Black Bean Garden Live Fish Restaurant Introduction
The Journey of a Gold Medal Chef From Chef to a Farmer with No Knowledge, "Huang Qiutian," born in 1969, originally specialized in cooking. He moved north to apprentice at the age of 15, and after mastering his skills, he worked as a chef on Liuchiao Street. Later, he opened an affordable Japanese restaurant in Yuanlin, hiring 20 chefs, and the restaurant earned 2 million TWD a month. Five years ago, after his father, who had been farming bamboo shoots for years, suffered an ankle injury, he was asked to return home. To take care of his father, he and his wife brought their children back to their hometown and learned to become farmers. He admitted that he really didn’t know much in the beginning. In an attempt to make the bamboo shoots grow more quickly, he dumped a large amount of fertilizer at the roots, but to his surprise, it backfired; after a rain, the shoots would float to the surface, becoming "sky shoots," and when harvested, they were short and fat, with a taste that was overly mature, earning them the nickname "radish legs." It was no surprise that the prices were not good. While others sold them for over 40 TWD per pound, Huang Qiutian's could barely reach 25 TWD, the lowest price in the market. For a time, whenever he entered the market, other bamboo shoot farmers would mock him, saying, "Here comes the 25 TWD guy!" This comment hurt him deeply, and he once ran to the back hills to cry. From that moment on, he understood that fertilizer needed to be used in moderation. In addition to fertilizers, he also insisted on not using pesticides, which made his father frustrated, scolding him, "You foolish child, you can't eat if you grow them this way." Sure enough, the rust disease and sesame leaf blight that could have been solved by pesticide treatment appeared in his fields, forcing him to rely on manual weeding. Previously, the older generation would stand in the water to weed, but Huang Qiutian brought over a piece of Styrofoam, wrapped it in a cloth bag, and used it as a seat in the water to move around and weed, making the task much easier. Other farmers found it funny at first, but after trying it, they thought it was great and started asking him for help in making similar ones. "I’m not smarter, just lazier," he said shyly. He jokingly mentioned that he has a “leg” with the bamboo shoots at night. He would patrol the rice paddies, worried about apple snails and birds stealing the bamboo shoots, often using a bamboo cannon to scare off the birds. Thus, the pesticide-free bamboo shoots, when harvested from the paddy, needed only to have their green skin peeled off and rinsed briefly in the cool mountain spring water from the nearby ditch, making them ready to eat. After three years of returning home, not only did he obtain the certifications for Ji Garden, but his prices also surpassed those of regular bamboo shoots; while others could harvest twice a year, he managed three times, yielding 2 tons a year that sold out immediately. Three months after returning home, Huang Qiutian opened the "Black Bean Garden" restaurant, where the highlight of the menu was bamboo shoots prepared in a Taiwanese-Japanese style, preserving their sweetness and freshness. Another innovative dish he developed is the "Tea Towel Beauty," which uses soybean skin to wrap local ingredients; although it is a deep-fried dish, it is paired with passion fruit jam from Puli, giving it a refreshing sweet and sour flavor! With numerous awards under his belt, he has won the Gold Medal Award for Bamboo Shoot Dishes and the Champion of Puli Bamboo Shoot Creative Cuisine Competition, with a plaque proclaiming him a "Gold Medal Chef" hanging proudly on the wall. Huang Qiutian is also one of the farmers in Puli who let visitors experience the planting and harvesting of bamboo shoots. "When city kids mistook the pink eggs of apple snails for strawberries, I realized I was doing something right!" he said, explaining that in the second year after returning home, he opened up for experiential farming activities to energize the rural community. Huang Qiutian tells young people that Taiwan's future advantage lies in agriculture, not high-tech industries!
