Chef James Chang was perusing the aisle at the Pan Asian Supermarket in Overland Park, Kansas when I spoke with him. Along the way, he picked up soy paste, oyster sauce, black vinegar, rice wine, ChingKiang vinegar. These were items for his upcoming pop-up and a collaboration dinner he was planning for the following week. Chang grew up in Taiwan and Southern California, then moved to Kansas City where he made a name for himself through his signature bottled chili crisps and pop-up dinners. He stopped briefly during our interview and ordered at the meat counter in Spanish.
“What is the Taiwanese American community like in Kansas City?” I asked him.
“幾乎沒有 Ji hu mei you (practically nonexistent),” he replies.
But with the support of local chefs and food industry peers, Chang introduces Taiwanese American flavors through his unique menus. His style of cooking, once strictly traditional, now delights in playful mashups of American classics with Taiwanese flair, a nod to his “fat kid tendencies”.
The following interview was edited for length and clarity.
Tiffany: How did you start cooking professionally?
James: My whole family is in the food service industry. Even in the States, my 阿舅 ah jiu (uncle) still sells prepped food in the wet market like drunken chicken and water boiled fish. My cousin runs a pretty fancy kaiseki restaurant in Taipei. It’s kind of in the blood, man. For better or worse, you know what I mean?
T: I’m guessing they roped you in to help out a lot?
J: Yeah! Free labor is a good way to go, or you can call it indentured servitude.
So my Mom and Dad divorced before I was born and my Dad was overseas since the late 70s to 80s when Taiwan wasn’t full of economic opportunities. That’s when the big mass migration into the U.S. happened and my Dad was one of them. He left me in Taiwan and I was raised by my cousin, aunt, and grandparents until I was about six or seven.
Ah gong 阿公 Ah Gong (grandfather) and Ah Ma 阿嬤 (grandmother) ran a rice shop. My Er Gu 二姑 (second Aunt) sold scallion pancakes on the roadside and the cousin who took care of me worked front of the house at multiple Japanese restaurants. It’s pretty much a part of our family history. Ah Ma was also a turkey farmer in Yilan.
T: So when you started cooking professionally, did your family want you to do something different?
J: It’s pretty much the Asian parent story of, they worked this hard to let me have these types of opportunities but we still go back to doing restaurants. My family was pretty much like, “What the f*ck?”
It’s like, you can’t blame me because from a young age, I was raised in a restaurant! That’s the only thing I know how to do. That’s the one thing I’m good at. I tried 9 to 5 jobs and I can’t do it, man.
T: When you started cooking, did you feel pressure to define your style?
J: I was still finding my way when I started focusing on cooking, which was probably right before the pandemic. I was very militant Taiwanese. It had to be very traditional. But I’m also American. It took me a while to come to the point where I’m like, I’m Taiwanese but I also cook in America. You have to find that balance between the two.
In my cooking, there will always be a strong basis in Taiwanese food. There will always be a nod to my Ah Ma and Ah Gong’s cooking, my Dad’s cooking, especially my Er Gu. My Er Gu was like the freakin’ cook of the family. That woman made everything taste good. My Ah Ma was the MacGyver.
She was so poor she used to make her own soy sauce. She could take vegetable scrap and make a four-course meal out of it. That’s something I wish I could go back and talk to her about and learn. You know the older Taiwanese don’t like to talk about the past.
T: So when you go back to Taiwan, are you gathering with your family over a big meal and cooking together?
J: Hah! Whenever I go back to Taiwan, they’re like, “Bro can you cook?”
T: Oh shoot! That’s a lot of pressure.
J: It’s very much, well you know how to make American food. And I’m like, “But I came back here to eat…”
T: They’re like, “Where’s my cheeseburger bro?”
J: Haha yeah! It’s like, Can you make steak? And I’m like, “Are you talking serious?”
T: As one of the few to represent Taiwanese cuisine in your area, do you have to be more of an advocate and educator for the cuisine?
