Bah. Sounds like simple food with overdone presentation for profit. I've been to a few of those places.
Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan, a wealthy province that has been part of China since the Han Dynasty (~0; ±200years).
I live just next door in the next province to the south, Yunnan, which is far more geographically diverse, as well as culturally - as for the most part it avoided Chinese hegemony for another thousand to fifteen hundred years. As you'd imagine, frankly our general food standard is far better than that of Sichuan: the population is lower, ingredients are more numerous, fresher and less likely to be adulterated, and we still have dozens of concurrent culinary traditions. There's a far greater appreciation on wild or non market-supplied ingredients. The flip side to this is that we perhaps have less ultra-rich, and therefore the market for showy restaurants is less developed.
If anyone is seriously in to Chinese food and/or considering visiting this restaurant, give me a holler in Yunnan and I'll show you some local culinary masterpieces at a fraction of the expense. To be honest, I like the food so much, I'm considering opening a restaurant myself: bitcoin appreciated! :)
(Note: 14 years as a vegetarian, many of which were in Yunnan, so I came to love and know intimately the variety of fresh cuisine. Fern, bamboo shoots, wild shrooms, marijuana seeds, mountain goat cheese, loads of weird fruits, etc... yum!)
The weird thing about Chengdu is that they don’t have kungpao chicken, which is actually just Beijing-style Sichuan food. You can have inauthentic Chinese food even China.
Hey, that's my hometown! Never thought I'd see it mentioned here, and about food, no less! Chengdu is almost regarded as synonymous with awesome food, and laid-back vibe in China. Oh and Pandas.
I'm going back there next week after two years, and I can't wait to get me some delicious, delicious Szechuan cuisine.
Haha, Chengdu is the only one I've been to (having been lots of other places in China). Oh, okay Beijing too...fine.
Best cuisine? Frankly I liked the old Hui stronghold of Ningxia the best. Plain old noodle soup, but to perfection every time. And very good who-knows-what-that-might-be-but-who-cares-its-delicious satay all around. Chengdu would be a close second though.
While I respect the culinary history of China, IMO SE Asia and India both blow all regions of China out of the water. (Though Taiwan, if you think of it as part of China, being my first ever overseas habitat, holds a bit of a soft spot in my cuisinitude).
Nice, now I have the urgent need to go to one of the true Chinese restaurants that I know, the sichuan style beef maybe is not the same that you are going to find in china, but it’s really different enough from the rest of Chinese restaurants that I know
Sichuan cuisine in the Bay Area is atrocious compared to the real deal. Maybe Cantonese or Hunan fare better but unfortunately I don't like these cuisines nearly as much.
BTW, I'm neither American nor Chinese, so I don't have any national pride involved either way. I just happen to have spent multiple years in both countries.
Good job tracking down the dianping reviews. There's 102 photos, with http://www.dianping.com/photos/23523792 the only one showing a fully set table. It looks like there's a strategy of using slightly uncommon ingredients for the southwest (okra for example) and, predictably, the time-honored strategy of serving everything in tiny portions (very rare in China; generally the opposite is true), with perhaps slightly uncommon but not necessarily expensive Jingdezhen (???) porcelain (FT author was clearly confused here). Silken tofu in whatever sauce is still silken tofu, pure and simple. I would have been more impressed to see hand-made tofu products, which Sichuan has significant history in, including famous derived sauces. I see at least two references to Yunnan cuisine: the banana leaf wrapped meat and vegetables (frankly doesn't appeal, Southeast Asia and Yunnan's Tai (?; dai) of ???? (xishuangbanna; my home for 2.5 years) and ?? (dehong) do it better), then some dragon fruit (???; huolongguo). I feel the reliance on imported seafood shows the chef's strategy is more a poorly masked play to popular taste and business than a truly local tradition driven culinary exploration, as FT has presented it.
Eep, I'm sorry. I should learn to read better. Totally was not trying to put words in your mouth.
To your comment about Sichuan, I'm not sure I would be in the same camp as the people you've spoken with. Ultimately everyone shares culinary attributes to some degree, but it seems to be unique enough to have warranted being considered its own cuisine.
