French Cuisine and French-style Food in Contemporary China: A Case Study on Western Restaurants in Tianjin

Abstract

Filled with the most foreign Concessions at the turn of the 20^(th) century, Tianjin (spelled as Tientsin on the postal map)has played an important role in the modern history of Sino-foreign cultural exchanges, in particular with food culture. Some of the Western restaurants get the best preserved over a hundred year and become special historical places where visitors could recall and taste the 'traditional' exotic cuisine in modern Chinese urban. At the same time, many 'new' restaurants of Western-style food are opened here after the 1980s and offer more kinds of exotic culinary. Among these exotic food, French cuisine and some French-style food becomes the most popular ones there as well as in many other cities. Thus, based on the case study of Tianjin, the purpose is to investigate the French cuisine and French-style food in contemporary China. Two kinds of research methods are used. One is to analyze the historical text about local Western restaurants from the Concession Period, in particular with French cuisine. The other is to do fieldwork in some typical Western restaurants which are still retained or newly opened in the fromer concessions, in order to collect information about French cuisine or French-style food. In the end, it provides an overview of tradition and change in French cuisine or French-style food through more fieldwork and documents in Tianjin. Also, it tries to discuss the exchange of food culture between France and China.