Cooking With Swagger

Hi everyone and welcome to another Food Jungle interview! This week, I’ll be sharing a conversation I had with one of the most charismatic chefs and restaurateurs I have had the pleasure of meeting: Cadence Gao.

In this interview I discuss everything with the Shenzhen-based chef, from cooking around the world and the fetishisation of Asian food, to the nuances of Chinese food culture and sustainable cooking.

‼️ While this was a riveting interview, I feel it important to point out that I have included some of the strong words that Cadence used to preserve the authenticity of our conversation. Let’s dig in.

Hi Cadence, it’s lovely to have you here with me. I’ve been looking forward to this interview for quite some time.

It’s a pleasure to be here; thank you for having me.

Let’s get right into it. Can you tell me about how your journey as a chef started?

When I was 13 years old, I made it to an all-boys school in Vancouver. I got very lucky. But within seven months, I was super expelled.

And, during the expulsion process, I was sentenced to helping out in the kitchen. I was pretty good there and the chef at the school cafeteria was kind enough to keep in touch after I left.

After all that, I decided to fuck off around the world and learn how to cook.

So, where did you go first?

I went to an uncle’s restaurant in Paris first and hated it. Fucking hated it.

Oh yeah? How come?

I didn’t particularly like the formats of the meals and I had yet to understand the “French-ness” of food. Obviously, as an Asian, I couldn’t eat much dairy and that’s a problem in the land of cheese and butter.

So, after three months in Paris, I went down south to Italy. That’s where I realised that all food is, more or less, the same.

Curious. What do you mean by that?

Food is largely influenced by three factors: agriculture, colonisation, and torture. If you’re on the same global latitude, you’ll, more or less, treat vegetables and ingredients the same: stew them until they’re done.

Whether in northern France or northern China, you’ll usually take food from the ground, put it in a pot, and cook it till it’s done.

So, I found that people in Italy treated food the same way that I treated it where I grew up in China. Italian food looks gross objectively speaking, but is fucking delicious. It’s the same in China.

And after this series of realisations, you made a move to the UK. How did you find the UK gastronomy scene?

When I was there, the scene was a little bit different compared to what it is now. I started cooking when the idiots started showing up. You know, the slick hair and the whisk tattoos on their forearms.

I cooked in places that would now be called “modern bistros”. But I noticed that the UK food scene was made up of either working class food - like herring and jellied eels - or extreme modernity - like curry-house fusion, David Chang-styled bao buns.

So, to answer your question, it was more pretentious than it needed to be. The chefs cooked to be exciting, rather than to be good.

So how do you feel about the rise of the “fusion” restaurant?

In my mind, chefs use the word “fusion” when they don’t have the balls to call their restaurant something else.

Like, where I grew up, there was braised ox tongue, braised brisket, kombucha, and baked sourdough. That can be both Russian and Chinese food, depending on where you’re from.

At what point do you draw the line and say that this is no longer “fusion”? If you look at Szechuan cuisine and you ask what is the driving component of that cuisine, everyone and their mum would say chilis and spice.

But chilis and spice came from the Dutch and the Portuguese in the late 16^th century by way of our version of the Colombian exchange.

You would argue that every cuisine is “fusion”?

Exactly. it’s like calling a restaurant a “food” restaurant. It’s just lazy. I wouldn’t say that one country has a cuisine in the same way that one country has one accent.

Okay, so your apprenticeships end in Europe. What did you do next?

I had this weird burn out at that point where I was uncomfortable in my own skin. So, I fucked off back to Vancouver and spent time doing other things, working in the music industry and the automotive industry.

Then, at the age of 21, a project manager in Shanghai brought me on as a partner in a restaurant group. And that’s when I opened up my first chain of restaurants.

And how did that work out?

Well, the thing about the restaurant business in China is that no one actually wants to run a restaurant.

They want to skip the process and become a successful restaurateur. But they can’t shake the reality that they don’t actually want to serve people. A life lived in service is an art that is lost in modern China.

I guess that’s because fierce individualism has become much more popular in recent history.

Sure. It could definitely be a natural change. But, from what I see now, people in China want to open a chain of 50-60 restaurants and then do nothing.

And when I got confronted with that, despite telling the owners that this wasn’t sustainable, I just left, sold my shares, and started my own thing.

That then became what is now my flagship restaurant, Magpie.

Magpie, which, of course, is now a sensation in Shenzhen.

I mean we try our best. Magpie was an exercise in blind arrogance proven to be feasible. In China, they’ll call you a fake white boy for trying to add a little bit of culture to your project, because modern Chinese people have this non-sensical pride of “being Chinese”. You either go super fancy or you produce volume.

But, when we opened Magpie in a hallway, it wasn’t too expensive, was elevated in certain ways, and wasn’t amazing by any standards. In every quantifiable way the food was just odd.

But, it’s profitable. And that meant that even if you do a good job with a bad idea, you can make it happen. There’s no secret here.

