628: The Bold Flavors of Fujian with Jess Eng

0:00This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. Resi is a digital platform that connects restaurants to restaurant lovers by elevating dining experiences, providing original industry content, and helping to fill some of the country's most exciting dining rooms. Because restaurants have always been more than just places to eat. The amazing world of restaurants is just a few taps away in the Resi app and at resi.com.

0:31One thing that this trip illuminated for us is a lot of the dishes that you can find in America, they're their own specific genre of Fujinese food. If we wanted to create like a traditional dish, like American markets are so limited, so could we substitute something that already exists? Do we want it to taste traditional to people here versus traditional to places back in China? This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbinell. Jess Ang is a food writer based in New York City. She's a regular contributor here at Taste, alongside a great roster of publications like Serious Eats, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

1:10It's so fun to have Jess on the show to talk about some of her favorite stories, her latest experiments with home fermentation, and her recent reporting trip in Fuzhou, China. And at the top of the show, it's the return of three things, where Eliza and I talk about what is exciting us in the world of restaurants, cookbooks, and the food world as a whole.

1:32Eliza, we're back with three things. How are you? I'm good, Matt. Do you want to go first? I sure will. I am talking all about books now. We are in the midst of fall cookbook preview and planning. We are. And I'm extremely excited about the season. We obviously publish books here at Crown, but I'm not only talking about Crown books. But the first one is from Crown. It is a really cool book from somebody I had not really heard of before I was lured to the book. It's Measure With Your Heart by Hannah Taylor. Hannah is a creator. It goes by the handle LilyLooTay on Instagram and TikTok. And Hannah's story is really cool.

2:12Hannah lives in a rural town in Georgia and is creating recipes and sharing her small town life with her followers. But I really like the way she does cooking. I think she has a lot of skills and has a really nice way of recipe development, doing Southern classics, but with modern spins. and I just think that her energy on reels is infectious. And I mean, some of the recipes in this book sound cool. I haven't fully read it and we're gonna have her on the show later this fall. She does a butternut squash casserole. She's doing her own vanilla extract and bone broth from scratch. So there's definitely some foundational cooking.

2:49There's a ham hock with lima bean stew. And I just really like this for our publishing program. Having Hannah here and Hannah's not like a big city chef for collaborators from rural Georgia. And I love that. And can't wait to hear more about her story. Yeah, I love watching her videos whenever they come up for me. So I'm excited to see how she's expanding into a book format. Right. What's your first thing? My first thing is that I went to a new Thai restaurant in my neighborhood. It's called Samyan. And I went there because the New York mag roundup of their favorite bites of the year so far, Tammy mentions the wings there.

3:25And I'm honestly not normally a big wings girl, But the way that they were described sounded so good to me. And when I went, I really was so smitten. I feel like I could come back. Everything I had was so good, but I would even come back for happy hour and just have like some nice cold beers and these wings. They do split the flats in half. So they have like two single boned winglets, they call them. So you have even more kind of like fried surface area. So it's super sticky. They have a kind of sweet and salty caramelized fish sauce glaze on it. Of course, like a lot of herbs and chili and it was so delicious.

4:01I love a good Thai chicken wing. What's the vibe like in the restaurant? It's cute. It's small, very red on the outside, maybe seats for like 15 or so inside. There was a giant fan that was blowing directly onto the back of my head the entire meal. So I felt very refreshed, although my hair did not dry very well. But I'm really happy to have a good Thai spot in the neighborhood in Clinton Hill. and I'm sure I'll be back. Great. Well, thanks for sharing that. What's your next thing? My next thing is a book that I have not read. It is a novel. And I'm really excited about it because I think it's giving a lot of Midnight Diner, that amazing Japanese television series that I think had five or six seasons that I think a lot of listeners may have watched.

4:46It's called Ex-Boyfriend's Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee by Saki Kawashiro, translated by Yuka Meino. And it's coming out in October. And I'm really excited to read it. The logline, I've not read this, but I'm just interested. It's a 29-year-old. Momoko is tragically dumped by her boyfriend, ends up in a restaurant and starts telling the story of this great tragedy of being dumped. She befriends the owner of the restaurant or the cafe, who is a Buddhist monk. And they start talking about the food that Momoko has cooked for her boyfriend that he loved so much but then dumped her anyways. And they hatch a plot that they're going to start cooking these dishes in the cafe and inviting people who have maybe had a heartbreak in their life to come to these dinners and share.

