Taiwanese Hand-Cooked Dishes: Meaning, Origins, and the 'Signature Dishes' of Banquet Culture

30-Second Overview: "Hand-cooked dishes" (手路菜) is a Teochew term for "signature dishes" ¹, referring to those requiring true skill, lacking standard recipes, and passed down orally from master to apprentice. Its most concentrated exhibition field is the "banquet" (辦桌)—a Taiwanese banquet tradition where tents are erected by the roadside and cooking fires are lit on-site. Neimen in Kaohsiung, due to its barren land, accidentally became the township with the highest density of banquet chefs (zongpushi) in Taiwan. In its golden age, one banquet company hosted 25,000 tables a year. However, from hotel weddings to the COVID-19 pandemic, 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 vegetable tail soup."

In the spring of 2020, 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 banquet advertisements, but roadside 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 if there are no banquets now, people still need to survive!" ²

The Xue family is a "banquet master lineage" in Neimen. Xue Menghui started following his father, Xue Qingji, to host banquets in high school. Over two generations, they accumulated more than fifty years of experience. Flipping through his father's work logs from those years, the entire almanac was filled with entries: 25,000 tables a year, rushing through ten events a day on major days. Chefs left home at dawn, finished by noon, and rushed to evening events; 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 decreased by 32.3% ³, and banquet orders shrank by 90%. Xue Menghui had over 500 tables 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

A banquet (pān-toh) is a banquet tradition of Minnan culture, brought to Taiwan with immigrants, with records dating back to the Qing Dynasty ⁴. For weddings, funerals, celebrations, temple fairs, and jiao rituals, the host invites the banquet chef to the temple courtyard, school playground, or roadside to erect tents and light stoves on-site. From chopping vegetables to serving dishes, it is done in one go. Unlike restaurants, banquets have strict customs: 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 meal, 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 to symbolize completeness. Every dish is a "hand-cooked dish": Red crab with rice requires controlling the steaming time so that the crab roe permeates the rice; Buddha Jumps Over the Wall requires processing more than twenty ingredients separately before sealing the jar and simmering; braised pork requires even fat and lean meat, melting in the mouth but not falling apart.

📝 Curatorial Perspective: People often describe restaurants as the "civil scene" (wenchang) and banquets as the "martial scene" (wuchang). The test for a banquet chef 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 in Tainan, once hosted 120 tables in a school auditorium in Kaohsiung. At 5 PM in the evening, a rainstorm struck. Water flooded up to their calves, the fire stove was extinguished, pots and pans floated on the water, and even the trout prepared for the pot swam away, with over ten disappearing. Wang Yi Yong immediately cut the canvas tent to drain the water, moved the kitchenware under the eaves, rolled up his sleeves, and caught the fish first. In the end, one trout was missing, but it was supplemented by ingredients from the reserve table, 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 alkaline white chalk, unsuitable for agriculture, with only drought-resistant bamboo surviving. Before the 1960s, residents survived by weaving bamboo baskets to package bananas for Qishan banana farmers; 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 on the land, found a new way out—cooking banquets for others.

Neimen has dense temples and powerful阵头 (traditional performance troupes). Every celebration creates a demand for banquets, keeping the business of banquet chefs booming. Xue Menghui's father, Xue Qingji, and his apprentice, a chicken vendor, and a pig vendor each contributed 20,000 yuan to establish a "Four-in-One" company, providing a one-stop service of ingredient supply, cooking, and table and chair rental ². After second and third chefs accumulated experience, they set up their own businesses. The banquet energy 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.

📝 Curatorial 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 Shanlin District, half an hour away by car, also came to work as laborers.

The golden age was approximately 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.

Vegetable Tail Soup: The Final Exam for Banquet Chefs

Among all banquet hand-cooked dishes, the highest status does not belong to Buddha Jumps Over the Wall or red crab with rice—it belongs to the final dish, "vegetable tail soup" (caiwei tang).

