At 64-years-old, Tai Hsueh-li (戴學禮) has more energy than most people half his age.
Last Sunday evening, he was vigorously smashing cucumbers and shredding Shandong-style roast chicken for his signature dish at yet another sold-out dinner.
Tai is not a professional chef. He’s a lifelong home cook with a penchant for garlic. He’s also a first-time borough warden, having been elected to Tongfeng District (同風) in his native Keelung last year.
Photo: Davina Tham, Taipei Times
And he’s a retiree — although all the usual connotations of that are dispelled by his many pursuits.
At Shi Yi (食憶), which translates to “memories of food,” retired, self-taught home cooks like Tai are creating feasts inspired by homemade family meals.
The restaurant is the brainchild of former fashion marketer Cherry Chen (陳映璇), 33. It opened in August last year, after Chen’s own parents retired and she was confronted with the question of how retirees spend their time.
Photo: Davina Tham, Taipei Times
A restaurant with a social purpose, Shi Yi is setting an appetizing example for a new approach to retirement.
SENIOR LIFESTYLES
Taiwan officially entered the international club of aged societies last year, when the proportion of citizens aged 65 and above passed the 14 percent threshhold. In 2017, life expectancy hit a high of 80.4 years, against the nation’s mandatory retirement age of 65.
Photo: Davina Tham, Taipei Times
Accompanying these demographic shifts is a change in the conversation around senior citizens.
“In the past when we talked about seniors, we’d talk about taking care of them,” Chen says. “Now when we talk about seniors, we talk about activating manpower.”
After noticing that most retirees around her had an abundance of culinary skills and free time — precisely the resources many young professionals like herself lack — Chen devised the central idea behind Shi Yi.
Photo: Davina Tham, Taipei Times
Housed in the cosy but elegant former residence of a navy captain on Fujin Street (富錦街), the restaurant opens exclusively on weekends and occasional weekdays. Each day, three retirees come together to cook a meal for about 30 diners.
The food is served as it would be at a family meal, in communal dishes shared by each table. Tastes skew toward the traditional, often with a personal twist. This attracts a range of clientele, young and old, although getting in the door is tough. At press time, tables for the rest of July and the whole of August have sold out.
Throughout the meal, diners are free to mingle with the chefs at their tables or in the open kitchen, and vice versa.
Photo: Davina Tham, Taipei Times
“[Older people] have so many rich life stories and experiences,” Chen says. “In this way they can share them and also find a sense of accomplishment here.”
From an initial recruitment among her friends’ parents, Chen has since expanded her roster of home cooks to number about 20, the oldest of whom is 93-years-old.
Last Sunday, Tai was joined in the kitchen by Liu Chin-ming (劉錦明), 64, a former hotpot restaurant owner, and Lin Jen-lung (林人龍), 60, a retired educator.
Photos: Davina Tham, Taipei Times
It is Lin’s first meal service at Shi Yi. He applied to the restaurant at the encouragement of his wife and sees his participation as a way of maintaining a more “diverse lifestyle” in retirement.
Liu, who was recommended by friends already cooking at Shi Yi, says she joined the project because “there’s no one to eat the food at home” ever since her daughter moved out.
“Everyone here gets along very happily, and when we make food for the guests to eat, I get a real sense of accomplishment,” she says.
Photo: Davina Tham, Taipei Times
During the restaurant’s months-long hiatus earlier this year, Chen says she would receive text messages from some of the chefs with photographs of new dishes they were developing. It was a gentle way of signaling their impatience to get back in the kitchen and meet diners and colleagues at Shi Yi again.
FAMILY MEAL
Shi Yi’s menu changes every meal, but can be classified into three categories: familiar dishes like beef brisket soup and loofah stir-fried with clams; re-creations of hard-to-find traditional fare like stir-fried taro stems and tofu meatballs in soup; and innovations like salted egg bamboo shoots and sour plum-pickled bitter gourd.
The food also reflects a range of ancestral backgrounds across Taiwan and China. Menu development begins when each chef first shows interest in joining the restaurant and auditions with their specialties.
The cooking can be uneven, but where Shi Yi excels is in blending the generosity of a home kitchen with a restaurant’s attention to detail.
For his debut, Lin goes back to basics, preparing a trio of cold appetizers comprising pork aspic, braised egg with a jammy yolk and a salad of 10 vegetables; four deities soup (四神湯) with pig stomach and Job’s tears; and braised pig’s trotter. The home-brewer also shares shots of his sweet and tart umeshu, or Japanese plum liquor, with diners.
Tai says that he develops his recipes without any plan or structure, yet his roasted chicken dressed with garlicky, saucy cucumbers manages to be both satiating and refreshing.
At the sight of his noodles topped with minced meat and soybean paste (炸醬麵), a diner grows ecstatic, saying that she has made three visits in hopes of finally getting to try this dish. At the end of the night, she appears to leave with a takeaway bag full of leftover sauce, compliments of the chef.
For Liu’s signature dish of stinky tofu, she grinds soybeans to make her own beancurd from scratch, fermenting it over two days before steaming with edamame, red chilis and mushrooms. Slow build-up of flavor during the fermentation means the tofu has a complex umami flavor and needs no embellishment.
At any other restaurant, it would be risky to serve stinky tofu as part of a menu in which the diner has no say. But here, a certain fluency in common Taiwanese fare is assumed. It’s also evident in other tastes and textures calibrated for the local palate, including the liberal use of offal and very springy bites of pork collagen and noodles.
There are about 10 courses to a meal, with each diner paying between NT$800 and NT$990. Each chef receives NT$2000 for a meal service, with all ingredients and overhead costs covered by the restaurant. Chen says that this business model just allows Shi Yi to break even, with a little to spare.
Not a way to make money then. But like the retirees who perform wonders in Shi Yi’s kitchen, Chen sees the restaurant’s value in other terms.
“Some of [the chefs] exchange culinary tips, and then some really form friendships with each other,” she says. “That’s the most precious reason why I wanted do this in the beginning.”
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