If you want a good restaurant, have fried food, have beer, and have a place to shit. Everything else you do is an obstacle to money making.

This is a very humble way of looking at it (at this point of the interview, Cadence pulls out a cigarette in true chef fashion).

I’m being as objective as possible. Realistically, to be a good cook in China is simple: a symphony of brown liquids wrapped around small pieces of food that you want to eat.

You’re not going to fuck up Chinese food hard beyond that. I challenge anyone to tell me that I’m wrong.

That’s interesting. And you didn’t feel the need to incorporate your European style into this Chinese cooking?

I’ll say one thing: I am not a fan of balanced and well-rounded flavours or heavy reductions like you see in Western cuisine. The meal, as a whole, should be balanced, but individual plates should hit you with strong flavours.

What I’ll do is have seven or eight hard-hitting things that attack your senses from all possible angles, rather than have each dish be perfectly balanced like you have in French cuisine.  

One question I’ve been dying to ask is, having noticed that Chinese food in China is different to Chinese food in the West, what would you say to Chinese people being able to tolerate different textures in food as opposed to Europeans?

Good question. Chinese people do not adhere textures to class. That’s a huge difference between the East and the West. In France, for example, you don’t have to walk very far to understand that the texture of luxury is nothing at all: smooth, fine, pureed and the list goes on.

Chewing is not considered low class in the East. It never gave us this indoctrinated stigma that one shouldn’t eat certain textures. For example, a crunchy piece of cartilage or a chewy pig’s nose doesn’t convey a sense of barbarism. It’s not built into us generationally.

Is this the reason why you stayed in China? Because you like that type of cooking?

If I’m being honest, I made myself a promise that I wouldn’t cook for people I don’t like. When I was still going for the French standard of Michelin-starred glory, cooking for people I would never talk to made me hate myself. I was famous in a 30 square-mile radius. For what?

And, as I see it, China is one of the world’s biggest question marks in terms of development. No one knows in which direction it’s really going. That’s exciting.

Specifically in Shenzhen – where I’m based – this is the only place where I feel that anyone can really dig their own trench and see where their determination can take them.

This is the only place where the traditional American dream still exists. Like in America, to open a restaurant you’d have to take out a loan. And if you fuck up, you’re fucked for life. In Shenzhen, though, I could fail four or five times and still get another round of funding.

And you think that helps develop the culinary culture of China?

I wouldn’t say so. Chinese food hasn’t really been developing for a while now, since industrialisation and mass-manufacturing of ingredients has become very popular.

It’s all become quite bland. Not to mention that the quality of cooks has plummeted recently.

Oh yeah?

It’s a shame, but the sensitive boys, who wanted to be rappers and poets a few years ago, are now in the kitchens.

They started showing up with the whisk tattoos on their forearms and university degrees, pretending to want to be there. There are fewer “pure” tradesmen and that has contributed to a declining quality.

Do you think “celebrity chef” culture has had something to do with that?

Absolutely. Especially in China. Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wearing, Marco Pierre-White, for example, were, first and foremost, chefs. Now there exists a type of “chef” that you see on TV that doesn’t need to know how to cook anymore.

Kids want to be celebrities and feel like all you have to do is have good presentation.

Somewhat ironically, you also started a YouTube channel. Why?

I think there is a misunderstanding that Western people have of Eastern people that I arrogantly think I might be equipped to remedy. We’re more similar than we aren’t and I wanted to show that.

For example, Western people care more about Chinese food than Chinese people do. Parents aren’t making bao buns on the daily at home like you see in movies. Chinese food culture also has beer, fried stuff, and smoking.

Honestly, there is just so much “pornification” of Asian food. A chef friend of mine told me that no matter how fancy the food is, it all becomes shit at the end of the day. There is no such thing as “un-shittable” food.

And there’s a beauty in knowing that, no matter which country you’re in, the food will always end up the same.

And you want to eliminate that fetishisation?

Exactly!

That’s incredibly interesting. We’re coming to the end of our chat, but I wanted to ask a broader question on sustainable food practices. What is food production like in China compared to the factory farming you see in the US or the UK?

I mean, food production is pretty bad quality here. You have to remember that there around 1.8 billion of us. The hardware doesn’t exist to make high quality food for that many people.

So I’m assuming the culture of sustainable production isn’t there.

Not really. Hunger is the priority, which stops sustainability dead in its tracks. For many in China, forward thinking is necessary, but today is still today and we need to eat today. Accessibility above all else.

This is the only place on earth that I have lived where it is consistently cheaper to eat out than eat at home. And people are poor here. So, what are people going to do? They’re going to go for the cheapest, poorer quality option. People are too hungry to care as much as we should.

Do you see that changing in the near future?

Not in my lifetime, I think. Perhaps when our population implodes in the next 50 years things could change. But not really before then.

Well, that’s it for today. Cadence, it has been an absolute pleasure. Looking forward to following your remarkable journey in the coming months and years!

Thank you for having me. I had a great time.