[ CHEW ON THIS ]
BETTY SHIMABUKURO / BETTY@STARBULLETIN.COM
Martin Yan demonstrates how to trim a bell pepper during an appearance at American Restaurant Supply. He would later trim the pepper into eight paper-thin layers.
Funnyman Yan
Martin Yan considers
good humor the medium
for his message
You'd be hard-pressed to find a chef who takes education more seriously -- and himself less seriously -- than Martin Yan.
To both those ends, he was lowering his rear end into a hot spring in Taiwan at 5 a.m. a week ago today. "I didn't realize it's so hot. It burned my butt!"
He took two eggs into the spring, to see if they'd poach (they didn't). The adventure -- captured on tape for his PBS cooking show -- required three retakes. "I was burned!"
Then it was a rush to a small airport to rush to Taipei to get on a flight to Hawaii. He arrived at 6:30 the next morning, only to find he couldn't check into his hotel until 3 p.m. "I had to wash and shave in the hotel bathroom."
But at 9 a.m., groomed and in fine spirits, Yan was in front of a small group at American Restaurant Supply in Pearl City, ostensibly to promote sales of his knife, but in reality teaching and making fun of himself.
Would he have gotten his hotel room, he mused, if he'd passed himself off as a famous local chef? "I should have said, 'I'm Roy Yamaguchi!' They probably take care of me and put me in a better bathroom."
Yan introduced his television show, "Yan Can Cook," in 1978 and since then, by his count, has hosted 1,800 cooking shows. He's written 25 cookbooks, runs a cooking school in San Francisco and last year launched a restaurant chain, Yan Can, with six locations in California. He plans to expand to all the countries that air his TV shows. That's 60 countries.
He's just completed four weeks of filming in Vietnam and Taiwan for the 2004 season of his PBS show, to be called "Martin Yan's Quick and Easy" (his current series is "Martin's Yan's Chinatowns," airing at 5 p.m. Saturdays on KHET/PBS).
And yet he had the time to do knife tricks and make jokes in front of maybe 20 people in a modest restaurant supply store on the fringes of town, just after a grueling plane trip.
"This business is people business," Yan said. "Doesn't matter how many show up."
Besides, he loves Hawaii and tries to bring his family for a vacation every year.
"When I come to Hawaii I go to see Roy Yamaguchi, Sam Choy, Alan Wong. They always buy me free dinner. You go to Sam Choy's, tell them you're Martin Yan's cousin -- you get free dinner. Go tonight. I give you my card; you buy my knife."
And so the patter ran as he went through his bag of tricks -- deboning a chicken in 18 seconds (actually it timed out at 20 seconds this time; must have been jet lag), cutting a 2-inch square of red bell pepper into eight thicknesses, each so thin you could read through it.
"Yan can cook, so can you. Yan can cut, so can you. Yan can't do it, don't even try."
The crowd was captivated, but not very expressive. "I have never seen anybody so impressed that they are stunned," Yan was forced to comment. "I have never been able to impress people so much."
Later, he'd sign autographs, taking the time for lengthy, made-up commentary: "To so-and-so ..." he'd write "... who is caring, generous, loving and very giving ..."
Yan began teaching while himself a student, of food science at the University of California-Davis. He paid for college by teaching Chinese cooking.
He considers his current career as more teaching. His shows travel to Asia each season, introducing not just the food, but also culture and history, always with good humor.
"I never wanted to be funny," Yan said. "I just wanted to have fun."
But observing such early TV hosts as Julia Child, Graham Kerr and Titus Chan, Yan learned that a distinctive personality and a funny side were necessary for teaching.
"Working as cooking professional I think what you want to do is keep them captivated. If no one watches, what good does it do?"
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