Why Did Andre Chiang Give Up His Michelin-Starred Restaurants and Go Back to Taiwan? | #InnoMinds

i would say one thing that i think the biggest difference is do we see cuisine or culinary as a culture or as tourism it should be under culture every taiwanese you should learn taiwan flavor history [Music] good local time everyone and welcome to the latest episode of innovative minds with audrey tong to date we've met innovative minds in the fields of politics research and the defense of human rights but today we're going to enjoy a more sensory experience with taiwan chef andrei zhang [Music] [Music] so [Music] good local time everyone and welcome to the latest episode of innovative minds with audrey tong to date we've met innovative mice in the fields of politics research and the defense of human rights but today we're going to enjoy a much more sensory experience with taiwan chef andrei zhang andhra was born in taiwan and grew up around the chilean night market in taipei city after choosing to follow in the footsteps of his mother a hard-working cook versed in all manners of cuisines he chose to move to france as french cuisine was for him the most untouchable now andre's philosophy is based on modernizing the classic french techniques by sourcing the most fresh and the most interesting seasonal produce having made an indelible impression on the culinary scene since opening restaurant andre in late 2010 the popular establishment was ranked 14th on the world's 50 best restaurants list in 2017 and held its spots for seven consecutive years please join me in welcoming today's guest andre hi audrey hi everyone this is andre hi andre i knew that you entered the culinary scene very very early on at a very tender age at what moment did you suddenly think oh i love cooking i want to be a chef oh first of all my mom was a chef so i kind of started very young um by helping on my mom in the kitchen um and that's i guess where it starts or plant a seed of me being a chef um but since i was a kid i think my mom has planned to train me to become a chef so we always have this little game of guessing what's inside of whenever whenever we go to a restaurant so we will guess what's in the dish and i think for me that's kind of um competition because i'm a competitive person uh so kind of a game between me and my mom every time i go to a restaurant and that kind of plant the seed of me i want to be a chef and i want to learn more about culinary so i can do better in the next challenge with my mom so i will try to eat as much as i can i try to order different type of food to learn different spices and vegetables so next time i can have better guests uh whenever we play the game what's inside yeah well this sounds very interesting and was there a particular dish that you made that you started your career uh well i think i can't recall but the first dish that i i did myself it was um what's the ketchup fried rice okay yeah sounds delicious that's that's where i first started i learned how to how to cook uh you know put a chair in front of the wok as i was too little so i think i started cooking since i was eight wow or nine but officially when i was 13 but i think what means to me about cuisine is whenever we learned a dish or my mom took me to to to try a dish in the restaurant then she will do it exactly the same dish again at home and then tell me how to make it better so my mom dish always better because she dissect all the process and then tell me that if we make one little change and this dish tastes better no i say yeah it tastes better then i would take that dish she will put that dish in the lunchbox and i bring it to school i always have two lunchbox one is for myself and the other one is to share with my classmates um that's what my mom taught me uh good food is to be shared um so i always have two lunch box and one is for myself and one is for my friend i guess that would have made you really popular [Laughter] it's good yes uh but not long after that since you mentioned that you officially uh became a cook around 13 but you moved abroad uh just two years afterward at 15. so what motivated this move to france um so at the beginning i decided to left taiwan when i was 13 and i went to japan to help my mom in the restaurant she had a chinese restaurant there so i was helping her for two years but you know the the chinese culture of learning especially in you know learning how to cook in the kitchen is quite different it's almost like how we teach a kids you know this is what we should do don't try to be funny and you just do what i said yeah discipline never ask questions yes that's right just yes and you do it um and then while i was in japan that was the year that fuji television start to have this iron chef program uh and when i saw this japanese iron chef that cooked french cuisine that really amazed me how could an asian chef cook such a beautiful tasty french cuisine so i said i told my mom i want to be a french iron chef so um so yeah and that's that's that kind of um direct me to being a french uh chef and also um while i was selecting my path whether i should continue of cooking chinese cuisine or i should learn japanese cuisine since i was in japan or french cuisine because i think that's the three best cuisine in the world for me at that time and so french cuisine is always so far away and um it seems to have so much imagination of the culture so as i told my mom i want to learn french cuisine and i want to go to france and yeah and then i go when i was age of 15 i don't i don't