We began our meals sitting at the bar in this slightly industrial-themed restaurant. The walls are painted dark, with some accent of the lacquered wood panels and countertops, and the whole of the decor is even personalized and emblazoned by the artwork display by the windows. Where we sat, we had the best complete and unobstructed view to the chefs' cooking and plating of the dishes. The chefs were stern, with faces absorbed in their tasks initially, but as the meals progressed, they gradually warmed up to our poking faces and inquisitive curiosities. The conversations carried out even further as we introduced ourselves.
Complimentary beverages were poured into our cups as the chef owner shared his visions of his own cuisines and the difficulties of maintaining and adhering to his principles. The chef owner is a farmer by day and a chef by night. A large part of his dishes utilizes fresh herbs and flowers which he has grown by himself and daily operation is a dash of driving kilometers away between collecting the herbs in Nantou at his farm and the restaurant in Taichung.
As he was talking about his first-hand experience, my mind leapt months into the past, reliving the very moments in the morning during Feuille Next—where I had just finished my morning run of the grocery shopping—to collecting and picking the herbs in the garden. Picking the flowers and herbs was no easy task and it could have easily taken an hour or more to do so. I felt immediately empathetic towards him as collecting the flowers is also a battle and evasion against the vicious bugs and thirsty mosquitoes; and tactfully weeding the plants and detecting any possible signs of infestations at the same time under that intense and burning sunlight.
“But I have felt more and more the need to be practical and I really need to generate some revenues for my family, especially my kids have been born...” My mind snapped back to catch his emotions and the physical exhaustion on his face at the last few words of his sentence. Having to revise his dishes for the sake of pragmatism, and the perseverance of his vision to use the plants he has grown for his cuisines—the very reincarnated idea of “farm to table”—has most been a battle and a conflict against himself; and has rendered down to physical toll of turmoil and uncertainty. It was not appreciated and the ease of acquisitions of the lucrative, imported, commercialized ingredients the locals have gotten a taste for, shatters his world of ideals and aspirations. It was at that moment I realized how precious and difficult Feuille Food Lab really is—it operated as it was imagined, with its existence solely for the advancement and possibility of the cuisines, but not as a vessel of survival, in the context of reality and out of necessity.
Feuille Food Lab is a dream—an oasis to practice the desired and the ideals—or is at least, for the duration of the pop-up event. People have this impression that I opt for this 3-month format of the restaurant is because I am doing it for the pleasure and the fun and that the studio is not bound by the delicate balance between the costs incurred and revenue generated. But what they do not realize is that it is exactly the opposite—that this format of only 3 months out of a year is because this is the longest I can sustain while putting forward the imagined dishes to cater in the context of the creativity and the concept of fun dining. The dishes served at Feuille Food Lab, though creative and fun, have never actually turned any profit. At the end of the 3-month period, it is then about making the readiness and the renewed preparations—whether restocking and finding the time to test more creative ideas, or saving enough budget to last through the pain of starting another event, or persuading myself that this is “the” event that I get the actual break of being able to enlist the help and assistance I desperately needed so I would feel more positive and encouraging about the potential of hosting again another event.
Running Feuille Food Lab is only an illusion. And in that illusion, all the hard work is instead contrarily quite real and physical. But it is also in that illusion, that the creative dishes can be made—and must be made otherworldly in complementary to that context. Guests coming to Feuille, have unknowingly, transported themselves abroad to ride that very train out of reality and into that dream of ideals. It is therefore, in that sense, in a different world, the guests have different expectations towards what they would normally perceive as their dinner ingredients, styles, and dining methods that constitute their usual dinners in the reality world.
It is also special and magical that the guests have found their way to want to try the dishes at Feuille Food Lab. It is really never about the relationships of playing the host to cater to the guests. Because together, you and I, have just made another bleak event possible from the pragmatic reality—just that one more time—as Feuille Food Lab, could easily cease to be without any prior notice!
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