In 2010, Sherilyn Fan (樊秀玲) made headlines as the first female head chef at a five-star hotel restaurant in Taiwan. She’s also served as deputy executive chef of the Palais de Chine (君品酒店), and for years oversaw the procurement and quality control of some of the most expensive tables in Taipei.
Since April, Fan’s career has taken on a dramatically different look.
At the single table of her tiny new restaurant, Oz Traiteur Francais, Fan offers a high-end dining service with a reservation three days in advance. Mainly, though, she does an upscale version of takeout.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
Every weekday at noon, Fan delivers about a dozen lunchboxes down the block to children at Taipei European School.
Each box is NT$150, and its contents are made from scratch. Some days, there is a lacey French omelet and mashed potatoes. Other days, it’s braised beef or a meatball dish from northern Europe. Each entree comes with a dessert (custard, tart, pie), plus freshly squeezed juice or a milkshake.
Behind glass at her restaurant, there are more entrees in a box, each flash-frozen and most priced below NT$300. There’s moussaka, French-style baked potato pie, roasted beet salad with mustard seeds and free-range spring chicken baked with herbs.
Photo Courtesy of Sherilyn Fan
“Sometimes people will walk in and ask for one of the dishes to eat here, but I have to tell them that we are primarily a takeout service,” Fan said.
Takeout-only lowers overhead and makes whole-food meals more affordable for average families, she said.
MADE FROM SCRATCH
Photo Courtesy of Sherilyn Fan
Fan said that everything on the menu is made from scratch, down to the cooking oil, which she presses herself. She added that she sources produce and poultry from carefully vetted farms.
“After working for a few years as a chef, you begin to notice where the food comes from, and you hope people would make better decisions about what they eat,” Fan said.
“My goal is very clear. I want to develop the food system. Years before the recent food scandals, I realized that Taiwanese do not eat well.”
It was only when she started working as a chef did Fan realize that much of the meat in Taiwan is farmed unethically and unhealthily, with the heavy use of growth hormones and antibiotics.
She cites as an example the common practice of rearing chicken in crowded black boxes.
“There’s no light, only a strip of feed and water... It cannot exercise because it is crowded. In 29 days, it will be slaughtered, so for the purpose of speeding weight gain it must be fed lots of hormones. It is also fed antibiotics so it will not get sick,” she said.
KNOW YOUR SOURCES
This brew of synthetic chemicals enters the human consumer in trace amounts. The effect is hard to isolate and measure, as hormones are naturally present in the blood and antibiotics enter in other ways.
The European Union has banned hormone-treated beef and the use of antibiotics in meat. In Taiwan, their use is still legal and prevalent.
Fast-food vendors like McDonald’s and KFC sign contracts with low-bidding local factory farms to keep prices low, Fan said, adding that hotels do too, even the five-star kind, which operate on sliver-thin profit margins.
“You can use free-range poultry at a hotel, but not often. Hotel procurement is done through a bidding process — I open a bid on chicken, and we compare prices and choose based on that.”
“It is hard to use this model to find the ingredients you want the most,” she said.
Today, with a low-overhead operation, Fan is able to purchase small batches of ingredients from sources of her choosing.
Some delicacies, such as special cheeses, are imported from Europe. Most ingredients are local and purchased from a carefully curated list of vendors.
Fan said fresh fruits, vegetables and fish are easier to find at traditional open-air markets, less so at a supermarket. She prefers meats from small-scale farms — poultry for her takeout entrees comes from a mountainside farm in Luye, Taitung County.
“I get the kind that climbs trees and forages for corn,” she said.
CULINARY OUTLIER
Even before her takeout venture, Fan was unusual in her field.
She’s a woman in a male-dominated profession who arrived in the kitchen late in life. Before then, the National Taiwan University graduate was an air-traffic controller at the Civil Aeronautics Administration (民航局).
At 30 years old, Fan resigned from the job and left Taiwan. With no kitchen experience to recommend her, she went to France with an eye on enrolling in culinary school.
“Since I was young, I’ve liked food, eating it and thinking about how to cook it. In my mind I was always making it, but in reality I was not. At home, it wasn’t possible for my parents to allow a student to chop, chop, chop,” Fan said.
Within four months of studying French in France, Fan had mastered enough vocabulary to test into the Institute Paul Bocuse, one of France’s premier culinary arts schools. Upon returning to Taiwan, her hire at the Palais de Chine marked the first time that a woman held the post of head chef.
“The people who worked under me were mainly men. My assistant chefs were all men,” she said.
She ran a brisk kitchen, in which her gender turned heads and drove some chefs to go above and beyond in completing their tasks — for “pride’s sake,” Fan said.
She knew her gender was also working against her. As some male chefs balked at her orders or remained aloof, Fan countered by approaching the colleagues least likely to approach her.
“Sometimes men do not know how to communicate with female chefs. A lot of the time, they will not dare to ask questions or to proactively ask about things, and more often than not I took the initiative to communicate,” she said.
Fan is not particularly proactive about sparking a public debate on the gender gap in kitchens. Rather, as with her approach to national eating habits, she is more intent on offering a viable alternative to an old habit.
“People’s concepts are deeply ingrained,” she said.
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