Ken Chan (陳偉強) has come a long way since he started out wheeling a trolley in a dim sum restaurant, becoming the first chef in his adopted home of Taiwan to win three Michelin stars.
Hong Kong-born Chan, 53, worked through tough apprenticeships back home before rising through the ranks on Taiwan’s culinary scene over the past three decades to become executive chef at luxury five-star hotel restaurant Le Palais in Taipei.
Serving mainly Cantonese cuisine as well as Sichuan, Fuzhou and Taiwanese dishes, Le Palais became the first and only restaurant in Taiwan to receive three stars when Michelin launched its Taipei guide earlier this year, describing the food as “truly outstanding.”
Photo: AFP
Chan’s menu is relatively affordable compared with three-star restaurants in the rest of the world, with dishes ranging from steamed prawn dumplings and baked barbecue pork buns, priced from NT$250, to an eight-course set including lobster salad, bird’s nest soup, braised abalone with goose foot and steamed tiger grouper at NT$6,980.
Taiwan’s most-recognized chef, Andre Chiang (江振誠), famously gave up the two Michelin stars attached to his eponymous Restaurant Andre in Singapore, closing it in February to focus on other projects, including his Taipei restaurant RAW.
But Chan says he believes receiving the stars will boost the island’s burgeoning foodie credentials.
Photo: AFP
“It inspires everybody to aim higher and higher,” he said.
Chan attributes his accolade to “luck,” but it is also testament to perseverance.
After dropping out of school in Hong Kong aged 12, Chan began working in a restaurant in the city, pushing a dim sum trolley around the tables from which customers would choose dishes.
He already had a love of cooking passed down from his mother and remembers how she would give him two Hong Kong dollars to buy ingredients in the market to feed the family, as she was working full-time to make ends meet.
Having to carefully think how to spend the money to create the best meal has influenced his approach in the kitchen now, says Chan. “I told my staff ‘You shouldn’t just aim to finish the job but should do it well, as if you were cooking for your parents,’” he said.
A DYING ART?
Life in the Hong Kong restaurant business was far from glamorous.
Chan was tasked with washing the underwear of a chef he worked under and recalls being hit on the head with a spatula when his “master” was in a bad mood, even being thrown into a river for making mistakes.
“Back then if you wanted to learn something, you had to beg the master to teach you,” he said. “I had to buy drinks and fruit to treat my masters so they would casually teach me one or two steps.”
Chan believes young people now are too pampered and unable to handle pressure. “I have to ask them to learn,” he said.
With just HK$270 (US$34) in his pocket, Chan began a new chapter in Taiwan 30 years ago at the age of 23, after his mother died and his girlfriend dumped him. His first job was as a chef in a vegetarian restaurant and he recalls feeling isolated because he only spoke Cantonese, the dominant language in Hong Kong, not Mandarin which is spoken in Taiwan.
But he says a sense of pride made him stay and he began to build a reputation for his Cantonese cuisine.
Chan worked up to becoming head chef at another five-star hotel restaurant in Taipei, before taking the executive chef position at Le Palais in 2010.
At the time, the restaurant had only been open for a few months and Chan was despondent over the lack of customers on his first day.
“I didn’t go home that night and locked myself in the office to ponder over how to run the restaurant,” he remembers. He came up with a new menu of 27 dishes and replaced around a third of the staff as part of a major overhaul.
Chan worries that traditional skills in Cantonese and Taiwanese cooking will eventually be lost as the old masters age and young chefs struggle to create the same flavors. But for now, he says his own goal is to keep reinventing himself. “I don’t see myself as a veteran chef,” he said.
“My mentality is that I am like a child just learning to walk and I have to constantly learn new things.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located