#ChineseFoodiesofIG: Martha Cheng

Martha Cheng

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews I’m doing with my favourite Chinese foodies that I follow on Instagram. Come and follow the #ChineseFoodiesofIG hashtag on Instagram and leave a comment showing your support for these talented folk!

Where are you from? Where are you really from?

Raised in Foster City, CA, spent the most years of my adult life in Honolulu. My parents are from Taipei.

What’s in your fridge?

Ugh, too many things! So many different hot sauces, from homemade chili oil and harissa to store-bought Hawaiian chili pepper water and kochujang. I have less jams than I used to because when I was moving a lot at one point my friend told me she'd stop helping me move unless I got rid of my jams. Whatever tropical fruit is in season — right now there's starfruit and rambutan in there. Fresh ramen noodles, miso, pi dan, tofu. Baking experiments: pandan sponge cake and sweet potato meringue tea cake.

What does home taste like?

Jiaozi and cong you bing and xian dou jiang and you tiao and zhou.

Share a food memory:

For most of my life, my dad cooked (a lot of French recipes) or brought me out to eat fast food while my mom worked. But I remember in the early days when mom made tomato and eggs or just a peeled tomato with sugar for an after school snack. 

Who's your Chinese food legend?

My grandma. Funny, I noticed Mackenzie Fegan as a recent interview — my grandma worked at Henry's Hunan and then opened her own restaurant later.

Dream dinner party guests:

Friends and family, especially my parents. It's really only in recent years that my parents have let me cook for them — my whole life they discouraged me from the kitchen in favor of more ‘serious’ pursuits. Obviously, that tactic failed!

Know any good Chinese restaurants?

Wherever my mom and dad take me when I go home. If we lived in the same city, I would enlist my dad as a research assistant. I swear, he calls the food trends before food media and always knows the best places to go right at that moment — when longtime favorite restaurants are on the decline or improving. On every visit home we usually eat at Joy restaurant in Foster City, which has been there since I was kid, and pick up baozi from a newer spot in the same strip mall — it supplies baozi for a lot of Bay Area restaurants.

What does Chinese food mean to you?

I don't know that I could define it any more than I could define ‘American’ food. But I do know that I like eating across the entire spectrum of Chinese food—from a Hakka restaurant on the east coast of Taiwan to noodles in Milpitas to, yup, Panda Express. And I love eating Chinese food in different countries—I find it fascinating how it tastes sometimes wildly to subtly different to a direct line to China whether I'm in St. Vincent or Italy or New Zealand. And I like seeing how different cultures relate to it — like that jiaozi is translated to ‘ravioli’ in Italy or some noodles referred to as Chinese pasta Bolognese. It really underscores to me common culinary threads. Just like poke: it's really its own thing here in Hawai‘i, but seasoned raw fish is prevalent around the world, from Korean hoe-deopbap to Chinese yusheng to Tahitian poisson cru.