know much about it but that was um that was this motivation of being a french iron chef at the age of 13. did you learn french before going to france no i don't know yeah but but i do uh i i recognize all the menus and recipes because i i read a lot i read a lot especially you know french cuisine french chef i remember when i arrived before i arrived in france i bought a book it's called hundred best chef poetry in france so i can flip on any page or any portrait of the chef i know his name his restaurant where it is the specialty of the restaurant and how many michelin stars he got so i was obsessed in french cuisine before i even go there so the basic ingredients cooking methods i i i know it before i go yeah so you immersed yourself for like 10 years right in the french culture so how was life like uh as someone who uh is obsessed with french culture but have not previously been in france um i would say it's painfully beautiful okay painfully beautiful yeah um i well i didn't bring anything with me so the light was tough i was just living with with the farmer he gave me a room i don't have any money so i asked my chef that um where shall i live so he let me stay in his house for about the month and then after that he recommended me to a farmer that produced the vegetable for our restaurant so i stay in a barn house that is super cold in winter that is extremely hot in summer that's where they park the all the machinery the barn house for free the only thing that i have to do is i have to wake up three o'clock in the morning so i'll help the farmer to flip the pumpkin to cut the aubergines and tomatoes whatever that is ripe that is ready to go for market then i put it on the trolley so he can arrange nicely so he can push that card to the market that's the only thing i have to do to pay my rent so that's how i started so basically i wake up three o'clock in the morning and after the farm work i'll go to the restaurant then i finish about maybe 12 midnight mid midnight so you got three four hours to sleep every day well it sounds pretty painful so what's the beauty part of it um as i'm so obsessed in in in french culinary i think every day i open my eyes i want to work and as i mentioned i know every best chef in france so i know that i'm living in a fairy tale and all the first people that i saw in the book now i'm talking to the person i'm working with the chef and then i'm working on the dish that i used to see in the book or magazines and now i'm living it um so it's a beautiful process i never feel that a day of exhaustion or tired of pressure of course there were there was pressure but i'm happy i lost 17 kilos the first two years because i was too tough but i was happy my mom wanted me to quit because i was like a skeleton and then um i said no mom i was happy i'm very happy to to be in that environment to be a great chef so yeah that's um that's the beauty of it that's the beauty of it yes um so one thing that i noticed uh and the media also noticed is that you love collaboration uh with artists of all different sorts multimedia artists how did that come about well i think to create is one thing to deliver an experience is another thing so as an artist or artisan we we have that creating process but after you create your masterpiece or something that you would like to express how to connect to the audience it's a different part of art and i think every creator has the same vision of delivering messages and the only difference is the medium whether i did it through food or through painting or through sculpture in fact we're doing the same thing so i naturally feel very easy to speak to artists very easy to communicate with them and i think to deliver a message or deliver an experience it's not only through food but the sound um the visual the you know the five senses that's where i feel there's no difference there's no boundary for me to work with different artists across industry are there particular early experiences of such collaborations when you were in france or even before i think in france it teaches me how to appreciate beautiful things in life i still remember when the first year i was in i was in france and my chef took me to the market and they say i'll show you the market and say okay we're gonna go buy this buy that and we went to a vegetable stall and if the vegetable was beautiful the aubergine the everything was so fresh and then he told me pick one and so i picked the aubergine so he said how you want to cook it i say i don't know you tell me because when i was in my mom's kitchen it was never like this it was just do it cut it um this big and then do as i said she don't she doesn't want me to have any thought passing my mind try to cook it like this all that so it's the first time people ask me how do i feel about the vegetable how do i want to cook it i start to appreciate first i start to appreciate beautiful things the second is i learned how to express my emotion through food so i guess that was a very big change since i was since i was kid i was 15 at that time so that changed the the relationship for me or finally i can express myself finally i can tell people what i think and how i want to cook it so i guess that's um that's a very big difference maybe the the education uh in france compared to asian yeah a lot more creative freedom yeah yeah it is it is did you make a distinction between uh calling yourself a artist or artisan yes is there a difference definitely definitely a lot of people think the word word artists but i said no we're we're not