The World on a Platter

There are no quick routes to the neighboring coastal townships of Fengbin and Changbin. We drive for more than three hours from Taipei before reaching our first stop, the Amis indigenous community of Tingalaw (Chinese name Fengfu) in Hualien County’s Fengbin Township, where we enjoy lunch in the tribal leader’s home. It’s a communal meal of chilled winged beans, stir-fried star jelly (Nostoc commune) and snails, along with a soup of mixed wild vegetables.

“We Amis eat basically everything under the sun except the planes in the sky, the cars on the ground, and the submarines in the sea,” jokes one of our tablemates, village elder Chen Li-nian. Sometimes known as “the grazing people,” the otherwise agrarian Amis regularly forage for ingredients. In contrast to city dwellers’ reliance on frozen foods, Chen says that the Amis treat the mountains and the sea as their pantry, and believe fresh foods are better than frozen.

Entering the Austronesian world

After lunch, we join Chen for a walk in the mountains. “I hope you can walk slowly. We want to move at about a third of the speed we would on flat ground,” says the lightly dressed senior citizen. Before we start, he puckers his lips and whistles softly, inviting the wind to walk with us.

He tells us, “Out here, you’ll learn things you didn’t know about Austronesian culture.” Locals joke that Tingalaw has “more houses than people.” Though it looks cut off, the village is actually its own world, oriented to the ocean. In fact, according to anthropologists, this area was the starting point for the great seaborne migration of the Austronesian-speaking peoples.

On our walk, Chen teaches us how to “see into the deep parts of the forest”—to spot holes dug by wild boars, trails made by goats, monkey scat, and even ant nests partially eaten by pangolins (who are saving the rest for later). We identify breadfruit and velvet apple trees, both of which Amis use to craft dugout canoes, shell ginger hearts that can save your life in the wilderness, and the elephant grass hearts that village women like to gather.

When we finish our hike, we are 362 meters above sea level and smell coffee. It turns out that tribal leader Xu Yongzhe and his wife, Ye Meizhu, grow coffee here. When the couple retired after working in Taipei, they came back home to Tingalaw and planted two hectares of mountainside in coffee trees. Their daughter now markets their outstanding East Coast coffee under the “Coastal Coffee” brand.

The scent of coffee wafts through the air of Tingalaw, attracting visitors to the village.

Visitors try roasting coffee beans for themselves in the great outdoors.

White jade snails

After departing Tingalaw, we head south across the county line to Changbin Township in Taitung, which is home to Awos Farm, Taiwan’s only white jade snail farm. There, we nosh on submarine sandwiches made with the snails as we listen to Awos founder Wen Hongcheng describe how he started his business.

An Amis from a farming family, Wen spent part of his childhood in the fields with his father. “We’d leave home on summer mornings carrying only an empty pot and some uncooked rice for lunch. At noon, we’d catch snails and frogs living near the fields for our main course, and pair them with wild fireweed [Crassocephalum crepidioides].”

When Wen returned to his hometown five years ago, he discovered that snails had commercial value and decided to go into the business of raising them. But rather than the ordinary giant African snails (Lissachatina fulica) more commonly raised by Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, he chose to produce white jade snails (L. fulica “White Jade”), a white variant sometimes referred to as “land abalone” for their tender, delicately flavored flesh. Wen explains that the meat of these snails has a hint of grassiness in its flavor, and that the French are said to be especially fond of the variety.

His farm harvests 3 million snails per year, and does the initial processing onsite. This includes separating the snails into five size grades, ranging from small “winkle grade” snails and the “ordinary grade” snails fried up in Chinese restaurants to the large “special grade” snails weighing 30 grams and upward most commonly seen in Western restaurants. The farm then stores the snails in large freezers at -65°C so they can be supplied to buyers throughout the year.

Wen Hongchen operates Awos, Taiwan’s only white jade snail farm.

White jade snails raised on a diet of papaya and pumpkin have tender flesh with a slightly herbal flavor.

A white jade snail submarine sandwich.

Embodying local culture

Travel has been described as a way to experience other people’s ways of life. A trip to Fengbin and Chang­bin highlights the essential truth of this statement. With no must-see scenic destinations, visitors come here to escape their own hectic lives and sample the very different lifestyle of the Amis. “People come here to relax and eat,” says Nick Yang, the executive chef at Sinasera 24, the twin townships’ fanciest French restaurant.

