Upending the “Hierarchy of Taste”
by Aaron Arizpe
In the entrepreneurial realm, there can be a sea of difference between ideation and action. As a startup ourselves, we felt we should shine the light on some people we see bravely navigating those waters. And in that spirit, we start with a profile of our friend Jenny Gao, a Chengdu-born techie turned chef turned culinary entrepreneur who last year launched the highest-grossing craft food campaign ever on Kickstarter. Her company, Fly by Jing, is doing great things in the consumer packaged goods space, while contributing to a thoughtful and much-needed dialogue when it comes to Chinese food in the United States.




Below, a conversation with Jenny Gao:
So, for anyone who’s not familiar with Fly by Jing, tell us a little bit about the company?
“Fly restaurants” is an endearing term for one of thousands of hole-in-the-wall restaurants in my hometown of Chengdu, in Sichuan province. The cooking is so good that people swarm like flies to these places. Jing is a reference to my birth name. Without getting all elevator pitch-y on you, we make high-quality Chinese food — condiments for right now; but soon, snacks — and we want to change people’s perceptions of what it means to be Made in China. Our most successful product right now, and the one that anchored our Kickstarter drive, is Sichuan Chili Crisp.
And what are those perceptions you referred to?
So I did this pitch last week for a startup accelerator called Techstars, and in giving the audience a very condensed version of why we exist, I mentioned something called “The Hierarchy of Taste.” The term was coined by an NYU professor named Krishnendu Ray, who wrote an excellent book called The Ethnic Restaurateur.
**Silently navigates to Amazon to acquire said book**
In it, he explains how Americans have come to view Chinese food as dirty, cheap, and unhealthy. That is, to a significant degree, rooted in politics. If you look back at the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — a horrible decree which prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers into the U.S. — it actually caused the existing Chinese communities here to become even more close-knit, so Chinatowns in major cities proliferated and more Chinese restaurants started opening all over the country. Now there are something like 50,000 (!) Chinese restaurants in America, and yet the cuisine suffers from image problems.
And how do you address those problems as an entrepreneur?
It starts with how we talk about the cuisine. To call it “Chinese food” is reductive to begin with. It’s such a blanket term. China is the size of a continent. That’s like lumping the entire canon of Italian, French, and Spanish cuisines under one banner of “European food.” The food in China has such a rich history — over 5,000 years of it! — but a lot of it is lost in translation, or has not even made its way into our consciousness here in America.
And you feel it is time that that changed?
Absolutely. Italian food, for instance, has made that journey from low-cost to luxury. There are $40 plates of pasta there in New York, and here in LA. I think with a broader representation of Asian people in the media today — the fanfare over Crazy Rich Asians, and so on — it’s only a matter of time before this extends to food as well. A few years ago, Calvin Trillin wrote this brilliant satire for the New Yorker about what’s the next Chinese province we’ll “discover.” People have been realizing that Chinese food is so much more than just takeout. It’s starting to be held in higher esteem.
And do you think that’s the case all across America?
Well, I definitely see it happening in New York restaurants. It’s only a matter of time before the rest of the country catches up. Even here in LA, there used to be this mentality that if you wanted, say, great Sichuan or Hunan food, you had to venture to the San Gabriel Valley. But Sichuan Impression — an all-time favorite of the late, great Jonathan Gold — just opened in Santa Monica! To me, that feels like a tipping point.
So how does Fly by Jing fit into that shifting conversation?
I always tell people that my products are not “authentic”; they’re personal. They’re a personal reflection of me. I was born in Chengdu, but have lived all over: Canada, UK, Germany, Singapore, Shanghai. As an adult, I realized how disconnected I had become from my cultural heritage and identity. If I’m Chinese and I don’t know about these things, probably no one else does either. Food became one of the key ways I was able to reconnect. But last year, when I came to the U.S. to attend Expo West [the biggest natural foods trade show], I saw practically NO multi-cultural products.
And you saw this as an opportunity?
100%. The crazy thing is, in the same way that products like ours are new here, they’re also new in China. Products like this don’t really exist there, either, because as its population grew and grew, so did the country’s consumption of industrialized foods. So a lot of these natural, top-quality ingredients never make their way around China, much less outside of it. The Tribute Peppers we sell are called that because they used have traditionally been reserved for emperors!
But I feel like your branding is so approachable… and dare I say, millennial-friendly.
Totally. The packaging was intentional to have you question your preconceived notions of what Chinese food should look like. I wanted to launch here in the US because of those biases, to poke at them a little bit. America is a culture creator on a world scale, that’s also why I chose to start here. We have ambitions of becoming a household name. After all, why do you need to be Chinese to enjoy something like this?
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Aaron aka @pocketfork spent the last decade at Momofuku, Roberta’s, and Chefs Club before joining the team here at inHouse. Over the years he’s been fortunate enough to explore nearly every facet of the industry, from kitchen stages to working FOH, writing for major publications and orchestrating pop-ups with nearly 200 star chefs from around the world.
