The most brilliant chapter of Pan Xiaomin’s chef career is the years from 1997 to 2001 he worked at the Chinese embassy in Paris. In these years, he prepared 220 banquets at the embassy and beyond.

Born in 1951, Pan himself is not sure whether he was born to be a chef. In his memory of childhood years, he remembers enjoying candied dried fruits produced from his parent’s business. In good old days, such dried and sugared fruits were used as Spring Festival gifts for relatives and friends. They often came in finely wrapped packs. Pan was deeply impressed by the look of the finely sugared fruits. Many years later, he says that his passion for fine-looking dishes he cooks can go back to his earliest memory of the sugared fruits.

Another memory of his childhood years is about the fine balance a chef must make. A cook hired by his parents could do a lot of traditional dishes in the Suzhou style. The boy watched closely when the cook prepared luxury dishes for family reunion dinner on the eve of the Spring Festival. When he says the best chefs seek a flavor that appeals to the majority he is thinking about the family cook who made the best balance in the dishes he cooked.

In 1968, the 17-year-old Pan Xiaomin went to work at Kunshan where he worked as an apprentice at the kitchen of Kunshan Restaurant. A trainee usually spent three years to learn skills and master expertise. He worked hard from five o’clock in the morning till 9 o’clock in the evening. It took him one and half a year to graduate from the trainee program. In 1977, he came back to Suzhou and worked at a timber processing factory. About nine years, he stayed away from the kitchen. However, he was asked back to work at the restaurant of Xuecheng Tower in 1986. He rose fast in the kitchen. In 1992 he became its executive chef.

Pan Xiaomin comments that the job enabled him to master all the work of a restaurant kitchen, for example, how to design a menu for a banquet, how to prepare a banquet for several hundred or even over 1,000 guests, how to minimize waste and best use food ingredients, how to develop new dishes, and how to excite and satisfy the curiosity of diners, and how to seek the greatest profitability without employing additional hands or increasing costs.

All this led him to be chosen by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1997. It is widely known that the ministry prefers chefs who can cook in the style of Huaiyang Cuisine, a culinary art that emerged and consummated in Jiangsu, can integrate other culinary styles. That year, recruiters from the ministry came to Suzhou and Yangzhou, the home region of the Huaiyang Cuisine, to find chefs for Chinese embassies. Pan Xiaomin was on the list of candidates. The test was simple: design four totally different menus within ten minutes for a banquet within a 2,000-yuan budget (it was a fortune back then). He designed four menus within ten minutes. The examiners read the menus and said he passed the written exam. The next day, he was asked to prepare all the dishes from one of the four menus he designed. He was stopped after he made the first dish on the menu. He was scared a little bit, thinking he had failed. The examiners explained that he passed and one course showed his skills and expertise.

He was sent to China’s embassy in Paris. He learned later that chefs highly appreciated by examiners in tests and interviews would be sent to important embassies such as ones in the UK, the USA, France, and Russia, for chefs at the embassies there see a heavier workload as there are more diplomatic events and activities. Years later, Pan joked to his friends that he regretted performing so excellently at the examination or he wouldn’t have got such responsibilities for preparing important banquets at the embassy.

He arrived at the embassy on July 14, 1997, the national day of France. His first important assignment was to make a reception at the embassy on the Army Day, celebrated on August 1 in commemoration of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army in 1927.

The banquet Pan Xiaomin designed for foreign guests who came to the reception was a huge success. Though it was made in typical Chinese style, the new chef modified the cooking and ingredients so that the dishes appealed to the guests. Chinese ambassador Wu Jianmin went out of his way to meet and praise Pan for his brilliant performance. Pan recalls he felt hugely proud at that moment. His most impressive assignment in France was cooking at French President Jacques Chirac’s castle home. The French President Jacques Chirac received the visiting Chinese Premier at home. Pan tagged along to prepare Chinese dishes for some Chinese visitors who, not accustomed to western-styled food, preferred Chinese food. After seeing the Chinese dishes consumed by Chinese visitors, President Chirac said he wanted to try Chinese food. Pan prepared four dishes and one soup. The French President liked Chinese food very much. The next morning, the President came to the kitchen to express his appreciation of Pan’s brilliant work and gave him two bottles of wine and a pack of cheese as gifts. A few years ago, Pan gave one bottle of wine from the French President to his son as a gift when the junior got married. 

In early 2001, Pan Xiaomin came back to China and was engaged to prepare banquets for international visitors when China was going all out to get the approval for hosting the Olympic Games in 2008. After the success of the application in July, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked if he would like to work at the Chinese embassy in the United States. Pan declined the offer, saying his mother was in poor health and his son was about to attend the national college entrance examination. Six years and one month after his flight to Paris, Pan boarded a train back to Suzhou. He resumed working as an executive chef at the restaurant at Xucheng Tower until he retired.