Nick Yang

The Training Before Tainan became the center of his current work, Yang founded Sinasera 24 in Taitung, Taiwan. There, his dishes reflected a refined, French-inspired style that avoided unneeded complexity and let ingredients speak for themselves. That earlier chapter was pivotal, as it gave his cooking a disciplined grammar: clarity, restraint, and attention to the ingredient before the gesture. At Sinasera 24, he became associated with farm-to-table cooking that used local market and seasonal ingredients to make the flavors of Taitung stand out. The philosophy running through that period can be stated plainly: eat with the seasons and source from the land. It is a cook’s rule with the cadence of rural life, and it follows him from the east coast to the old capital.

The Lineage At YuDao in Tainan, Yang’s cooking is modern New Taiwanese cuisine rooted in local ingredients and history. The restaurant gives his earlier restraint a different inheritance: familiar flavors become a way to tell Taiwan’s layered history and evoke nostalgia. Rather than treating tradition as a fixed object, the kitchen works through recognition. A flavor may arrive like something remembered from home, then reveal the labor of a chef who has learned to let place speak first. The line from Sinasera 24 to YuDao is therefore not a break but a widening. Taitung taught the value of season, market, and product; Tainan gives those values another archive, one shaped by local memory, regional ingredients, and the emotional force of food that feels known before it is explained.

The Table YuDao’s signature dishes include Cigu milkfish tartare and venison from Tainan’s Nansi District. Both point to the way Yang builds a meal from specific Taiwanese ground rather than from abstraction. Other favorites at the restaurant have included abalone and coconut soup with puff pastry, Changbin prawn torched à la minute, Nansi Sika deer tsukune, and black pork with an incredible crust. The range moves from coast to mountain, from market freshness to deeper savor, without losing the sense of a local story being told course by course. In 2026, MICHELIN Guide Taiwan awarded Yu Dao one Michelin star, Opening of the Year, and a Green Star. Taken together, those honors recognized not only the restaurant’s cooking, but also the seasonal and land-based ethic that has followed Yang from his Taitung chapter into Tainan.