Mama Huang’s Hakka Kitchen

「Hakka cuisines served by a seasoned chef in Guangshan」

With 30 years of preparing “roadside banquet,” Huang is a well-known chef in Guangshan. When she was young, she was an assistant of a senior chef here. After his retirement, she opened this restaurant with other assistants, also her bosom friends, and started to serve delicious feast with her extensive culinary experience and sophisticated cooking skills. Run by Huang and her daughter-in-law Chiuling, the restaurant offers classic Hakka cuisines in east Taiwan, which are prepared with a variety of home-made pickled and fermented foods. In summer, they make pineapple sauce for pineapple and bitter gourd chicken soup when the fruit is in season. They also make aged plum vinegar by themselves and put it in Chinese Ginger Chitlins to impart a delicate sour flavor. In winter, they make dried cabbage and salted and pickled mustard green when the vegetables are in season. These pickled and fermented ingredients release a delicious fragrance for the dishes served by the restaurant, including sauteed vegetables with shredded pork, soup, and stewed pork. Traditional Hakka food culture values “thriftiness,” or minimizing waste of food and preserving seasonal agricultural products with sun-drying, salting and fermentation. These practices have not only reflected the core value of Hakka food culture, but also become Huang’s secret behind her successful career as a chef.