J: Oh, I definitely put pressure on that but at the same time, it’s one of those things where I can’t be 100 percent authentic myself without acknowledging my American side.
You know, acknowledging my love of American cheese.
T: Hey, Taiwanese people love American cheese!
J: Oh man, I remember going to my first McDonalds. It was the first McDonald’s in Taiwan. It was like a straight up special occasion man!
T: And now you go to all the breakfast joints and they have that sh*tty American cheese in their sandwiches. It’s never the good cheese.
J: Yes, and those hash browns. I don’t want the good cheese. I want the sh*tty ones. That’s what we grew up eating! That’s one of the things I had to explain to people once I started doing my own food. To me, it was black market cheese. When I was a kid, you couldn’t buy it in the stores. You had to go to the black market to get it. I had no idea how it showed up at my house one day, but I ate it and it was like, “Holy crap this is delicious.”
T: There’s a lot of odd things in Taiwan where you’re like, how did this show up in Taiwanese cuisine?
J: Exactly! Like have you ever had the traditional 圓山飯店 Yuan Shan Fan Dian (Grand Hotel Taipei) spaghetti sauce?
T: Yeah, it’s kind of weird, a little sweet.
J: It’s straight up ketchup based, man.
T: I think it tastes like SpaghettiO’s.
J: Yeah! It kind of does! I love that flavor because it’s what I grew up eating.
T: When you’re trying to recreate Taiwanese flavors, are there some ingredients that are hard to source in your area and how have you worked around it?
J: Dude so, I have this 便當 bian dang (bento) pop-up this Sunday, right? And I got bian dang boxes into the U.S. brought over by my cousin who visited from Taiwan.
[The pop up] is in three days and I haven’t posted the actual contents of what I’m putting in there because supply chain is a real issue here. Because we are in the Midwest, There’s just certain [ingredients] you will not see here. Like take for example the most basic Kimlan Soy Paste. I was looking for it and I managed to find it. I bought all of it and it was pretty much just three bottles. This, I will see once every two months, and soy paste is a huge part of life and my style of cooking because that’s what my family eats. You can’t replicate that flavor. You can’t just use like xyz soy sauce.
T: Or worse, I’ve seen many recipes recommend oyster sauce and it’s not at all the same flavor.
J: Yeah. People don’t realize too that soy sauce is kind of like wine, where each region has its own flavor profile. Thai soy sauce is sweeter, Japanese soy sauce is saltier, Taiwanese soy sauce is less salty and more umami-based. People don’t get that you can’t interchange it. So even though I might be doing some f-cked up Mapo Tofu over rice with some cheese, at the the end of the day, the base of the sauces, the cooking style will be authentic. This is just my fat kid tendency to mix things up.
T: You developed a line of chili crisps and have since released many versions of it. How did you start getting playful with this and having it be a full-on product?
J: I, like everybody else back in the day, used to go buy Lao Gan Ma. There’s nothing wrong with Lao Gan Ma but my stomach would always hurt afterwards. If you look on the label of Lao Gan Ma, you can see all the preservatives. So it’s like, why can’t I do something like this? Why can’t we make it? This was right before the pandemic. I did a bunch of test batches and then I did my first commercial batch. I think it was 30-something jars. We sold out of that. [The batches] grew progressively larger. The current batch was at a thousand jars and everything was hand made, hand labeled, hand jarred because I don’t have the fiscal ability to go into packing yet.
T: There are a lot of Taiwanese Americans who are entering the food industry now and starting their businesses. As a chef who has been doing this hustle for some time, what would you say to them?
J: Brick and mortar is not the answer. Also, be open to experimentation with other cooking styles. Everybody wants a brick and mortar and I’m like, dude no. Brick and mortar would be nice but a lot of people don’t realize even if you’re in the industry, even in my shoes, I’m sure there are hidden costs that I’m not aware of. Especially when you open that brick and mortar, you’re really limited in your identity on what you can do and serve. While there is room for innovation, there’s not that kind of room for full innovation.
Follow James Chang on Instagram at @jchang.kitchen
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