Using a place which is intentionally pan-regional to make a statement about regions is not an anti-example. Also, I didn't make the original statement. And, no one said Sichuan was northern Chinese cuisine. So I'm a bit confused as to who and what you think you're responding to.
Kung Pao chicken in Beijing is the perennial sichuan dish that you can barely find in chengdu (and even then, it's just for the eastern tourists).
Most of the authentic Chinese resteraunts in the San Gabriel Valley are not in basements, but in strip malls. Heck, these days china town isn't the best place for Chinese food in most cities (seattle, San Francisco, Beijing, Vancouver), rather some suburb they has a large rich Chinese population is. Most of the authentic food you get in American china towns are very old school Cantonese, while Chinese food is much more diverse than that.
I've only been to China once (Guanzhou), but it was very hard to find vegetarian food. Everything everywhere seems to have duck or pork in it. The variety is definitely lacking compared to Europe or North America.
It's nice to see a Chinese chef marrying traditional cooking with elements of international haute cuisine. Hopefully this will become a trend, and Ms Dunlop is the perfect person to observe it.
The 3 reviews are actually all positive despite one of them giving low ratings. They praise the place's traditional & intimate ambiance, intricate presentation and plating, and of course the taste of the food. Price per person is about RMB450, or US$73 - very high for China, as the article notes.
- I couldn't find evidence via Google that Japanese people are discussing the restaurant online, but maybe it's spreading via non-public word of mouth.
- After sharing this article on Facebook, I have friends interested in visiting Chengdu. Let's see if this becomes a small phenomenon among the international gastronomic crowd.
This is a terrible example because that’s one cuisine where the western experience and the China experience are significantly different. I’m talking even authentic restaurants not Panda Express.
https://youtu.be/-AZ87qyHQ88
The video is a Sichuan master chef showing the cooking procedure. He speaking of Sichuan accented mandarin.
Gongbao jiding is traditional Sichuan dish.
You might simply did not see that on menu at chengdu. Sichuan has 80million people, chengdu 16million, it’s expected to see highly clustered food style even in a city.
Sichuan seems pretty popular in the USA these days.
In the medium-sized city where I live, there is a standard American Chinese place by a university which is frankly not very good even for American Chinese food, but was owned by people from sichuan and would make off menu sichuan dishes for immigrant students. But they noticed non-immigrant Americans ordering them too, and wisely noticed the general trend going on, and the same owners up a different place a few miles away with actual sichuan food and prices 2x+ higher, which has been very successful. :)
In Philadelphia there's also the popular Han Dynasty chain of sichuan places.
I'd imagine even the places with food closer to "actual" sichuan food, if they are popular with non-Chinese people, have "Americanized" to some extent. I couldn't say as they are my only exposure to it! But I know sometimes I get something where the flavors/textures are just TOO different than what I'm used to, and I just don't like it!
Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan, a wealthy province that has been part of China since the Han Dynasty (~0; ±200years).
I live just next door in the next province to the south, Yunnan, which is far more geographically diverse, as well as culturally - as for the most part it avoided Chinese hegemony for another thousand to fifteen hundred years. As you'd imagine, frankly our general food standard is far better than that of Sichuan: the population is lower, ingredients are more numerous, fresher and less likely to be adulterated, and we still have dozens of concurrent culinary traditions. There's a far greater appreciation on wild or non market-supplied ingredients. The flip side to this is that we perhaps have less ultra-rich, and therefore the market for showy restaurants is less developed.
If anyone is seriously in to Chinese food and/or considering visiting this restaurant, give me a holler in Yunnan and I'll show you some local culinary masterpieces at a fraction of the expense. To be honest, I like the food so much, I'm considering opening a restaurant myself: bitcoin appreciated! :)
(Note: 14 years as a vegetarian, many of which were in Yunnan, so I came to love and know intimately the variety of fresh cuisine. Fern, bamboo shoots, wild shrooms, marijuana seeds, mountain goat cheese, loads of weird fruits, etc... yum!)
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