Yan Can
Cook Goes Global
Page 2
vegetables and fruit. All this is "incorporating the healthy lifestyle and healthy eating habits" that are now popular in North America.
If Yan had showcased this "healthy" cooking style in Asia 15 or 20 years ago, he "probably wouldn't have an audience because the food wouldn't have been available (in Asia)," says Carolyn Jung, food editor at the San Jose Mercury News.
Today, people in Asia seem sophisticated about what they eat, she says. "There's just a whole new market and interest (in Asia) for that type of cooking."
For years renowned chefs like Berkeley's Alice Waters and Hollywood's Wolfgang Puck have included Asian influences in their cooking. That helped to fuel the popularity of "fusion" cuisine, which combines Asian and Western foods and cooking styles. The same fusion is now spreading to Asia itself.
"Now
you go to Asia, you see a lot of Western influences," Yan says, noting
the proliferation of restaurant chains like Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, TGI
Fridays and Ruby Tuesday, where he serves as a consultant.
Born in Guangzhou, China, Yan, 46, got his first taste of cooking at his father's restaurant while his mother ran a grocery store. The government nationalized both businesses when Yan was 13 and his family fled to Hong Kong. He lived and worked at a restaurant in Kowloon that an uncle owned. Food had become his life and he enrolled in the Overseas Institute of Cookery, paying for tuition by doing odd jobs at the school.
After a year at a college in Calgary, Canada, he decided that Canadian winters were not to his liking and moved to the University of California at Davis, where he received a master's degree in food science in 1975.
It was at Davis that Yan first started teaching cooking. After seeing Julia Child's cooking show on TV, he proposed teaching a Chinese cooking class at UC Davis. But he only started speaking English when he was 16, so his first few classes were a little rough around the edges.
"When I first started teaching, I was not very captivating," Yan recalls. "Probably my presentation was not very exciting."
In other words, he was putting his students asleep. That started to change during one class when a student snored so loud that it became distracting. Yan grabbed his wok and a spatula, walked over to the man and gave him a "gong." He scolded him for paying so much just to sleep in the class and told him to go home.
The class erupted in laughter and after that, "all of a sudden they all paid
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