Taiwanese Handmade Cuisine: Meaning, Origins, and the 'Signature Dishes' of Banquet Culture

30-Second Overview: "Handmade cuisine" (shoulu cai) is a Teochew term for "signature dishes" ¹, referring to dishes that require genuine skill, have no standard recipes, and are passed down orally from master to apprentice. Its most concentrated display field is the "banquet" (banzhuo)—a Taiwanese banquet tradition where tents are erected by the roadside and cooking stations are set up on-site. Neimen in Kaohsiung, due to its barren land, inadvertently became the township with the highest density of banquet chefs (zongpushi) in Taiwan. In its golden age, one banquet company hosted 25,000 banquets a year. However, from hotel weddings to COVID-19, banquet orders shrank by 90% over twenty years, taking away not just the taste of the food, but also the neighborly mutual aid of "returning the leftover soup" (huan caiwei).

In the spring of 2020, several brand-new flags were erected in the temple courtyard of Zizhu Temple in Neimen, Kaohsiung. Printed on them were braised pork (fengrou), shark fin soup, and eight-treasure meatballs—not advertisements for banquets, but street stalls set up by banquet chefs. 48-year-old Xue Menghui stirred "Ants Climbing a Tree" while explaining to a reporter from The Reporter: "Even without banquets now, people still need to survive!" ²

The Xue family is a "banquet master lineage" in Neimen. Xue Menghui began following his father, Xue Qingji, to host banquets in high school. Two generations accumulated over 50 years of experience. Flipping through his father's work diary from those years, the entire agricultural almanac was filled with entries: 25,000 banquets a year, with major days involving rushing through over ten events. Chefs left home at dawn, finished at noon to rush to evening events, and whether they slept for four hours was unknown ².

But the 2020 pandemic froze all of this. The annual revenue of the catering and group meal contracting industry dropped by 32.3% ³, and banquet orders shrank by 90%. Xue Menghui had over 500 banquets canceled in the second and third lunar months, forcing him to work part-time at a friend's bento shop.

This is not the first time the banquet industry has faced a crisis, but it may be the last.

Banquets: The Roadside is the Banquet Hall

Banquet (pān-toh) is a banquet tradition of Minnan culture, brought to Taiwan with immigrants, with records dating back to the Qing Dynasty ⁴. Weddings, funerals, temple fairs, and foundation ceremonies—hosts invite banquet chefs to the temple courtyard, school playgrounds, or roadside to erect tents and set up stoves on-site, from chopping vegetables to serving dishes in one go. Unlike restaurants, banquets have strict rituals: the choice of dishes, the order of serving, and seating arrangements all have specific讲究 (requirements).

A typical banquet consists of about twelve dishes, emphasizing "introduction, elaboration, transition, and conclusion" [^5]: Cold plates open the event, allowing guests to take their seats; soups warm the stomach; the middle section features heavyweight main dishes—such as red crab with rice, steamed grouper, and Buddha Jumps Over the Wall—ending with chicken soup, desserts, and fruit, symbolizing completeness. Every dish is a "handmade cuisine": Red crab with rice requires controlling the steaming time so the crab roe seeps into the rice grains; Buddha Jumps Over the Wall requires processing over 20 ingredients separately before sealing the jar and simmering; braised pork requires even fat and lean meat, melting in the mouth but not falling apart.

📝 Curator's Perspective: People often describe restaurants as "civilian fields" and banquets as "martial fields." The test for banquet chefs is not just culinary skill—regardless of strong winds, heavy rain, broken bridges, or collapsed roads, as long as the host does not cancel, they must fulfill their mission.

Wang Yi Yong, a senior banquet chef from Tainan, once hosted 120 banquets in a school auditorium in Kaohsiung. At 5 PM, a rainstorm struck, flooding the water up to the calves, extinguishing the stoves, and causing pots and pans to float on the water. Even the trout ready to be cooked swam away, with over ten fish escaping. Wang Yi Yong immediately cut the canvas tent to drain the water, moved the kitchenware under the eaves, rolled up his sleeves, and started catching fish. In the end, one trout was missing, but the backup ingredients from the preparation table made up for it, and all guests ate ².

Neimen: The Hometown of Banquet Chefs on Barren Land

Neimen in Kaohsiung is surrounded by mountains on all sides. The soil is high-alkaline chalk, unsuitable for agriculture, with only drought-resistant thorny bamboo surviving. Before the 1960s, residents survived by weaving bamboo baskets for Qishan banana farmers to use for packaging; after low-cost cardboard boxes took the market, the bamboo weaving industry declined ².

But it was precisely in that era that Taiwan's economy took off, and the demand for banquets surged. The people of Neimen, who could not grow anything from the land, found a new way out—cooking banquets for others.

Neimen has dense temples and powerful martial arts troupes. Every celebration creates a demand for banquets, keeping the business of banquet chefs booming. Xue Menghui's father, Xue Qingji, along with apprentices, chicken vendors, and pig vendors, each contributed 20,000 yuan to establish a "Four-in-One" company, providing a one-stop service of ingredient supply, cooking, and table/chair rental ². After second and third chefs accumulated experience and set up their own businesses, the energy of banquets in Neimen grew like a snowball, becoming the township with the highest density of banquet chefs in Taiwan, known as the "Hometown of Banquet Chefs" ⁵.

📝 Curator's Perspective: The story of Neimen is a common narrative of "turning disadvantages into advantages" in Taiwan: precisely because the land was barren and there were no other choices, it forced the emergence of an industrial cluster. Banquets supported countless families, and residents from the Shanlin District, half an hour away by car, also came to work as laborers.