5:39and it's sweet and it feels tonally it's Japanese in translation and I love reading Japanese translation because with a great translation with syntax being accurate it's a it's an energy that at times feels very different from literature written in English as a first language and I find it really enjoyable for me as a reader and I'm just excited about the book. Yeah it sounds fun. Great what's your next thing? I'll talk about a book also. Yeah. I'm really excited about Ruby Tando's new book, Owl Consuming, that's out this fall at Penguin Random House. I think Ruby is just such a smart thinker about so many things, including food.

6:15And this book is not a cookbook. It's a kind of series of essays talking about how food has become the dominant cultural history here in the West. And it covers everything from like Top Chef and TikTok to boba tea, you know all kinds of like food trends and it kind of really digs into like what is the impulse behind this trend why is it resonating with people how much is this our taste how much is this taste being kind of dictated for us by their cultural patterns i'm really excited to finish reading this book i've been enjoying it so far and i think hopefully have ruby into the studio when she's over in new york we're really excited about this one and ruby and i collaborated on a number of stories for Taste maybe five years ago.

7:00And she wrote a really memorable piece about the cheese boards and the cheese board industry that I really enjoyed going through the edits with her and getting that published. So can't wait for this collection. I think even that cheese board story feels similar to this book in terms of the kind of like studied analysis and like reasoning and kind of discussion that I expect from her. Great point. And I think what Ruby does so well is like there's a strong point of view and there's deep cultural reporting, but it's not about burning down institutions just to do it. I think that there's like really strong reporting and backbone with this writing.

7:37And it's very nuanced and it's very hard to do because you can obviously have hot takes all day, but that's hardly it. Yeah. And I think it's really ripe for this moment where I think food trends are at like a hyper speed and every week it's like strawberry matcha, Dubai chocolate, like all of these things that like all of a sudden are everywhere. And I think wondering like, how does this happen? And what is the impact of that is something we can all do more of. This is really I love that you're reading. I'm really interested in how she unravels these big ideas in it. What's your last thing? My last thing is a book that we're publishing here as well.

8:11It's not a food book, but I'm really excited about it. It's called Script Notes from the very popular podcast Script Notes. It is from John August and Craig Mazin. And John and Craig have hosted this podcast for a very long time. I found myself listening to it during the pandemic, during long walks. You know, we all had those moments. And I have really very little ambition to write a screenplay. I just was so fascinated in the way they think about creativity and the way they think about dialogue. And why we love film and television so much, they're the ones creating the words. And this book is compiled from 550 hours of those script notes conversations.

8:48And it's part writing course. It's part, you know, interview series. And there's some of the sharpest minds in television. As a reminder, John August was behind the films The Nines, Big Fish, Go, and has written several YA novels. And Craig Mazin, of course, is the creator of The Last of Us, Chernobyl. I love their dynamic on pod. They're very different personalities. And they're really, really, really opinionated about the industry, which I like. And I'm sure this book will be a nice translation of that energy. That's my last one. I have to admit, I want to call it one last book on three things.

9:24It's not actually a fall book. It's a spring book. I thought it was a fall book. I did the prep. I want to talk about it. You can hit the pre-order because it looks amazing, and I'm really excited about it. It's from Ella Quitner, and it's called Obsessed with the Best, 100 Methodically Perfected Recipes Based on 20 Head-to-Head Tests. It is what it is. It is a number of categories, 20 to be exact, where Ella is doing bench testing and really coming to the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe, the pancake recipe, roasted chicken. And I've worked with Ella here at Tasty Row a piece about cosmic brownies back in the day.