an artist we're the artisan what is an artist artist for me is you can have a free imagination free creation of anything that you want to do without even have a purpose like unconstrained exactly but an artisan is sometimes has to be very scientific very calculative and yet creative for example i always said that um to build a ferrari it's an artisan not only it's an art form it's beautiful card it also has to go fast the same thing for for chef is we're not only present the food as beautiful as it should um also it has to taste good so we kind of in um have to balance that one side you have very sharp calculated taste bud and yeah the other side you have to let your mind go to be creative to be imaginative mm-hmm why is there an imaginative engineering uh profession something like that disney used to call that imagineering i think that captures the artisan spirit yes right so i will take a short break and then we will be back to talk about your growth and social engagement and we're back so andre there was a critically acclaimed film in 2021 called andre and his olive tree that beautifully captured everything about your life and everything you do in singapore but it included this moment in your life when you decided to return to your choosing like original intent the beginner's mind to engage the people in taiwan and build a local talent system to the french standard when did you become interested in such social engagements well first of all i think it started maybe 10 years ago when i first decided to write my first bio tuition i still remember at that time when people were saying that oh andre you should you should come back to to taiwan now um the food and beverage industry is booming and they're more and more school they're having food and beverage management then we have people having international com when the international competition but i saw something that i pretty concerned is that we shouldn't teach our young kids to i call it gamble um we shouldn't teach our young kids to become uh an athlete that go for a competition and wins awards and expect that it could be successful overnight i see it's accumulation of experience and understanding of any industry or any craft it took time i never been through any competition i never won any awards or a metal so for me to to be who i am today uh it's a lot of um like i said a lot of accumulation of experience and uh hardship to get there so that pushes me to write my first bio a solution to share with everyone that i'm just a simple guide i was born in taiwan and in the night market i like what i do and it just consistently believe what you do and consistently accumulate all that experience will make you who you are don't think about just betting your time to to win a competition and expect that would change your life overnight um yeah so that's how that's where i think when i first started at first i feel that i probably could do something to change the idea or the the conception of the young the young generation and and more and more after my first restaurant richard andre i start to understand that there are a lot of asian chef that really look up to what i do and so that gave me a more responsibility to show them what is the right thing to do or being an asian and you will find most of our young kids they will they won't tell you that i want to be gordon ramsay but more they want to tell you that i want to be andre because that is something that they feel attached to and then they feel that of being a taiwanese i can cook a great french cuisine as well i can i can be known internationally as well as long as i work hard so i guess that pushes me to work towards how to influence and make a difference to our industry in a different way through education through throughout the new uh concept or a new uh topic for us to discuss yeah i guess that that was the beginning how initial uh my initiative and so last time we met it was a year ago right you mentioned one of your projects your ongoing projects to build such a fresh perspective on the kind of work that you and other taiwanese chefs do yes together it's called a taiwan taste book which is a way for you to introduce the taiwanese cuisine to the world and i find it very interesting because although i eat those sort of food like literally every day it's not very well known internationally when i go to international conferences people know bubble tea shalom bao and that's pretty much it right and so uh you introduced me to these ideas of like the sunbae the three cups the salty and crispy yensu and so on are distinct taiwanese flavors and so what did you want to achieve with this project internationally and why call it italian textbook okay um uh taiwan waypoo we um officially call it taiwan flavor spectrum flavor spectrum yeah okay so italian flavor spectrum is um for me it's the dna of taiwanese flavor it is a book it's a material i think we should have it in the in the school for everyone to understand what is taiwanese flavor and also i think it's um it's a tool for us to introduce ourselves internationally i guess when i always said to be able to think out of box you have to stand outside of the box and then you look i've been standing outside of taiwan and look inside of the box what do we have and what's missing i realized that we enjoyed our our own cuisine our own flavors so much but most of the time we found hard to explain who we are yeah what we eat and why yep so having a lot of experience seeing that in china they have a flavor book about sichuan cuisine the flavor