The golden age was roughly between 1988 and 2000. Xue Menghui recalled that during Lee Teng-hui's presidency, not only traditional "eight celebrations and one funeral" required banquets, but children getting PhDs or winning money from pigeon racing also had reasons to host banquets. On auspicious days marked in red in the almanac, the temple entrance and roadside were full of "Heineken Grand Hotels"—early banquet canvas tents were provided by beverage companies, printed with Heineken soda advertisements, becoming a synonym for banquets ².

Leftover Soup: The Final Exam for Banquet Chefs

Among all banquet handmade cuisines, the one with the highest status is not Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, nor Red Crab with Rice—it is the final dish, "Leftover Soup" (caiwai tang).

Many people think "leftover" means leftover food. Huang Wanling, the "Godmother of Taiwanese Cuisine," spent thirty years clarifying this misunderstanding. "As the name suggests, the chef's last dish, the one they can only leave after finishing, is called the leftover dish. Sixty years ago, no one questioned that leftover soup was leftover food; it was even a major dish testing the chef's skill." ⁶

A authentic leftover soup requires reserving part of the ingredients from seven classic banquet dishes in advance: braised soup, five-sweet branches, braised pork, bamboo shoot and pickled vegetable rib soup, flatfish and Chinese cabbage stew, white radish and pork stomach soup, and fish ball soup ⁷. From the moment guests eat the first dish, the banquet chef is silently calculating—how much to save, when to put it in the pot, and how to balance the proportions.

The Teochew word "jie" (kat) means to harmonize and blend. Making the leftover soup takes four to eight hours, with constant stirring, tasting, and adjusting during the process. Temperature, humidity, heat, and ingredient status are all judged in real-time. Huang Wanling herself took the lead in trying it once, taking six days ⁶.

💡 Did you know? "Returning the leftover soup" is the most human-touching part of the banquet. After the banquet, the host sends strong men to carry the leftover soup door-to-door to neighbors who helped. "Return" is pronounced with the third tone, carrying the respect of bowing and curtsying. After neighbors receive it, they can cook it again and add Chinese cabbage to make two pots. If the leftover soup is not balanced well, the whole village knows the next day, directly affecting the banquet chef's business for the next year ⁸.

Huang Wanling said: "Almost all Taiwanese dishes have immigrant characteristics, except for leftover soup, which is a dish adapted to local conditions over the past 300 years on this land, the root of Taiwan." ⁶

Twenty Years of Decline

The crisis of the banquet industry did not start with the pandemic. Zhong Yuechun, Secretary of the Chiayi City Catering Industry Professional Union, used three disasters to mark the timeline: "The 921 earthquake hurt a little, SARS hurt more than half, and this year's pandemic may make the banquet a declining industry." ²

A more fundamental reason is the change in lifestyle. Hotel weddings replaced roadside banquets; young people are unwilling to learn the physical labor of banquet skills; small and medium-sized enterprises in the export processing zones closed as industries moved westward—Xue Menghui said that some old clients didn't hire him for the annual dinner for two consecutive years, and upon inquiry, they had already closed down ².

"We are not only worried about this year, but more worried that people not hosting (banquets) becomes a habit." — Cai Yufeng, a Tainan banquet operator ²

This sentence reveals the deepest fear of the banquet industry. What is disappearing from banquets is not just a business, but an entire social operating system: temple celebrations drive banquet demand, banquet chefs support laborers and suppliers, and "returning the leftover soup" maintains neighborhood relations. When this cycle breaks, it is not just the industrial chain that breaks.

The People Fighting to Save It

Some are desperately trying to keep these flavors alive.

Huang Wanling initially only wanted to be a feature writer, interviewing old banquet chefs to write stories. But the old masters looked at her weak and powerless appearance and suddenly shed tears—because no one else was willing to learn. That tear changed her life direction: starting from being a laborer, she followed multiple banquet chefs for over a hundred banquets, practicing weightlifting to sustain her physical strength ⁶. Since 2011, she has successively published Banquet Chef Banquets, Grandma's Kitchen, Old Taiwanese Cuisine, 100 Years of Taiwanese Ancient Flavors, and The True Flavor of Taiwanese Cuisine, preserving the methods and stories of the land of old Taiwanese cuisine in text ⁹.

Another form of rescue is commercial transformation. Master A Long in Neimen made braised pork and Buddha Jumps Over Wall into frozen vacuum packs for e-commerce ¹⁰; some banquet chefs transformed into making sacrificial offerings, because even without large events, worship will not decrease ². But the experience of roadside tents, on-site stoves, and the twelve-dish introduction-elaboration-transition-conclusion of banquets cannot be replicated by frozen packaging.

The cruelest thing about handmade cuisine is here: it is a living skill, passed from person to person. How many grams is a handful of salt, when to switch from high heat to low heat, what color "the color is right" means—these mantras only exist in the hands and eyes of the masters. When the people are gone, the dishes are gone.

Xue Menghui flips through the agricultural almanac filled with his father's handwriting, the characters on it being the scale of an industry's golden age. What he does not know is that this diary records not just menus and table counts—it records how a whole era of Taiwanese people celebrated, how they expressed gratitude, and how they connected the whole village with one pot of soup.

Further Reading:

• Taiwanese Banquet Culture — The most concentrated display field of handmade cuisine: from the barren land of Neimen nurturing the kingdom of banquet chefs, to a complete set of banquet ritual knowledge spanning the human, divine, and ghostly realms.
• Chen Yu-Hsun — Director of The Grandmaster, bringing skills like chicken, pork stomach, and softshell turtle to the big screen.
• Taiwanese Seafood Culture — The red crabs, lobsters, and steamed fish on the main table of banquets, behind the Taiwanese seafood context.

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