60 TRAVEL+LEISURE | SEPTEMBER 2019
EXPERIENCES
Vanessa Huang, the
chef at Ephernité.
munched on panini while the owner
demonstrated how to pound veal
cutlets to Japanese tourists in a
cooking class. The mix of cultures and
cuisines seemed incredibly natural,
as cosmopolitan as it was laid-back.
You get the same feeling at Gen
Creative, where the hearty dishes
nod both to local traditions and to
the chefs’ own backgrounds—radish
cake incorporates chorizo, fried
chicken is accented with pomelo,
hot-and-sour soup is deconstructed
into an eggy, explosive puzzle. Gen,
you may not be surprised to learn,
means “roots” in Mandarin.
Apart from Kai Ho, none of the
chefs I met called their restaurants
Taiwanese. Yet they were cooking
Taiwanese ingredients (mostly) for
Taiwanese people (mostly); their
culinary training might be French or
Californian, but didn’t that put them
in line with the centuries of migrants—
from China, Japan, and beyond—
whose contributions form the basis
of “official” Taiwanese cuisine?
To expect such a label (or any label,
for that matter), however, is to overlook
the reason these chefs came to Taipei
in the first place. “We do everything
like a fine-dining restaurant, but we
don’t consider ourselves a fine-dining
place,” said Paul Lee, another Vegas
vet, who was born in Taipei and raised
in California. His Michelin-starred
restaurant, Impromptu, which
opened last summer and serves a
12-course tasting menu—red rice
with watermelon jelly, deconstructed
squid-ink lasagna, skewered sweetbread
with bergamot and sesame-leaf
gremolata—goes for a mere $70 per
person. (Try that in New York!)
He describes Impromptu, tentatively,
as “modern American.” But really,
he said, “we just want our own identity
in the culinary scene.” And in a city
chock-full of identities—all of
them shaped by a world’s worth of
experiences, each presenting a
uniquely delicious facet of Taipei—
he fits right in.
chefs from Australia, the U.S., and Hong Kong
apply New Nordic principles to local ingredients.
By 2018, those two had been joined by many
more. Taipei native Vanessa Huang returned from
France to bring her artistry to Ephernité (best
dish: a delicate rainbow terrine made with several
seasonal, local vegetables). Lam Ming Kin,
originally from Hong Kong, and the former chef
de cuisine at Jean-Georges Shanghai, opened
the cozy-yet-upscale Longtail, which serves a
mashup of French- and Japanese-inflected entrŽes.
And Eric Liu, Hansang Cho, and Melanie Garcia,
who’d been cooking in some of Las Vegas’s best
restaurants, came to collaborate on their own
place: Gen Creative, in the Daan District.
Liu lived in Taipei as a boy, but the Korean-
American Cho and the Guatemalan-American
Garcia had never even visited. Cho said he
didn’t need much persuasion, though: “Eric didn’t
convince me to move to Taipei. He didn’t have
to. We always shared the same dream of opening
a restaurant of our own. Sometimes things
happen for a reason, and we were all at the right
place in our lives to take that next step.”
Taipei’s energy was evident as the trio led me
around the produce and fish markets of the city’s
Zhongshan District one morning. Storefronts
stocked a dozen kinds of clams and squid in deep,
bubbling, cold-water containers; one farmer sold
remarkably leafy basil; a roving cart offered
piles and piles of fragrant strawberry guavas.
No lettuce, though: its microseason hadn’t started
yet. When the shopping was done, it was time
for breakfast around the corner, at Gusto Market
of Taste, an Italian grocery store where we
TRIP PLANNER
Ephernité ephernite.
com; tasting menus
from $58.
Gen Creative
gentaipei.com;
entrées $10–$64.
Impromptu
impromptu. com.tw;
tasting menu $70.
Longtail longtail. com.
tw; entrées $15–$54.
Mume mume.tw;
entrées $32–$35.
Raw raw.com.tw;
tasting menu $60.
Taïrroir tairroir.com;
tasting menus
from $51.
Stay at the Grand
Hyatt, a calm oasis
with huge guest
rooms near Taipei
- hyatt.com;
doubles from $261.
