The term of 'Taiwanese cuisine' was initially adopted by the Japanese colonizers in the early Japanese colonial period to refer to the local banquet dishes in Taiwan. Until the late 1930s, Taiwanese cuisine was identified by restaurants, nationalists and Japanese tourists as 'dishes [which] originated from Chinese Mainland, but had a lighter taste to adapt to the Taiwanese people's preference.' This identification was mainly built upon the banquet dishes in restaurants, reflecting the dining experiences and preferences of the upper class in the colonial Taiwan. In contrast to banquet dishes, home cooking and local food was increasingly attached importance during the wartime in the late colonial period because of the lack of food and the promotion of local cultural activities. Along with the Local Food Movement promoted during the wartime in Japan, some Japanese scholars and Taiwanese writers with enthusiasm for preserving Taiwanese local culture started to investigate and record Taiwanese local foods and folk dietary culture in Taiwan, highlighting the values and significance of these foods for Taiwanese people. The publication of magazine 'Folk Taiwan' and other articles served as a platform on which Taiwanese home cooking and local food could be entextualized. In addition to textualization, one Taiwanese intellectual Wang Jingchuan further represented these local dishes in the banquet menus of his restaurant Shanshuiting (Mountain and Water House), displaying the common living experiences of Taiwanese people. This article examines the process by which Taiwanese local dishes were textualized and represented during the WWII, and also analyzes the historical significance of this development. Although the original restaurant Shanshuiting has closed and the 'Taiwanese cuisine' highlighted by these intellectuals hasalso changed with the new social conditions after WWII, the textualization of Taiwanese local food during the wartime served as a crucial foundation on which Taiwanese foodways can be understood nowadays. The interpretation and construction of a 'Taiwanese cuisine' during the wartime period is also a valuable example for the formulation of a new Taiwanese cuisine in modern Taiwanese society.