spectrum in france we have i call a lahus it's a dictionary of traditional flavors how it combined together but we don't have such a foundation to teach our young generation or to introduce to other culture that this is what we do that for me is something that i think is the one thing that i want to i want to do i want to achieve and also one of the reason i decided to come back to taiwan and it is an ongoing process [Music] so we we we start to have this uh taiwan flavor spectrum lab this year early this year so it's already um we start to accumulate a lot of data and hopefully we'll start to have something interesting to show everyone excellent so yeah last time we talked about uh analyzing historical texts uh and making sure that when people use different words they actually mean the same flavor and things like that and i think it's a really really interesting research topic so what are the differences that you see when running a restaurant or a lab in taiwan compared to your other experience which has been running in france or in singapore are there cultural differences of running such projects or coordination or kitchen here to run a restaurant i think the biggest difference is it's almost no marketing in singapore or france yeah just people doesn't doesn't need and everyone knows exactly what they want and compared to to taiwan a lot of marketing branding uh need to be done uh to commit to communicate with um with with the public i think that's a quite a big difference to running a lab or what we do doing a research of a flavor i think in france or in singapore we're slightly more aggressive than in taiwan i would say the government is slightly more aggressive we have a department in the in the government that focusing on culinary either in france or in singapore i think that's very important if you see i would say one thing that um i think the biggest difference is do we see uh cuisine or uh culinary as a culture or as tourism it should be under culture it should be a department under cut ministry of culture right and not just terrorism yes so i think maybe at the beginning we put it at the wrong file and then that file should go to a different way so currently what or how we work on culinary it's more tourist driven or how to entertain instead of going deeper into a cultural research that i think it's uh it is a big difference and i was in um i was in a member of of the culinary department in singapore and also in france so since we don't have that department i feel that it's it is important for us to to to have and then if we have the department taiwan flavor spectrum is definitely in there because that's part of the cultural project what else would you put in there in addition to the spectrum well i think that's the first thing is every taiwanese you should learn taiwan flavor history we should all know uh more about the history the past hundred years or have passed 200 years of taiwanese culture and how the flavor evolved as well as our taiwanese history it should be in the book and then all the culinary students they should learn our taiwanese flavor formula before we learn how to cook french or spanish yeah so i think that's the that that probably is the the first priority and apart from that there are so many restaurants or cultural activities involved for example i was when i was in singapore i represent uh singapore to paris to cook in the embassy of singapore for all the ambassadors coming from around the world to to show singapore cuisine which doesn't make any sense i'm taiwanese so but i was there i was the best chef in in singapore at that time the best restaurant in singapore so uh but i mean so it culinary is the best tool uh for us to show who we are our identity and because the flavor is so distinctive and so precise that we can even tell people that we are different from anyone else not from the look not from the skin color not from the language but through our food we can tell people that we're different from anyone else it's a it's a gentle way to to tell who we are and it's very easy to connect to anyone around the world through food so i guess we have a long way to go right so it's not at a periphery of culture like tourism but at the essence exactly exactly and you've been like internationally not just in singapore france in taiwan i understand you've also been in africa yes restaurants and all over europe as well and you actually work with tlc the channel on the serious visits to countries around the world to explore the essence of culture that's food around the world what have you learned from this very international experience um yes talking about the the tlc program we call food in our time in fact it's something it's my last project before i leave singapore i want to create a program that about food but not showing everyone where to eat how's the food taste like or travel around the world and then see beautiful mountains and the rivers but really go deeper but having said that it's a it's a boring topic and there's actually no such a tv program that talk about food in that direction and being as a chef i feel it's something that i want to to do whether people like it or not so i actually write the script of the whole thing oh and then propose a proposal of the the producer yes oh wow yes so i did the whole the whole proposal and i pitched it to to tlc and then they like it very much and that's how we we started to really seed food in a different direction through heritage through tradition nature or humanity it sounds heavy but actually not do