10:01And I'm a big fan of her work. And I think this is a really fresh book. It is not a fall release. It's a spring release. But I just had to talk about it because I had prepped for it. Yeah, I have been following along with Ella's many, many, many tests that she's been doing on Instagram. and it really is, I think an overused phrase in media today is I did this so you don't have to. Yes. But I think really Ella did do it so we don't have to and I'm interested in reaping that reward. Very well said, very well said. I can't wait to read it. What is your last thing? My last thing is I want to just shout out how much I respect and admire LA Taco's recent reporting.

10:37I know that we're planning on having them on the show to talk more about it, But, you know, L.A. Taco has been a website dedicated to, quote, celebrating the taco lifestyle in Los Angeles for many years. But over the past couple of months, as ICE has really been ramping up their raids in Los Angeles, they've kind of turned into this breaking news source that I think is doing easily the best local reporting about what's happening, how the communities are being impacted. They recently published a story called Unbroken Spirit, how a detained street vendor is now aiding detainees from ICE facility about this longtime street vendor organizer named Emma DePaz.

11:12They also have this crucial tips on safely observing and documenting ICE activity. That is easily the most helpful, useful resource I've read in terms of like what actually are your rights in terms of where you can film, what you can say to people without being accused of obstruction. and they obviously accept subscribers and like supporters to the website. So I think in terms of seeing local reporting and wanting to kind of really support that work, I am really wanting to do that with LA Taco and I just think it's really kind of important and invaluable writing. Well, thank you for bringing that up and we're going to have Javier Cabral on who is the editor there and talk about the work specifically.

11:51We're going to link to the LA Taco website in the show notes. You can support, you can subscribe. It's important work. Really important for Los Angeles, for the restaurant community, for really everybody who lives there and needs information about what is happening on the streets. And I love that independent journalism is making a real impact for this important era and moment we're in. And it's really it's a reminder to support local independent media. Yeah. And I will say, you know, I just focused on kind of more of this community resource political day to day reporting that they're doing, but they also are continuing to do great restaurant coverage.

12:29I think they continue to be one of the best places to find out about places to go have amazing food in L.A. And it's great to see them doing both things at once. Yeah, it's I'm going to ask Javier about the challenge of doing both scopes of reporting because they're very different and having this big ambition to really report day after day after day. It's it's incredible work. Yeah, I think, you know, they are very different in terms of tone and subject. But I think a lot of it is rooted in the same community of like Latin American, Central American, Mexican immigrants in L.A. that are contributing so much by having these restaurants.

13:02So I think it is interesting to see that and to see how they'll continue to report. Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing the three things. You too. From February 20th to March 7th, dive into Canada's biggest culinary festival, Montreal en Lumière, an exclusive partnership with the McCord Stewart Museum and its exhibition, On the Menu Montreal, a restaurant story. The 2026 festival invites food lovers on a flavorful journey through time. Montreal's top restaurateurs will reimagine 65 years of the city's iconic astronomy, crafting inventive, nostalgia-inspired dishes with a modern twist. Prepare your palate.

13:44World-renowned chefs, including several Michelin-starred talents, will team up with over 80 of Montreal's finest local chefs to create unforgettable, one-of-a-kind menus. The full program is available at MontrealOnLumiere.com, presented by Lotto Quebec in collaboration with National Bank. This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames. If you're one of those last-minute shoppers, you might know the feeling. Ideas are running low and the clock is ticking. Here's a fun idea. Aura Frames. Aura Frames is the solution with a gift that feels personal, a little curated, and sent with love. And a gift that can be purchased in no time with a few clicks of the mouse.

14:25Aura Frames are great. They sent me one to check out, and it was really cool and dumb simple to set up. I loaded photos using the app, and it was displaying them instantly. There are no limits to the amount of photos you can load, and you can customize messages with each photo. And here's the deal. You can preload an Aura frame with photos and have it directly sent to that special person in your life, gift-wrapped and all. There will be no price tag, and you can include a personalized message. Think about it. All those photos from this past summer's family reunion delivered in a digital frame.

14:58That is pretty cool. For a limited time, save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get$35 off Aura's best-selling Carver Matte Frames, named number one by Wirecutter, by using promo code TASTE at checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames dot com, promo code TASTE. The deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out fast, so order yours now to get in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Jess Eng, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the podcast. I'm really happy to have you in the studio. You're one of my favorite writers to work with here at Taste and also just a great person to chat with.

