlop, who’s written on Chinese cooking. The food world in China, now, how do you see it? Is it getting better, getting worse? Is it headed to become large corporations, as in America, making a lot of soulless food, or is it still on the way up? That’s a difficult question, because restaurants that I know, and Fuchsia knows — like Jesse, which is an old restaurant in Shanghai — I was there recently, and I’ve been going to that same restaurant for 20 years, from when it had four tables, by one family. Now they have a multiple, but still — what Fuchsia talked about [the low status of Chinese chefs], though, is going to stop them. It’s the level of status of someone joining a cooking profession. Din Tai Fung: the dumplings have gone down. What’s happening now is, even though they have this great tradition of cooking, the workforce is either coming straight from the countryside without being trained — the restaurants are making a lot of money because the people who are going there don’t have trained palates, and so they just open up and be better. Traditional restaurant: that takes a lot of training, and to go into that, they’re not going to find the workforce. I think that they’re going through a period right now of, probably, I would call, mediocrity. Doesn’t the low status of cooking in China, in some ways, protect them? It keeps pretensions out of the food world. It means people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds can become cooks. You can have a grandmother or a grandfather being a cook. You can walk along in Shanghai and find a place where they make dumplings, and they simply roll them. No one there thinks of what they’re doing as an art, but that ultimately enables free entry, and gives people a bit of the freedom that they don’t have in Tokyo. Thus, I would say, you should be more optimistic about food in China.…

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