we know where the cuisine come from a group of people they live in the same place and then the spring summer autumn winter the issue reflects from where they live how they survive and how they enjoy food and that's cuisine but cuisine can be decide by nature some cuisine or decide by nature for example the the place that i went in siberia that's the coldest place on the planet has minus 72 degrees so the nature decide how the cuisine will look like i was in in ghana they don't have a cuisine in ghana they have a very broken culture so it was very tough uh everything is different if you go one city to another city they will tell you different things what is ghana uh what is the ganache and no one says the same thing so it's very broken culinary culture but the people they collect word of mouth they collect all those alphabet and try to put them together so what made the cuisine of ghana is human i see they they collect those bits and pieces and then they put it together and they say this is our cuisine so and in china it's different china is tradition so we inherit this thousand years of knowledge and technique and it you know we inherit and we continue of doing it so uh cuisine being defined in a very different way some through human some through nature and some are heritage so that's what i feel it's it's interesting as a chef to to show people what food is like in in in my perspective um yeah so i'm a complicated person sometimes i think you you made an excellent case why this should be administrative culture not tourism because it sounds like culture to me yes so um so in this generation we've seen that many chefs are not as traditional uh or um just following one particular tradition as you just mentioned as they used to pay they're very vocal socially engaged believe in course about human rights issues artistic coordination all sorts of different flavors of chefs what do you think is the reason of such a vibrant culture of a new generation of chefs first of all i think our industry has evolved so much before we probably have 30 i'm talking about the last generation probably 30 of the time that we dined out and now a day i would say even 70 80 percent of the time we dined out instead of cooking in so uh what we eat eighty percent decided by the chef so the chef decide to use organic vegetable or they decide to use processed food that directly affect the citizens health yep so that's where i think it's it's it's important and secondly nowadays chef they're not only just cook sometimes they need to be farmer you understand the change of four seasons you understand of when to eat what sometimes you have to be scientist nutritionist so i guess the requirement of being a chef is getting more and more that's why um i've been teaching in a cup of um university in taiwan for seven years now i don't teach them how to cook i never pick a pen or a fork to to to show them how to how to cut a fish or or cook a rice i teach them color i teach them four seasons i teach them sometimes branding strategy calculation creativity which i think nowadays in the new generation of chef what they should learn sometimes we even just talk about advertising talk about branding trend color brands luxury brands how they market themselves and what intrigue your eyeballs which i think they're all relevant today for a chef to learn so probably we got the the toughest job yeah because you don't just need to learn one thing you have to learn basically everything so the nature of becoming a chef is becoming complicated exactly yeah so it's not just you it's complicated the entire field is becoming multidisciplinary yes it's what i hear yes so um so the last question for this segment uh it's been reported that you returned your two michelin stars and you declined to attend the mission award ceremony uh like um making a stunt and preferring instead a a what we say open and also more democratic uh judging mechanism on the social aspects of the food industry such as uh asia's fifties uh best restaurants so uh please tell us more about this choice like why okay um if i can make an example that what if the olympic game only have one sport ah okay how's it gonna be like it's gonna be crazy and currently in a culinary world we only have one sport i see it's mission and guide okay nothing wrong with it um but if we only have 100 meter race and then we have someone who jump really high we have someone who's you know swimmed really fast yeah like asking a fish to climb a tree yeah yeah it's not going to work so uh there's so many great restaurants great shifts there are the weather it's a it's a it's a full stall or um [Music] there's spanish food chinese food in in in in different form of culinary i think they all deserve their own spot and while you have one criteria for everybody sometimes it's different it's very hard to judge uh whether it's good or not good so for for for raw i think it's a different animal the reason that i created raw eight years ago is i think taiwanese platform taiwan needs to have its own brand like ding tai phone is the taiwan brand we tell everyone that they they know ding typhon is taiwanese they know raw it's taiwanese so it's a platform that we show all the beautiful things that we have in taiwan in a different form of art and so it's very hard to be calculated or to measure how many stars you want to get well i think we should get five stars yes for the purpose every other field has five stars yes for the purpose of you know or the for the intention of why we're having this platform not for