15:40So I think we should have a lot of fun things to talk about. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Eliza. So something I don't think I've ever asked you is what draws you to food writing. But I'm really interested in how you kind of have found yourself in this space. I think, as you know best, food writing isn't always just about the food, even though that's like the entrance for a lot of people. People can immediately understand it because it's something that they experience in their lives, whether they're cooking it, making it, consuming it, watching it on social media. But when I was in college and I was trying to come up with presentations or final projects, I always ended up writing about food, whether it was in a data visualization class, a history about Mesopotamia, my thesis, which is more of an art history thesis than anything.

16:38food the narrative food always found its way in and um if that's also one of my favorite food articles to consume as well I just I like reading the stories of people behind food when I'm interviewing someone for a food story sometimes I just notice that we're talking not about food but we're talking about their lives their way of getting to it the dreams that they've had when they first got into the business when I'm writing this story it's so funny to look back on the interviews and see like half of the interviews, not just about food, but like the culture and politics and climate questions that come out of working in the business.

17:16Yeah, I think obviously it is such an intersectional topic. And even knowing a little bit of your academic background and the fact that you were, this is right, data visualization and folklore double major. Has anyone ever had that combination before? I mean, maybe there have been people out there have done something like this, but to put it explicitly on paper, I don't think I've seen anyone yet who's had it. I think the underlying thing the whole time was storytelling. I think I was naturally good at math as a kid. I'm not very good now, but in college, I really wanted to pursue that. I wanted to use that part of my brain.

18:02And the classes that spoke to me the most were the ones not of, you know, going to the whiteboard and proving something through formula, but actually going and exploring how people were collecting data, how they were collecting nuggets of information. And maybe it was more of a training in journalism than I knew at the time or like reporting. But I was always questioning, how are we getting this data? Is it representative of the population you're trying to speak about? Is it ethically collected? And sort of all those questions came bubbling up. Yeah. Yeah. I think as an editor to me, I see both kind of like that more traditional like math, statistics, data set and also the folklore as being ways that people are collecting information about the world around them and trying to define it.

18:54And I think it's a really kind of appealing combination because it results in storytelling that is kind of qualitative and quantitative in different ways. Yeah, it was a very fun major to pursue because I could take these classes that were focused on the history of ancient food and storytelling and then kind of go in a different direction and take a discrete mathematics class. And we're talking about the history of math and how people came up with numbers. So that was a cool part of the degree. Okay, at a later date, I want to learn about how people invented numbers. But I guess for the focus of this podcast and your writing in general, you know, you write a lot for taste and for other food publications.

19:39Are there any stories that you would look back on as especially pivotal or meaningful for you in your own kind of growth as a reporter and writer? I think there are two stories that stand out. This is when I started realizing that I could write about food. I would think I was my mom's an accountant my dad like works in management for insurance companies and so I always didn't really imagine that a career in writing could be an actual thing so in college having sort of a break and like taking a gap year I was sending out my college papers to different publications the first being Atlas Obscura and I was like I want to write about the oldest recipes in the world and so they took that pitch and they're like can you just make this recipe at home.

20:25That really inspired me because I was going to write about it. And like part of going to school is just, you know, putting pen to paper and reading. And that was more of an experiential thing where I was like, oh, I actually have to make this in my home kitchen. I have to figure out what ingredients they use. Of course, it's very different from like 4 ,000 years ago. Yeah. Wait, what was the recipe? It's a recipe for the oldest like super stew. And there's no salt involved at that point, because they didn't really have this way of harvesting salt. And so there's a lot of literature out there that says that this food is not, you shouldn't consume this food.

21:05It's not very, you know, delicious. But they've had a, like back then they had a huge tradition of wedding, like these elaborate feasts. And so, and you could get salt from many other things too, like seafood and things like that. So I just thought that was an interesting way. I just thought that was an interesting thought experiment. I was like, and then to actually put it to paper was very rewarding because it tasted better than I thought. What is in there? Do you remember what's in the stew? it's a beef I believe it's a it's a lean cut of beef I'm forgetting the cut um and there were carrots and I believe I'm looking at a photo of it right now maybe you can pull it up no I'm not trying to like grill you on the Mesopotamian stew I'm just I have so I don't think anyone has ever mentioned Mesopotamia to me on the podcast before so I love that we're kind of crossing it off.

