Feature: Chef of Chinese food in U.S. glad to serve as cultural ambassador

CHICAGO, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Martin Yan is a household name in the United States. Born in China's southern Guangdong Province, he gained his fame here by teaching Americans how to cook Chinese food.

At a meeting of the 2016 National Chinese Language Conference (NCLC) on Friday, Yan said food is culture, heritage and a lifestyle, and reminds one of where he comes from and his background.

"I consider myself a culinary and cultural ambassador," Yan told Xinhua.

Yan said when he first came to the United States, there were 6,000 or 7,000 Chinese restaurants. Now there are some 54,000, more than all the fast-food chains combined in the country.

In Yan's point of view, Chinese restaurants here in America serve almost everything because of the need for diversity and for their own survival. But sooner or later, "more and more Chinese restaurants will be specialized, say Shanghai restaurant, dumpling restaurant," he said.

Yan is practically the first chef to bring Chinese food to the world on TV. When he began his career as an on-air chef for a local Calgary TV station in 1978, there were few chefs in the cooking-show arena.

Yan has been hosting his award-winning PBS-TV cooking show "Yan Can Cook" since 1982, and has produced more than 1,500 episodes so far, catching the attention and imagination of the American audience.

"I can say that I was the first Chinese-American breaking into the mainstream media, a mainstream American television medium," Yan said in an interview with Xinhua.

Yan even incorporated Chinese acrobatic skills into his cooking show. "When you want to appeal to a broad audience, you have not only to be educational, you also have to be entertaining to attract and captivate your audience ... you gotta be very animated, have fun," he said, "Then people accept you as their friend, whatever you say, much easier."

"You build a friendship, you build a bridge, because I'm the bridge between the American and Chinese culture ... people can cross that bridge and enjoy and understand Chinese culture through food and cooking," he added.

For the longest time, people always thought that Chinese food is fast food: cheap, inexpensive. "That is not true," Yan said.

He mentioned the Man Han Quan Xi (combining Manchurian and Han Chinese delicacies) -- the Imperial Banquet, saying some of the Chinese food are refined, elegant and great -- from the serving ware, from the surface and the selection of ingredients.

"Chinese food, just like any fine cuisine in the world, the French cuisine, the Italian cuisine, or any other cuisine, is the finest cuisine to its best in terms of execution, choice of ingredient, freshness, and how food is prepared," he said proudly.

Besides being the host of a popular cooking show, Yan has travelled and taught cooking classes in the United States and all over the world in the last 30 years.

"I travel to China practically eight times a year" in search of the best Chinese food. "So I can learn and I can introduce all the things I have tasted to people from around the world," he said.

The American Culinary Federation has designated him a Master Chef, and he was also elected an outstanding Chinese figure in 2013 at an official cultural event in China.

Initiated in 2008, the ongoing 2016 NCLC in Chicago is the ninth session. Under the theme of "Ambassadorship in Action," more than 1,300 officials, university presidents and school principals, experts and teachers from the United Stats, Canada and China attended this year's session to share and exchange their Chinese language teaching and learning experiences in four plenary meetings and over 90 workshops.