Taiwan’s Dinner Table Diplomacy

“He told me I was going to make the menu. I was shocked,” Kao said.

Suddenly, Kao, a lawyer-turned-food influencer, found herself in charge of designing a state banquet for more than 1,000 guests. She put together a task team composed of veteran food writer Jewel Tsai—“who is very experienced in sourcing ingredients,” Kao said—and two critically acclaimed Taipei chefs: Wes Kuo of Embers, who has an encyclopedic “knowledge of herbs and plants in Taiwan,” and Tsai Jui-lang of Mountain and Sea House, who specializes in traditional 20th-century banquet fare. “He has the technique,” Kao said.

In less than 36 hours, the group had sketched out a preliminary eight-course meal. Their strategy was to concoct dishes and flavor profiles that would represent Taiwan’s five main ethnic subgroups: Indigenous, Hoklo, Hakka, Chinese mainlanders, and Southeast Asians. “We wanted to tell the story of Taiwan’s multiculturalism and democracy,” Jewel Tsai said.

This story is central to Lai’s platform. His Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is the first political party in Taiwan’s history to secure three consecutive terms, and Lai has styled himself as an extension of his predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, who maintains that Taiwan is already a sovereign, independent country and does not need to declare independence. The party asserts the island’s autonomy in part by embracing its vibrant mix of cultural identities, and this year’s banquet menu is an expansion of that ethos.

The team behind the inauguration dinner (from left): Jewel Tsai, Wes Kuo, Tsai Jui-lang, and Liz Kao.Courtesy of Liz Kao

Seventy percent of residents have Hoklo ancestry, descending from the initial wave of migrants from China’s Fujian province who started settling on the island’s west coast in the 17th century. Hakka, a migratory group from southern China, also arrived during this period and comprise about 15 percent of the population.

Another 10 to 15 percent is represented by Chinese mainlanders, who fled with the Republic of China’s government to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War in the mid-20th century. Southeast Asians, the most recent immigrant group, began arriving in large numbers in the 1990s and now account for 2 percent of Taiwan’s population.

“Taiwanese cuisine is the combination of all these groups of people. It’s a sum of all the cultures,” Kao said.

As Kao’s team prepared the menu, they narrowed in on ingredients unique to each of these cultures. For the first course, for example, they opted for an array of seasonal vegetables, including Makino bamboo, chayote squash shoots, and lily bulbs, plated over a streak of sauces that represent Taiwan’s ethnic subgroups: te’nas, an Indigenous chili saltwater dip; Dongquan chili sauce, a Hoklo-style hot sauce; a sweet Hakka kumquat jam; fermented tofu paste, brought over by Chinese mainlanders; and satay sauce, a nod to Southeast Asian immigrants.

Eaten together, these starkly different sauces create a bright, savory blend that ties the dish together. “Ingredients are a vehicle to represent democracy,” said Kuo, who curated the sauces for this dish.

State banquets in Taiwan have long been a soft-power tool for the island’s leaders. When the Republic of China government, led by Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan in 1949 during the Chinese Civil War, Chiang wanted to project it as the sole legitimate ruler of China. For his inauguration banquet, his staff therefore served haute regional Chinese dishes such as Sichuan smoked duck, Cantonese barbecue pork, and Shanghai-style fried prawns.

Over the next few decades, state dinners followed a similar script. In 1965, Yen Chia-kan, who would later become Chiang’s successor, hosted a dinner for foreign press corps featuring braised shark’s fin, Beijing duck, and northern Chinese knife-shaved noodles. The recent wave of mainland Chinese immigrants made up less than one-sixth of the population, but they had already become Taiwan’s ruling elite. The cuisines of the rest of the populace—Hoklo, Hakka, and Indigenous—did not appear on official menus.

Taiwan transitioned from a dictatorship to a democracy in the 1980s, with the old ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), or Nationalists, becoming one player in a multiparty system. But state menus didn’t change significantly until 2000, when Taiwan-born Chen Shui-bian became the first elected leader from the DPP. Unlike the KMT, the DPP had less of a cultural affinity with the Chinese mainland. Chen’s banquet included local delicacies that predated the Nationalist government’s arrival in Taiwan and elevated what had previously been considered working-class fare, such as meatball soup made with local milkfish and steamed savory rice pudding.

Since then, Taiwan’s inauguration banquets have become increasingly egalitarian and specific to the island, reflecting a growing number of people identifying as Taiwanese over their ethnic subgroups. That assertion has upset the Chinese government, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory.

