Taichi Restaurant

Story

http://taichirestaurant.co.nz/

Taichi Restaurant

Food is a perfect bond that can bring people with different cultural backgrounds and different beliefs to sit around the same table. We invite you to come and enjoy a Cantonese family meal in our family-owned restaurant located in Spitfire Square in Christchurch.

Our restaurant is a Chinese restaurant that specialises in Cantonese cuisine as we are Cantonese descendants. Our family made the decision to migrate to New Zealand over 20 years ago, but we settled in New Zealand Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, with a great hope that we should keep our own origins to become part of the multicultural community.

Chinese cuisine is famous for its diversity across different regions and Cantonese cuisine originated from the Canton province and is one of the Eight Culinary Traditions of Chinese cuisine. Cantonese cuisine is famous for its ultimate efforts to keep the original taste of the primary ingredients. The flavours of a finished dish are well balanced so that the primary ingredients stand out with their original tastes. For the same reason, spices are used in very limited dishes to avoid overwhelming the flavours of the main ingredients, and these ingredients are often used when they are at the peak of their freshness.

We endeavour to adhere to this principle of freshness and original taste by growing some of the herb ingredients and vegetables in our own family farm in Christchurch. These home-grown fresh vegetables will be cooked and served to our customers fresh from the land.

Our restaurant was named by Professor Adam Lam, the Director of Confucius Institute at University of Canterbury during a casual conversation. Tai Chi is one of the most complicated concepts in Chinese culture so that it is a mission impossible to find an accurate translation into another language, as its complexity will be lost in translation. Although “Tai chi” is a form that represents English pronunciation, the original concept enjoys its untranslatability and is widely accepted as distinctive cultural icon that represents Chinese beliefs and philosophy all over the world.

We believe that Chinese cuisine shares great similarity with the concept of Taichi. While the Chinese cuisine in different parts of the world has taken into ingredients (forms) available locally, its uniqueness of its cooking methods makes it a distinctive cuisine to enjoy great popularity around the world.

China and New Zealand, one Eastern culture, the other Western culture, one in the Northern sphere, the other in the Southern sphere, but no matter Chinese descendants or local kiwi, we are all living under the same sky, which is also a key concept of Tai Chi: the harmonious unity of two extremes.