Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
36 published records
01 / belief
“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.”
02 / commitment
“There’s this assumption that foreigners won’t be able to handle certain foods. I’ve sometimes had to have an argument and just say, “Look, we will eat it.”
03 / belief
“May I add? I think hot pot restaurants are like the McDonald’s in China. [laughter] It’s considered as a fast-food restaurant, really.”
04 / 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.”
05 / 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.”
06 / uncertainty
“Like in Germany — I don’t know if it’s a certain region — they have Mett, which is raw pork.”
07 / belief
“The closest thing it reminds me of is some Peruvian spices, for example, strange in itself, or Mexican spices. But that combination of spices needs a lot more exploration, I think.”
08 / belief
“I think we have to partly use imagination, and there are some continuities in ingredients and techniques.”
09 / uncertainty
“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.”
10 / belief
“I think Ethiopia is still very underrated when it comes to food. Only been there for the first time this year, and it blew me away.”
11 / belief
“I think more of it is just practice, just writing, having a notebook, writing your impressions.”
12 / belief
“To me, also, Chinese food in Panama has a much more authentic flavor than even most parts of Europe, if they have Chinese food. That’s, I think, quite surprising, almost like a hidden secret in Central America.”
13 / belief
“I think, perhaps, when people have this obsession with texture, there are certain ingredients that require fast cooking.”
14 / observation
“Sometimes what they do is, they bring street food into an area, a bit like the Singaporean Hawker Center idea. The problem is that they’re not individual traders anymore.”
15 / 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.”
16 / 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.”
17 / 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.”
18 / belief
“Nothing in their cuisine was shocking to me in a way that I suspect it would be traveling around different areas of China.”
19 / belief
“Similarly, I think some combination of Chinese clientele, not a particularly nice venue, and I guess also, when you’re in the restaurant, typically in the UK, if the service is not as warm and polite.”
20 / 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.”
21 / belief
“I have not spent time in Mexico at all, and I think that Mexico is hugely exciting.”
22 / belief
“I’ve only been to China once, so I think I’d love to go back. I was in Chongqing.”
23 / belief
“I think that the Cantonese simplified model is in many places but with slight variations.”
24 / belief
“I think that the people writing about food are no longer the Confucian gentleman scholars.”
25 / belief
“On the subject of Fuchsia’s writing, I think that your book is wonderfully well organized, to introduce the cuisine through 30 dishes and to use that to talk about knife work and diversity and everything else.”
26 / belief
“Going back to the exotic-ingredients aspect, I think we mentioned deer tendons earlier.”
27 / preference
“I think that distorted our view, so maybe people have caught on. Personally, I enjoy Hunan food a little bit less than Szechuan food.”
28 / evaluation
“We have gotten around proving that we can eat sea cucumbers and stuff on many occasions. 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.”
29 / evaluation
“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 food-intricate culture.”
30 / prediction
“I believe that is the highest ratio in the world. That is because in the ’90s, the Canadian government just offered extraordinary numbers of visas to Hong Kongers to basically escape Hong Kong before their return to the mainland.”
31 / evaluation
“I did have a really interesting conversation with an Indian who came on my tour to Yunnan earlier this year because I was speculating that one of the reasons that Chinese food is so diverse is that the Chinese are really open-minded, with very few taboos.”
32 / evaluation
“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.”
33 / preference
“We appreciate and we use a lot of local ingredients, from the Maryland crab that paired with our tofu skin.”
34 / evaluation
“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.”
35 / evaluation
“There’s always this tension between — we all feel nostalgic and we love tradition, and there’s something worthwhile about trying to document classics and traditions.”
36 / prediction
“So, as Chinese became the №1 group coming to the United States, we started getting a lot of regional cuisines. 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.”