The Thousand-Year History of Famous Taiwanese Dishes Ft. Vivian Ku

“I don't feel like there's a need for me to write a book,” Vivian Ku says near the end of this episode of Chef’s Table: Talks. “I'm just gonna do what makes sense to me.” That quiet resolve—neither ambitious nor indifferent—anchors a conversation that ranges from the layered history of Taiwanese cuisine to the economics of running a neighborhood restaurant in Los Angeles. Ku, the chef and owner of Pine & Crane and Joy, doesn’t position herself as a culinary evangelist. She’s a cook who happens to run a business, and her food is the product of a specific, complicated history that she refuses to simplify.

What Makes Taiwanese Cuisine Taiwanese

Ku describes Taiwanese food as “organically designed for the masses,” a phrase that captures the island’s immigration history. Taiwan, roughly one-eleventh the size of California with about three-quarters of its population, has seen wave after wave of settlement: aboriginal peoples who have been there for 20,000 years, migrants from China’s Fujian province, Hakka Chinese with their own customs, 50 years of Japanese occupation (1895–1945), and then, crucially, the retreat of the Kuomintang (KMT) from mainland China between 1947 and 1949. That last wave brought about two million people—mostly military men, including Ku’s own grandfather—from all over China, a vast landmass with wildly different climates and dietary habits.