Maitiao'er looks simple: dough rolled, cut and pulled by hand. But the man who has spent four decades keeping the craft alive sees it differently. For Wu Shunhui, making it is a dialogue with the dough, the broth and a taste Wenzhou people refuse to forget.
Jiushan Ice Cream has only ever made one flavour, and that is the point. For nearly a century, the same stall by Wenzhou's Jiushan Lake has served a freshly baked crisp cone filled with creamy ice cream and topped with black sesame ¡ª the ¡°taste of Mom¡± that food critic called ¡°the most luxurious luxury in all of Wenzhou¡±.
For many in Wenzhou, the New Year begins with a sound: the rhythmic "dong, dong" of rice cakes being pounded. Zheng Shiwen has kept that sound alive for more than twenty years ¡ª his team raises a ten-kilogram pestle 3,000 times a day, two men working in perfect sync, one lifting and driving down the heavy wooden pestle, the other swiftly folding the scalding dough towards the centre with bare hands.
Chen Jianxin arrived in the Netherlands in 1974 and started with a single Chinese restaurant. Four decades later, his "Zen" restaurant group serves high-end Asian cuisine inside Real Madrid's Santiago Bernab¨¦u stadium ¡ª and the Wenzhou flavours on his menu, he says, are devoured by foreign diners with even greater relish than by Chinese guests.
Jin Xiaorong never liked wheat-based food as a child ¡ª except for Yongjia wheat cake. Two decades after leaving home, she returned to her hometown to master the ancient craft, then opened a restaurant near the Pompidou Centre in Paris. During the 2024 Olympics, long queues formed outside her door, and a homesick young man walked in speaking the Wenzhou dialect.
Chen Zhengmo is the fourth generation of his family to make Dengzhan Gao, the "oil-lamp cake" of Wenzhou. In early 2024, he quit a stable state-owned job to take over his father's shop ¡ª and brought the hundred-year-old street snack to a new audience through short videos, new fillings, and a very old frying technique.
Pan Chunxiang is 101 years old and has been making Yongjia wheat cakes for nearly ninety of them. Her craft appears on no official heritage register ¡ª yet when her son returned home after years away, he declared that no delicacy across the globe could rival this simple taste of home.
Zhou Xiong won China's National Youth Culinary Competition in 1990, then spent the next three decades doing something rarer: building a system to keep Ou cuisine alive ¡ª a vocational school that has trained more than 20,000 chefs, a research association, and a full banquet built around Wenzhou's native citrus.
Xiang Chaohui has spent more than thirty years in Ou cuisine, and his path runs in one direction: from the stove to the podium. A national culinary master and Labour Medal recipient, he now wants to turn this craft into data ¡ª a standardisation manual for 67 traditional dishes, and a 4,000-square-metre museum where Ou cuisine becomes something you can see.