how fast you can run or how elaborate or you know crystal chantly is and uh white gloves and silver cutleries um that that that's that that's one of the the reason that i think it's every restaurant should decide whether they're going for a hundred meter race or not or they can join other things with their own mission purpose yes yes and it should not be compulsory we should not have only one sport with one criteria one standard that should be plural yeah yeah so that that's what i think and for for restaurant laundry it's slightly different the reason i returned the mission start because um it's um you know i grew up with it i i grew up in that michelin culture i never work in a restaurant that is not mission start oh my restaurant that i work in france is three michelin stars i work in all the best three mission restaurants in france so it's in my blood to receive such a high accolade at the end of my restaurant i would like to return it's like you receive a precious gift from someone and one day if you don't need it you returned it instead of throwing it away or or another use so i think to return the mission start is a right gesture i return a precious accolades which i think i might not need it in the future yeah okay so you're making a statement but it's a friendly statement yes you can say that cool okay so after a short break we'll be back and talk more about the next generation [Music] and we're back andre um you've mentioned that you wanted to work with the taiwanese talent and the next generation i've heard that you've got a really young team like just early twenties or something uh please tell you how to do this uh that was the um since the beginning we decided to have an 100 uh taiwanese ingredient restaurant um so our team is part of our ingredients okay i see um so we have a very young team an average of 25 in total we have 50 staff okay for a restaurant is huge it's almost a baseball team i know so manage a um such a huge team i think the biggest challenge for us is to really give them a guidance of what's the motto for this restaurant we're not only a restaurant that cooking french style cuisine with taiwanese ingredients but also every time we try to deliver a message try to find our own dna a little bit more uh i think for this this this uh this eight years we come up with our own philosophy of communicating with this young young generation and our own philosophy uh first is we call the yes mentality the yes mentality yes just when every time we come up with an idea we'll say yes okay like can do yeah yes so we first try it but i will say yes i can do it but i will need his support i will need uh instead of saying no i cannot do it because i didn't have this i didn't have that or it's you know it's too com time consuming etc so we will say yes so yes it's our yes mentality yes i would need three weeks to finish it okay but i can do it so it's a yes and not yes but yes yes so and that uh that creates a different atmosphere when we when we when we discuss about concept and project um second thing that we develop is i spend a lot of time sharing or communicating concept instead of telling them what to do every every season we have a different concept or you know the restaurant has its own rules and regulations but it always comes with a concept not a to z or sop we call it but i found that it's better this way when they know a frame and they are free to run around within that frame instead of saying should i go straight or should i turn right so if they become they can become very relaxed in a working environment because they know what atmosphere we want to deliver and they know we didn't even have a working hour they come because they know they have to be here they leave because they think they finish their job and then again they can go um so what was the framework there they becomes more responsible to their work so that is quite different and i think the third is give before they ask um there are a couple of times that we have uh our staff come into the office and they say chef uh i think the there's something wrong with the my pace lift because i got two thousand dollars extra okay so that's exactly what you started i said no that you started you know you get this 2000 started from this month um you give before they ask and that's something that we we always do we appreciate the work and then we we always give before they ask i think it's at the end of the day you're still giving out that race but how they feel is completely different whether they they get it after they ask or you just we need to take the initiative to do it for the staff and that directly affect how they treat the customer they would do before they ask i see yeah and so i guess it's a philosophy that we pass on and how they would think that whenever the guests had the stake they would need to speak okay and you give before they ask they will think further so i i think there are there are a couple of um uh philosophy that we develop at raw since we are managing in such a young team uh slightly different from other restaurants yeah it's like shenzhen leading by example exactly and how would you uh say that your team building activities um are and are there like memorable moments for your team building with a young team yes um every year we have a team building uh the team building we go for a survival game okay yeah like literally shooting at each other yes shooting at each other the reason that we did it we it's a tradition since we were in in richmond andre in singapore and then we passed on