Diner’s Diary | Award-winning Taiwanese chef on why she’s closing Le Moût: too much marketing and social media

Ask award-winning chef Lanshu Chen why she decided to close one of Asia’s top restaurants and her answer is plaintive and illuminating: “I started to feel I’m not very good at playing this game.”

By that she means the constant whirl of marketing that comes with winning a string of awards for her French fine-dining restaurant Le Moût in Taichung, Taiwan, and coping with the social media age in which every diner considers themself a food critic.

“I need a break, but what I tried to say is that I’m not a very social person,” she says of the announcement of her decision to close on March 12 on Le Moût’s Facebook page.

“These past 10 years I’ve worked a lot to make my restaurants known by people in Taiwan first and then the rest of the world, and it takes a lot of my energy to do that.”

In her open letter, Chen writes that the fine-dining landscape has changed immensely since she started.

“Today everyone is a mass critic and their verdict has transformed into millions of nicely edited photos on the internet. Chefs have to come to the stage and speak. Restaurants need to survive by all means of public relation [sic] tactics. It is already very far from what I had been inspired by, in the old days of the grand chef era.”

Asked to elaborate, Chen says marketing Le Moût, which ranked 28th on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2017, means having to explain her story and philosophy, and create dishes that are eye-catching.