VOA常速英语:厨师Tim Ma的美食

My name is Tim Ma, I am the chef and the owner of Kyirisan, Water & Wall and Chase the Submarine.

So my parents are first generation immigrants, they both came from Taiwan to Arkansas sometime in the 70s.I can’t recall the year, they didn’t speak English and just landed in Arkansas, of all places.

My parents surely taught me about working hard, like, they came to America for the American dream.And you know, what they were escaping in China to land in Taiwan and then come to America was you could make your own destiny.You could work hard and that would lead you to your dream.

So we specialize, here at Kyirisan, in Chinese French cuisine.I grew up in a very Chinese environment but I’m train in French cooking.

This was an expression of the melding of the two things that I know.For sure, a lot of attention is paid on a scallop dish that we do here, we simply wanted to match basil and coconut.

And we got to this point where we’re like, “Well, let’s just do something off the wall and see what happens.”

And we were like, “What if we take something cold and melt it in something hot and that infuses the flavor by mixing it in?”And that’s where we landed with ice cream.

The response was good, just started steamrolling from there and that’s one of our more popular dishes.

So my wife and I have three children, ages one and a half, four and six.

And in our family we have generation names, and my children’s generation happens to be the last one.And so their generation name is “Kun,” but we pronounce it “Kyin”.So the name Kyirisan comes from “kyin” and then “yi, er, san” one-two-three for our children in Chinese.And we just pushed it all together and called it Kyirisan.

My children definitely make me smile but I like to say that I have three biological children and I have like, 50 or 60 work children.

I’m always at work, I’m at work seven days a week, and I want to be around people that I enjoy spending time with.Because you spend almost more time with the people that you work with than you do with your family and friends.

And so, you know, coming to work makes me smile, when I get home I don’t want to cook. You know, open the mac and cheese box and dump it in with some milk and butter and it’s done.

I don’t like to cook outside of the restaurant which is actually surprising to a lot of people.I also think that’s true of a lot of chefs, you know, I get all my cooking out of me while I’m here.

One thing that probably a lot of people don’t know about me was: through the places that we lived I was actually bullied a lot.

And I think that set me up to, for one, have more compassion as a chef in what I’m doing and sometimes try and equalize everything,because I came up through a very non-equal environment, and I sometimes would be, not punished for that, I would be bullied for that.

I do believe that I’m creative as a chef, but I also think that a lot of our success, up to this point, has been through just sheer hard work.

I think, in this country, you can create your own success, just by working hard.Not because you’re smarter than anybody, not because you’re more creative than anybody just by working hard and that’s, I think, that’s why a lot a people end up coming to America.