to to raw when we first started i think managing such a big team it's almost like managing a a a brigade so they have the discipline they live in uh in um in the big uh team big community so we have uh we have this brothership uh since since the beginning so how to build up this uh team spirit we all every year we have this survival game and i often share that we have to save the president game that we always play okay so we split the team into two and one team would be the terrorism and the other team will be the good guy defending the president yes who who's the president then i'll be the first president he's checking okay yeah yeah so i'll play the president uh and then so the one team they would try to go from point a to point b and then try to escort the president to the air force and the air force one and then you have a terrorism standby and ready to shoot him and so they you will see that at that point um you start to develop a strategy you will see the you know the pastry chef the pastry girls and say no you know let's do this let's pretend that it's a fake president but we're going from this way and he said wow you know you don't you don't see that very often when when she's just quietly like you know piping her banana cream on the puff and then suddenly she become the the tactician exactly and and that was that very interesting part so since the first year we did that we thought it's a great practice for our team building and then so we do that all the time [Music] so what is exactly that president in this whole uh tim building session is our restaurant so how we protect this restaurant moving towards where we want to go and then there will be different voices there will be different challenges and how how we find each other's strength and then get to where we're going so it's a it's it's a great practice and then we we had it all the time it's i maybe you can try it in your office sounds very interesting maybe in virtual reality right yes um so uh it's nice that you you mentioned uh this uh lady uh chef because my next question is about women's uh representation uh when i was a child uh which is around the same time as you were a child or the same generation chef is considered kind of a immense world the culinary arts that we see on newspapers is like 90 percent uh man has that changed in the next generation and are there any advice that you give to women who want to be a chef yes it is it changed dramatically and previously in restaurant andre we have more girls than meant in our team oh wow in uh in taiwan in at raw we have half and half yeah 48 to 52 excellent so we have almost half and half i guess nowadays there's no much difference in fact i feel that girls they have much more delicate hands and um uh especially doing high pressure work they're extremely calculative and and and focused and why today that we don't see so many female chefs is because a lot of them uh abandon their career after they get married i see so we didn't see a lot of female chef that's the the thing i feel you know being a mom is that's important of having a great career and um in in an asian culture uh we still think that it's important to you know support the family uh therefore we don't see that much female chef really can go through that and and even after the marriage and still continue their career but i see i do see more and more that we employ a lot of female chefs okay i think as a society we're slowly but surely moving toward like helping a child's family together as a society to raise the child and therefore hopefully we'll see more senior women chefs in the future in taiwan um so the other thing i want to ask you uh is that um you've said that you're proud to be able um to uh for the young team to kind of lead the creative direction of the restaurant and we've seen a lot of creative directions for example working with the web 3 metaverse nft and worlds like that how did that come about and how do you feel about this um yes definitely i feel that we are moving forward and every creation that marks where we are [Music] food is just like language every generation we use the same ingredients but we say differently i think yeah when you said cool we said awesome we said rad yes are sick you know then you see a different generation um they they they use the same vocabulary they use a different vocabulary but express the same uh the same thing same as your cuisine i feel that we need to give these young generation more opportunity to to show and express themselves and ask questions for them to be more sensitive of the surrounding we create the first edible nft the whole idea is actually pretty simple if you go to a food court you order a curry rice and you get a curry rice and you eat it it's good that's one dimension no talking no talking um the two dimension is when you go to a restaurant and then they were sure they would tell you that oh this is the uh the scallion from ilan and this is the cherry duck from ilan and then the the idea of doing this dish was um um chef thing reminds him about the the grandmom's dish and then so therefore he created this dish as you see personal memory yes and then you try to put what they said and your dish together and try to to to create a an image or memory try to connect with that vision that's two dimension you hear and then you eat and then you try to imagine uh but what is three dimension is what if i can take you to his grandmom's period or i can take you to see his grandma was cooking this dish and it's not your grand mom or not my grandmom is