Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
23 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think also it’s about not repetition. That’s the key thing. 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.”
02 / belief
“I think one problem — and this maybe comes back to economics again — but in England, for example, I think now the door has opened to massive public interest in regional Chinese food, and people are really open to trying now eating Sichuan, Xi’an food and so on.”
03 / belief
“I think we have to partly use imagination, and there are some continuities in ingredients and techniques.”
04 / belief
“I think more of it is just practice, just writing, having a notebook, writing your impressions.”
05 / belief
“I think, perhaps, when people have this obsession with texture, there are certain ingredients that require fast cooking.”
06 / belief
“I think the thing about China — there was this ancient philosopher, Gaozi, who said shi se xing ye 食色性也, food and sex are human nature.”
07 / belief
“I think the problem is that with China’s modernization, there’s been this big effort to clean up the streets, and they’ve seen street food as being old fashioned and something undesirable.”
08 / belief
“I think that because the identity of Sichuanese food is in the flavors, you can apply a Sichuanese yúxiāng fish-fragrant sauce to the kind of fish that you can get, say, in England.”
09 / belief
“I think that’s maybe something that people don’t necessarily realize, that it’s not just aesthetically important, it’s also technically important in Chinese food.”
10 / belief
“I think that the Cantonese simplified model is in many places but with slight variations.”
11 / belief
“I think that the people writing about food are no longer the Confucian gentleman scholars.”
12 / belief
“We’re now just having another period of flowering, but with increased transport links, of course, it’s faster and crazier and more international. But I think you’re right that the big difference with Chinese food in the West is that you no longer have a community of mainly Cantonese American Chinese people who are catering for Western tastes and who don’t have access to many local ingredients apart from dried and preserved food, which they could import very early on.”
13 / belief
“Just to put that in context — in the ’90s, China was really just beginning to open up. So in Chengdu, this provincial capital city, there were only, I think, a couple of hundred foreigners.”
14 / belief
“I would say that when people think about Chinese cuisine, they often think about stir-fry as the Chinese method par excellence.”
15 / belief
“The first Chinese restaurant to win three Michelin stars was one in a fancy hotel in Hong Kong that did a tasting menu of courses which one person could enjoy. But I think chefs in China — as they become more internationally minded, they do feel a bit hard done by.”
16 / belief
“Then more recently, every Chinese restaurant, really — certainly in London, but I think nationwide — has crispy duck.”
17 / belief
“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.”
18 / belief
“I think 60 years on from that, I don’t — there are some like there’s a fantastic Suzhou bakery in this food street in Taiwan where they make really traditional Suzhou pastries.”
19 / belief
“I would say at the level of individual dishes, very interesting dishes, but China has it all already.”
20 / belief
“I would say that if you’re talking about farmhouse cooking, and the cooking actually, particularly at this region, I see a lot of affinities with Italian cooking.”
21 / belief
“Many Chinese waiters and restaurateurs that I know in London have had the experience of Westerners ordering food and then complaining that there are bones in it or that it’s fatty meat, all of which are good things in China, and then complaining and making a scene. I think people are just — it’s easier.”
22 / belief
“The other thing is, I think most of the Sichuan pepper that is exported has been exported and handled by Cantonese people.”
23 / belief
“There was an amazing series of cookery books produced around 1980, I think, when they photographed the classical dishes of four great cuisines of China.”