The culinary art of Ou Cuisine has travelled overseas along with Wenzhounese. Once it left, where did it go ¡ª and what did it become?
A port firstWenzhou¡¯s connection with the wider world goes back long before modern times. In 999, the second year of the Xianping era of the Northern Song Dynasty, Wenzhou was listed as a foreign-trade port; in 1132, the second year of the Shaoxing era of the Southern Song Dynasty, the city set up a customs agency to manage overseas trade. Wu Zimu's The Customs of Lin'an records more than forty kinds of seafood ¡ª dried scallops, shrimp, oysters, green mud crabs, swimming crabs, clams ¡ª arriving in the capital Lin'an from Wenzhou. Wenzhou's sea flavour was travelling nine hundred years ago.
When the port opened to foreign trade in 1876, Wenzhou's restaurants flourished, and dishes like jade-belt sea cucumber and crab steamed with egg white appeared on tables along Wuma Street. Wenzhou, ringed by hills on three sides, opens to the sea on the fourth. The sea was its way out ¡ª and Wenzhounese were already finding their way across it.
Kitchens followedThrough the 1980s and 1990s, large numbers of Ou cuisine chefs took jobs in Chinese restaurants in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Germany, making up a significant part of the kitchen staff. They carried more than dishes; they carried Wenzhou's banquet customs. To this day, dragon-and-phoenix cold platters appear at overseas Wenzhou weddings ¡ª platters built by chefs like Ye Guozhong in Spain and Chen Guangdi in France.
Ou cuisine has always borrowed and adapted: it takes Cantonese cuisine and adds a little salt and more thorough steaming; it takes Sichuan cuisine and cuts the heat; it takes Jiangsu cuisine and uses less sugar. Wenzhou cuisine is willing to adapt to different tastes without giving up its own character. That temperament is why, overseas, Ou cuisine has continued to blend so naturally with local food traditions.
A table across the seaToday the connection is more direct. In 2015, Wenzhou launched the World Wenzhou Ten-Thousand-Table Banquet, which has since become a platform for keeping Ou cuisine's craft alive. On 11 January 2025, thirteen Wenzhou hotels served the banquet at once ¡ª more than a thousand tables sold out in a day ¡ª and Wenzhou-run Ou restaurants in the United States, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Japan answered, setting the same feast on their own tables. One feast, tables an ocean apart ¡ª and each year, the tradition reaches a little farther.
At the same time, a Wenzhou-born couple living overseas began documenting Wenzhou food in short videos abroad, letting viewers around the world see the Wenzhou taste that crossed the ocean. Flavor no longer travels only by plane. It can travel online, too, making its way back home one screen at a time.
Where does Wenzhou flavour come from? The mountains and the sea provide the ingredients. Craft gives them shape. And the footsteps of the Wenzhounese keep the flavor moving.