his grandma then we see exactly the same person we see exactly the same vision and then we come back to taste the dishes so now i understand perfectly there is no gap of when i said mountain you think about fuji mountain i think about alps you think about something else it's still mountain but they're different but what if i can tell you a hundred percent or take you to that 19th century or whatsoever and then you would come back here and then you know exactly what was in his head and why he did this and that would be no miss and that's three dimension so that's where i decide to create create this nft try to bring people into a creator's mind and i think that's the the valuable thing about about this and i'm i'm a dreamer i i don't mind trying new things and what i think is valuable in this whole process is to tell people that the painting of vanco might be valuable but if i can get into van gogh's mind and understand that why he painting this this masterpiece is even more valuable and i try to create this nft to let people get into the creator's mind and understand why he's doing this it's much more valuable than the dish itself so it's a token of connection really between a creator and hopefully someone who will be inspired by the personal memories of the creator and also the context in which the creation was made yes yes so imagine if if in the van gogh time he released a an nft [Music] about his creating process and today that thing going to be more valuable than you know that shows what exactly what he see is his vision really twisted or is that just his style um that thing would be even more valuable than what he paint yep because what what he painted is just a kind of door uh through which that we can see the mind but previously there was no way to make this direct connection yes i think this is super innovative befit of the innovative minds uh so my last question to you audrey um you talk about the importance of the mutual appreciation between peers of chefs who have different thoughts different purposes rather than just individual to individual competition to get x amount of michelin stars so based on the discussion of this kind of new generation of peer appreciation of new generation of chefs which peers of yours of this generation do you admire and why um if i would say one i would say auguste escoffier so es augustes kofiet is one of the greatest and chef in france and he's the chef that he published so so many books and to really that chef stand out from the kitchen and really made this chef this this occupation become not really a celebrity but to let people understand and notice about the craft that starts from him and the most important writing from him is he gathers all the best chef at that time in 1938. he did a book of la house so which is the uh the dictionary kind of like i mentioned the taiwan flavor spectrum book together all the greatest chef and what is french cuisine's all about in one big book and i think that was the great thing that every single chef in france must have that book read that book and then have that book wherever they go for me it's always a role model that i look up to i hope i can create a book just like him and then that could last for a very long time and then that all the young generation after generation could benefit from what he has established to put all the the elements of dna of the cuisine and the culture together and which inspired a lot of great chef today that was my the chef that i inspired yeah amaya the most okay and as you said you're doing pretty much the same thing in his footsteps with the taiwan flavor spectrum project thank you so much chef andre thank you thank you for coming to our show uh and to our audience uh please check more information and videos on talonplus.com we have a youtube

channel too so if you liked today's episode be sure to subscribe and share see you next time live long and prosper well i think it went pretty well and especially about the italian flavor spectrum because exactly last year me and audrey i was in her office and we talked about we talked about this project already and then she kind of gave me quite a lot of advice so it's great that the one year later and then we talk about it again also that we had many progress and this time we have our own tower and flavor spectrum lab that we started this year so it's great to catch up and then last time we didn't have so much time to talk about and especially it's it's in our office so a bit more official and this time we feel much more relaxed artichoke it's a vegetable artichoke the very strong vegetables that it could grow almost everywhere you kind of don't know it's kind of kind of like tomato that is a fruit or is it vegetable so it can be both so it's nutritious but at the same time it's beautiful it's strong i think i'm i'm a person that everything needs to have a reason every decision i make there will be a reason therefore when you make a decision you don't you don't regret this no way back also whenever i make a decision i think a lot i learned about the pros and cons so either it goes in the right direction or wrong direction i've expected already i expect that to happen so there's no this yeah you just live with it and there's no no regret okay well there's one that's uh when i uh when i'm uh i marry my wife we met for three months and then we get married and i didn't measure the pros and cons all right everyone i'm andrew chang i'll see you on taiwan plus

2022-08-03 08:47

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