Bando - Taiwan's 'outside, outside catering'

Amcham TOPICS piece from two years ago:


Bando -- Outside, Outside-Catering
Text and photos by Mark Caltonhill

Just after dawn on a warm November morning, "Just-call-me-Jiang" pulled his canvas-sided CMC Varica onto Linkou Road in Linkou Township, 20 kilometers west of his home in Taipei's Shilin district. The marquee builders had already come and gone. For 30 yards, one lane of the road was blocked by a bamboo frame covered in red, white, and blue plastic sheeting, a dozen folded tables leaned against a wall, and a dozen stacks of red plastic stools stood around like dayglo obelisks.

Jiang climbed out of his 1,100cc truck, and with his two assistants started to unload wooden boxes, gas cookers, crates of live chickens, bags of rice, and other foodstuffs. It is Jiang's job, as a "bando" boss, to set up the tables and by sunset cover them with a dozen delicious courses of traditional Taiwan fare for the 120 guests of a Linkou businessman.

Bando (辦桌) is Taiwanese - the Mandarin would be Banzhuo, but no one ever says that - and means "attending to tables." They are the island's traditional outside caterers, with the emphasis very much on "outside." Traveling from gig to gig, they set up their makeshift kitchens wherever needed: sometimes in fields or car parks, but most often in the street, blocking half or even all of it. Until a few years ago, most foreign visitors to Taiwan would not be on the island more than a week or two before encountering one obstructing their way home, but with parking spaces at a premium and concerns over cleanliness, in Taipei City they are largely a thing of the past. In Taipei County, including Linkou, and throughout the rest of the country, the tradition is very much alive, though anyone planning a street-blocking bando must apply for a three-day permit from the police. One day is for erecting the scaffolding and tenting, one day for cooking and eating the food, and one day for taking down the marquee.

Nevertheless, according to Jiang, business is much the same as it has always been. Due to the economic downturn of the last few years, in fact, competition has intensified, with many people entering the trade who had barely cooked a barbecue before in their lives. Bando companies cater to birthday parties, weddings, funerals, and temple activities. People engage them, rather than going to a restaurant or hotel, for a variety of reasons, including their lower price and last-minute availability, but primarily because they are traditional.

Jiang was in Linkou for a temple fair. The Chulin Shan Guanyin Temple (竹林山觀音寺) was celebrating the Chu Jia (出家) ceremony honoring the anniversary of "leaving home" to become a monastic of its patron deity, the bodhisattva Guanyin. The whole town was in party mood. On Linkou Road and other side streets behind the temple, 40 or 50 marquees had been erected and bando companies were arriving from all over northern Taiwan. His is normally a solitary occupation, but temple fairs offer Jiang a chance to catch up with his colleagues, some of whom he hasn't seen since the same fair one year earlier or, in the case of Linkou, five years earlier.

Perhaps surprisingly, none of the cooks seemed to come from Linkou itself. A-lien, for example, had come from Tucheng City in southwestern Taipei County, the Chen family from Sanchong City just across the river from downtown Taipei, and A-Chi, who had set up his kitchen in the car park right beside the temple, hailed from Danshuei Township to the north of the city, where he runs the café at "one of the local golf courses."

Just as Jiang goes only by his surname and A-lien by his nickname, A-chi is also reluctant to part with any means of identification or contact. "This is not a company," he explained. "I just help out friends. Contact is by word of mouth."

At 46 years of age, A-chi has been "attending to tables" for more than 20 years. From a farming background and with many brothers, he left school early and started work in restaurant kitchens in his neighborhood. With half-a-dozen years of experience under his belt, he started his bando "non-company" in his early twenties.

Secretive about himself, A-chi was more than happy to talk about the bando business. Events for temple fairs, such as the one he was preparing, cost about NT$5,000 per table - so about NT$50,000 to NT$60,000 for that day's ten-course meal for 12 tables of 10 diners each - birthday parties cost about the same, funerals less (about NT$4,000 per table as the food doesn't need to be such high quality), and weddings more, perhaps NT$6,000 per table, as better food and more courses are served. The marquee, tables, and chairs are ordered and paid for by the client; a bando boss may make a little extra money by helping to arrange entertainment - karaoke, a band, or even a "foreign show," which A-chi explains as meaning Russian strippers, female or male. With 40 or 50 bando catering to upwards of 7,500 people, somewhere around NT$4 million would be changing hands on this Thursday evening in Lin-kou alone. Given the secrecy of the various proprietors, presumably Taiwan's revenue service would not be hearing too much about this.