22:07Yeah. Okay. So it's leek and garlic pounded together with meat broth, right? Yeah. What direction would you take that if you had a limited? I guess I would probably need to get like a mortar and pestle. I have one. I just don't think it would maybe be big enough for this quantity. I don't know. It's very interesting to think about like what were the tools available, not just the ingredients, but the tools and obviously, you know, electricity or like a home oven, those kinds of things weren't around. And it's even like you have to think, I mean, they were making pottery back then, but like the vessels look so different too.

22:42They're not using the traditional tablespoon or cups. They're having their own way of measuring. Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. Okay. What was the other story that came to mind for you? The other story that came to mind was my first reported story for the Washington Post. And it was about vegan barbecue in America. And so this is when there is, you know, Beyond Meat was sort of reaching a zeitgeist in the cultural conversation. And there were restaurant owners who had been practicing like plant based lifestyles and integrating them into their cultural foods of their culture and cultural foods for a long time.

23:26so I like this story because it started with me walking around San Francisco and those are my favorite stories where I'm just like walking on the street I get an idea I'm like hey that's an interesting restaurant or person or thing I've never seen before let me go talk to them so it was this barbecue truck called Vegan Mob in San Francisco run by an awesome restaurateur who's done a lot for the community in SF and Oakland. And then I was like, I really want to like pitch a story about this. So I was working not in food writing, but in graphics and data visualization for the post as an intern. And I pitched it to Joe Yonan, who's the editor.

24:08And it's like, I want to write about vegan barbecue. And this is what I'm seeing. I've seen it also in other parts of the United States at this one place in Atlanta. Can I write about it? And that was my first experience of getting edited and he's like wait there's there's an interesting narrative here um like the south is known for being like a meat heavy smoke rich area and what if you talk about it by sort of threading that not just through Atlanta but through these other producers can you find them so that was like a research moment for me where I had to like go out and I was sourcing things and it was the pandemic so it was all over social media but I had over like five I had like five to ten conversations with different people including people from there's a guy from Texas Monthly who writes about barbecue a barbecue column so I talked to him about this new wave of restaurant owners and really I like that story not only because I was walking and found the story but But also because I was threading this narrative, not just between one place, but so many other places.

25:19And they were doing it independently of one another, too. Yeah. I think it's always rewarding as a writer to get one idea and then follow the thread and realize that there's a whole tapestry at play and it's not just one narrative. Yeah, that was so cool. And then after the story hit, I got to visit them, too. So that was awesome. Yeah. Put the dishes into your real life experience. Right now, as we're talking, I'm sipping on this delicious cold brew tea that you brought back from your recent research reporting trip in China. You were in Fuzhou, and I know that you were kind of developing some stories.

25:53And I was wondering if you could catch me up on maybe like what brought you out there in the first place, because we haven't had a chance to talk about it yet. Yeah. OK. The first thread of the idea is I met Alan, who I traveled with to China way back when at a birthday party. We just bonded over food. So that was a really special moment. And as I got to know him, I knew that he ran this organization called Fujo America. It was started six or seven years ago in New York, bringing together like first people who grew up in the northeast area who were Fujinese and wanted to like have a culture. It's a cultural community for them to host events, to connect, and to get in touch with their roots, whether through food or games and other things.

26:41And then last year in September, October, I wrote an article about Ninhau, which is a Fujinese restaurant that opened up in Prospect Park. And that was one of the first modern Fujinese restaurants in New York, contemporary restaurants in New York. And that was really awesome to see. And because I was researching the history of East Broadway and the Fujinese community there, not only there, but also Sunset, Brooklyn Sunset Park and Flushing. And as I was researching this, I was relying on Alan. We were talking a lot. And I said, hey, there's actually a bigger story here. It's not just this one.