The inauguration banquet of the KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou in 2008 took a farm-to-table approach that showcased the island’s food production; the menu listed the sources of many of the ingredients, including chicken from Guanmiao, a southern Taiwanese farming district, and squash from the east coast city of Taitung.

Indigenous ingredients weren’t represented for the first time until the inauguration meal of Tsai, the outgoing president. Her menu in 2016 featured pork chops dusted with maqaw, a native Taiwanese spice akin to lemon pepper. It also included Hakka-style rice noodles topped with shiitakes, which, according to the menu, were harvested by a farmer named Tian Chin-feng in northern Taiwan. Tsai has ancestry from both groups.

Lai’s banquet builds on that legacy by being more inclusive than ever. “Past menus have not acknowledged the new immigrants,” said Jewel Tsai, referring to the Southeast Asian population in Taiwan. Eighty percent of all foreign residents are migrant laborers, hailing mostly from Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. “They’re an important part of Taiwan. They have small restaurants all over,” she said. “I believe that in the next five to 10 years, their food will be integrated into Taiwanese cuisine at large.”

Dishes on the inauguration menu: the hors d’oeuvres platter (top left), filleted seabream on a salted white puree (top right), chicken soup with a parcel of pickled mustard greens (bottom left), and bubble tea served alongside shrimp rice.Courtesy of Liz Kao

Chefs Kuo, Tsai, and their associates sat together, jotting down tasting notes and feedback on plating and tableware choices for the in-house staff. In the next room, a local vlogger was interviewing Kao. Meanwhile, Jewel Tsai patiently explained each dish to me as they arrived.

The hors d’oeuvres platter featured a drunken chicken medallion marinated in Shaoxing wine, which represented mainlanders’ cuisine, alongside a taro, sweet potato, and kumquat spring roll—a personal favorite of Lai, who has Hoklo roots—from a vendor in the president-elect’s hometown of Wanli. It also included a Hakka rice dumpling flavored with mugwort, an Indigenous millet wrap stuffed with pork, and a singular shrimp coated in a bright Southeast Asian-style sweet chili sauce.

Most of the other courses weren’t as literal but still drew from the theme. A filleted seabream from a local aquaculture farm sat on a salted white puree flavored with bright green drops of oil made from cicong, an Indigenous prickly ash, which lent it a peppery, yuzu-like tang. A chicken soup with aged turnip and a parcel of pickled mustard greens paid homage to the fermentation techniques of the Hakka. A 1930s-inspired sweet and sour pork adorned with preserved plums and green mangoes recalled Hoklo fine dining when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule. There was thinly sliced goose with turnip and tofu braised in two types of sauces: one to represent Chinese mainlanders of Teochew descent (“It has more spices,” Jewel Tsai said) and another in the style of the Hoklo (“More simple,” she said).

While the dishes were steeped in symbolism, none of the flavors were overwhelmingly spicy or bold. The fish had been deboned. Most courses could be enjoyed with a fork and knife. It was an elegant progression of courses fit for a crowd of political leaders, important campaign donors, and foreign dignitaries from around the world.

Then the unexpected happened. As the seventh course arrived, the room suddenly erupted in cheers. “Bubble tea!” Kuo exclaimed. Servers carried in shrimp rice and the iconic Taiwanese beverage, sourced directly from two popular eateries in Tainan. It was essentially takeout on a plate—a jolting deviation from the intricately composed dishes that preceded it. The bubble tea, which came with fat black straws, looked almost cartoonish.

A special request from the president-elect, the course was rumored by the team to be a nod to Chinese President Xi Jinping. In a television interview last summer, Lai said that if he ever had the opportunity to dine with Xi in Taiwan, he’d order shrimp rice and a cup of bubble tea. For dessert, we finished off with a fruit popsicle dipped in a citrus-forward marmalade, surrounded by mango, pineapple, melon, and wax apple—all sourced from Taiwanese farmers.

After the tasting, I asked Lee Hou-ching, the secretary-general of the nongovernmental organization in charge of planning the banquet, about the official reason for the seventh course. He demurred. “Tainan is known as a food city,” he said. “Lai wanted to represent Tainan with a dish appropriate for a banquet.”

Food is subject to interpretation, but that’s partly what makes it such an effective yet subtle tool of soft power. The inauguration banquet is a way for Taiwan’s new leadership to set the tone for how it wants the world to perceive the island. “We want the world to know Taiwan’s identity,” Kao said. “We represent democracy, freedom, and diversity.”

Correction, May 20, 2024: A previous version of this story mistakenly referred to Lai’s shrimp rice dish as shrimp fried rice. It has been fixed.