Many people think vegetable tail is 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 vegetable tail. Sixty years ago, no one questioned that vegetable tail soup was leftover food; it was even a major dish testing the chef's skill." ⁶

A authentic vegetable tail soup requires reserving part of the ingredients from seven classic banquet dishes in advance: braised soup, five-silk branches, braised pork, bamboo shoot and sour cabbage 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.

In Teochew, "jie" (結) means harmonizing and blending. Making vegetable tail soup takes four to eight hours. During the process, constant stirring, tasting, and adjusting are required. Temperature, humidity, heat, and ingredient status are all judged in real-time. Huang Wanling herself took the lead in testing it once, spending six days ⁶.

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

Huang Wanling said: "Almost all Taiwanese dishes have immigrant colors, except for vegetable tail soup. It is a dish adapted to local conditions on this land for over three hundred years, 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 an industry in decline." ²

The more fundamental reason is the change in lifestyle. Hotel weddings replaced roadside banquets; young people are unwilling to learn the physical labor of banquet cooking; small and medium-sized enterprises in the export processing zones closed as industries moved westward—Xue Menghui said that some old clients did not ask him to host the year-end party 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 will make not hosting banquets a habit." — Cai Yufeng, a banquet operator in Tainan ²

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

Those Who Rescue

Some are desperately trying to keep these flavors.

Huang Wanling initially only wanted to be a feature writer, following old banquet chefs to interview and write stories. But the old master looked at her weak 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 Banquet, Grandma's Kitchen, Old Taiwanese Cuisine, Century-old Taiwanese Early Flavors, and Original Taste of Taiwanese Cuisine, preserving the methods and stories of the local land of old Taiwanese dishes in text ⁹.

Another form of rescue is commercial transformation. A Long Shi in Neimen makes braised pork and Buddha Jumps Over Wall into frozen vacuum packs for e-commerce ¹⁰; some banquet chefs have 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-conclusion structure of banquets cannot be replicated by frozen packaging.

The cruelest thing about hand-cooked dishes is here: it is a living skill, passed from person to person. How many grams is a handful of salt? When to turn high heat to low heat? What color is "the right color"? These mantras only exist in the hands and eyes of the master. When the person is gone, the dish is gone.

Xue Menghui flips through the almanac filled with his father's handwriting, the characters on it being the scale of a golden age of an industry. 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 exhibition field of hand-cooked dishes: from the banquet chef kingdom raised in the badland of Neimen to a complete set of banquet ritual knowledge spanning the realms of gods, humans, and ghosts
• 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 crab, lobster, and steamed fish on the main table of banquets, the context of Taiwanese seafood behind them

References

1. Hand-cooked Dishes — Ministry of Education Taiwan Teochew Common Word Dictionary — See the original link for detailed content supplements↩
2. The Longest Winter for Banquet Chefs and Laborers — The Reporter — (2020)↩
3. Ministry of Economic Statistics — Revenue of the Catering and Group Meal Contracting Industry — (2020)↩
4. Banquet — Wikipedia — Wikipedia entry↩
5. One Banquet Company, Fragrance for Ten Thousand Families — The Legend of Neimen Banquets — See the original link for detailed content supplements↩
6. Huang Wanling's Original Taste of Taiwanese Cuisine Keeps the Classic "Vegetable Tail Soup" Fragrant — 500 Times — (2021)↩
7. Vegetable Tail ≠ Leftovers — The Godmother of Taiwanese Cuisine Teaches How to Cook the Classic Good Flavor "Vegetable Tail Soup" — United Daily News Orange Generation — (2021)↩
8. Classic "Vegetable Tail Soup" is Not Leftovers! 7 Independent Dish Ingredients Simmered for 4 Hours — ETtoday — (2021)↩
9. Taiwanese Hero — The Godmother of Taiwanese Cuisine Huang Wanling — Liberty Times Net — (2022)↩
10. Neimen A Long Shi Banquet — Rakuten — See the original link for detailed content supplements↩