A long day of labor

Although not too lavish, temple fair banquets represent a full day's work, as they require the bando boss to turn up around dawn and stay till the last dish is washed, which could be as early as 10 p.m. or as late as the small hours of the next morning. He or she must come early because the food needs to be blessed twice, once raw and once cooked, to make it suitable for consumption by deities and ancestral spirits. For this, it must be clean.

It must also be dead, so one of the first tasks, therefore, is to kill, pluck, scale, and clean out the chickens, ducks, fish, and at the Linkou event, even pigs. The staff then set about scrubbing and slicing vegetables and preparing soups. Flavorings are added liberally; Jiang, for one, had six 500g boxes of MSG to add to his dozen courses, suggesting that each diner would consume more than 25 grams of this additive alone if they drank every last spoonful of soup.

Since some of the food had been prepared earlier and would need only to be heated up, by mid-morning A-chi's team were sitting in the shade, the dead fowl and sliced vegetables protected from flies with a large sheet of netting. An hour later they set back to work, but in fact were cooking themselves lunch - an eight-dish mini banquet - which took less time to eat than it did to cook. By midday they were asleep under the marquee. Work started in earnest after the nap, with more vegetables to slice, chickens to sever, lobsters to shell, and meat to flavor. With menus fairly standard, bando staff the length of the street seemed to be engaged in some heart-learned ritual, all plucking, cutting, slicing, and cleaving as if in time to some unwritten timetable.
All were starting with lobster, the first soup was invariably "Buddha jumps the wall" (佛跳牆) - so-called because it is said to be so delicious that monks slip out of their monasteries to eat it - and given the special nature of the Linkou "Killing of Lord Pig" (殺豬公) event, all had at least one dish cooked using large lumps of fatty pork.

If something was found to be missing or more ice was needed, one of the liveried staff would run off to the nearest supermarket or 7-Eleven to make up the deficiencies. Pans, dishes, chop boards, cleavers, and various utensils were washed in buckets at the roadside. Finally, with the gas stoves lighted and all the food loaded into huge wooden steamers measuring about 2'6" square and piled six or eight high, the staff could sit down for another well-earned rest.

While the boss kept an eye on the cooking, a junior staff member stapled plastic tablecloths to the tables and laid each table with ten sets consisting of a plastic bowl, glass tumbler, wooden chopsticks, and paper napkin.

At around 5:45 the first guests started to arrive, most decked out in their finest clothes. So far, only pumpkin seeds and other snacks had been put on the tables, and guests helped themselves to guava or orange juice, but not yet whiskey. At 6 p.m. the town exploded with firecrackers, and the tables quickly filled up. Jiang said that diners were punctual at temple fairs, less so at weddings and birthday parties, and much less so at funeral banquets. With cars, motorcycles, and even buses and trucks passing within inches - occasionally, news of a bando traffic accident makes the papers - the first dish was brought out, carried in above-the-shoulder style by the cooks/waitresses, still dressed in the aprons they had worn all day.

At A-chi's car-park venue, lobster salad was followed by vegetables and glass noodles, sweet and sour ribs, "100 cuts" free-range chicken, scallops, sea cucumber, "ten brocade" delicacies, and so forth - one dish every 10 minutes or so, until at around 8 o'clock, the extra "free" dish of fruit was presented.

All that he, Jiang, A-lien, and their colleagues could do now was sit down for a cigarette and hope the guests were not in too chatty a mood.

As each serving dish was emptied, it was brought into the kitchen area and washed; as each table cleared of diners, the glasses were removed and everything else - disposable bowls, chopsticks, napkins, empty drink bottles, and spat-out bones - were wrapped up in the plastic tablecloths ready for the garbage collectors.

Finally, with everything loaded back onto the ubiquitous blue mini-trucks, each of the bando bosses stepped into the shadows, shared a cigarette with his client, and accepted his day's earnings.