A meal can give you a sense of the warp and weft of a local culture, and that’s exactly what Yang aims to deliver at Sinasera 24. He explains that the restaurant’s name combines sinasera, an Amis word meaning “the earth,” with the number 24, representing the 24 solar terms of the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar. Yang notes that French cuisine has always placed great importance on regional cultures, and says he wants to use what can easily be three-hour-long meals at his restaurant to offer cultural feasts involving all five senses, and as a showcase for local products.

Yang’s use of white jade snails mirrors Amis food culture, while also highlighting the local climate and products. After all, the local weather is part of the reason that Awos is Taiwan’s only white jade snail farm.

“This is probably the best place in Taiwan to raise snails,” says Wen. He explains that the creatures are cold blooded and easily killed by rapid changes in temperature. The fact that Changbin’s temperature only varies by 6–8°C even in winter makes it an ideal place to farm them. Viewed in that light, the snails are almost a gift from the local environment.

The exquisite dishes at the restaurant Sinasera 24 are opening a dialogue between French food culture and Amis culture.

Sinasera 24 executive chef Nick Yang.

Connecting with local farmers and artisans

Yang’s pursuit of local specialties has brought many rare and hard-to-find ingredients to his restaurant’s tables. These include white jade snails, handmade Pacific sea salt, wood-fired brown sugar, camellia seed oil from the Amis community of Kusahala (Chinese name Nanxi) in Changbin’s Zhangyuan Village, eels from Tjuaqau (Taiban), a Paiwan community in Taitung’s Daren Township, and very flavorful but hard-to-transport Toyonaka strawberries grown in Fenglin, Hualien County.

Yang believes that restaurants should have mutually beneficial relationships with farmers and artisans. He doesn’t just order from them, but also takes restaurant staff to visit them so that staff can learn how ingredients are grown or made, and absorb some of the local culture. He also shares how the restaurant uses the ingredients he buys from them.

Yang’s sourcing is in keeping with the spirit of the slow food movement that originated in Italy in the late 1980s. Even though his farm-to-table process involves only one restaurant, it is linking up a small but significant production ecology. This slow food approach enables consumers to tangibly support small-scale local producers and keeps local traditional cultures alive.

Cai Limu learned to make salt from seawater from his elders and is helping preserve this traditional salt making method.

From rustic to refined

When you sit down for a meal at Sinasera 24, you’ll be surprised to find how much this Aboriginal village in Eastern Taiwan recalls faraway France. French cuisine is often described as being local and seasonal. Isn’t that much the same as the Amis approach to living in accord with the rhythms of nature? But there are differences. Whereas French cuisine emphasizes a layering of details, Amis dishes more often resemble the home cooking we enjoyed in the Tingalaw tribal ­leader’s home: they are generally chilled, fried or boiled.

Yang’s delicate and refined menu is clearly at the opposite end of the spectrum from the rustic dishes typical of Aboriginal cuisine. The plates are his canvas, the food his art, and the changing seasons and the products of the field his inspiration.

“On my way to work today, I saw blooming hibiscus and ripening paddy rice. When I went to the harbor, I found an abundance of beltfish and seaweed. Nature was reminding me what ingredients I should cook.” The rapid pace of modern life makes it hard to notice this kind of quiet inspiration. “If I were in a city, the only thing to tell me the season would be the fruit stores. But even the fruit stores often sell the same things the whole year round.”

Yang has no plans to introduce fully fledged Aboriginal cuisine to his menu. Instead, he sneaks local ingredients into classic French dishes by doing things like replacing the olive oil used for dipping bread with camellia oil, and swapping shell ginger seeds for vanilla seeds in canelé. Nor does he shy away from using potent flavors like those of aromatic litsea (Litsea cubeba), Japanese prickly ash (Zanthoxylum ailanthoides), scarlet eggplant (Solanum integrifolium) and Taiwanese tangerine (Citrus depressa). But he layers transformations and sauces to make them more approachable.

This winter, the restaurant has introduced yet another new twist: a 100% game meat prix-fixe menu. Yang’s idea is to give a nod to French cuisine’s game culture and hint at the Amis winter hunting culture. The new menu will serve up foods rarely seen on restaurant tables in Taiwan, including rabbit, bee larvae, ostrich, and mallard, layering and integrating their flavors to mirror the incredible terrestrial and marine vistas of Taiwan’s East Coast on diners’ plates.

Sinasera 24 integrates ordinary and hard-to-find ingredients in its French-inspired dishes. The photo shows pyramid-shaped crystals of handmade salt.