More Than a Delicacy

For foodaholics, cuisine is the first thing comes in mind when thinking of a person, a place or an event, like the mellow goat’s milk boiled by your grandmother, the delicate dim sum in Guangzhou or the feast on New Year’s Eve. And usually, with time rolling on, the face of the person grows hazier, the scene of the place dims out and the clamor of the event recedes to a distant murmur. But the flavor of the food, which cannot be touched and seen, amazingly remains evergreen in our memory and can even brings back all the color of the past. This is the magic power of food — beyond simply delicacy, it is about stories, culture, science and wisdom. This is also what Once Upon A Bite — a documentary about food unfolds.

The poster of Once Upon A Bite

Always on the Road Chasing Flavor

Completed more than two years, Once Upon A Bite welcomed its premiere on October 28^th 2018, securing a score of 9.4 out of 10 on Douban (a popular community website). Featuring Chinese food and interweaving the foreign counterparts, the team traveled the highways and byways of China, from France to Spain, Vietnam to Morocco, Peru to Iran. With fine narration and quality shooting, Once Upon A Bite provide us a feast of the uniqueness and diversity of food around the world. CHEN Xiaoqing, the Chief Director of the documentary, says in an article: “…flavor is more like a puzzle; it brings us sheer bliss as well as curiosity for this wonderful world.” In this documentary, leading an excellent team to travel home and abroad, he tries to unravel the puzzle of food.

The Microscopic World of Food

A highlight of Once Upon A Bite is the quality of the photography. Through some advanced techniques like ultra-micro photography and photomicrography, we can catch a glimpse of the tiny changes and texture of food, which give us a lifelike illusion that we are touching and feeling the texture. Ice flowers emerge on the meat one after another; gammons soak and absorb the salt; crystal dews adhere to wheat grains… Is there anything tinier than these? In this documentary, actually the answer is yes. Rather than stopping by the flavor food presents, it exposes the molecule world behind food, introducing us the scientific principles that create such a cuisine. Small as they are, they weigh heavily.

The ice flowers on the meat

Cultural Collision Seasons the Gammon

Eating habits are the epitome of a place’s culture. From cooking methods to eating styles, intriguing differences between regions are uncovered by Once Upon A Bite. The huge, stout gammon, a kind of cured ham, is a representative example. In China and Spain, gammons are both hung to dry for a year, but when they are to be eaten, they face different destinies. In China, gammons are cut into thick pieces, they jump vigorously into the wok with magical sauces to be piled together on the plate. However in Spain, the gammon is sliced into a paper-thin piece of meat, artfully formed into a delicate shape, it melts in the diners' mouths with its unique flavor. One is rustic and energetic, the other dainty and reposed, these two different versions of gammon reveal two different philosophies towards life.

Chinese gammon

Spanish gammon

Wisdom and Creation Make Your Mouth Water

Crabs always drive diners crazy — the stubborn and tempting cuisine keeps lingering in front of their eyes while they could do nothing with it because of its hard and sharp shell. Now comes their salvation. “…however in China, every part of the crab will be taken full advantage of.” When the voice-over comes on, a cook was separating the cooked crab into different parts. Wherever it is concealed, behind the hard shell, the meat is brought to light with special tools. Lightly poked into the shell, a piece drops onto the plate smoothly. And then, the biggest crab shell, which is the middle of the crab, serving as a plate holding a pile of crab meat, is roasted with a sheet of golden pastry covering on it. Such a creative combination breaks down the screen, and wraps viewers with its tantalizing aroma.

The pastry-covered crabs

There could be more subtitles to expound on everything else Once Upon A Bite contains, like the special annual feast of the minorities, the father and the son’s adventure of catching fish on the sea, the couple’s tacit cooperation in cooking… But words are too colorless to depict the fabulous and deep map of food. Therefore, it is time to explore the food kingdom in this documentary with your eyes and ears, and then walk around the kingdom with your own feet. Beautiful encounters are sure to greet you on the road.