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.
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!)
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.
My feeling after living in China for a decade and comparing her review with the photo evidence: similarly unimpressed.
Her other books get comments like "Repetitive, disjointed and boastful", "trite anecdotes and sweeping cliches, all exclaimed wide-eyed and breathlessly", "The recipes are different from the traditional Chinese recipes", "Her excuses for eating fancy food and endangered species were bogus". The ones you can Look Inside! contain mentions of Mencius and Marco Polo, and describe ?? (baijiu; a critically important class of alcohols in Chinese banquet culture and cooking) as simply 'rice vodka'.
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.
> When you look at vegetarian cuisine outside of india, with very few exceptions in terms of restaurants and few exceptions in terms of dishes, it looks like unimaginative dimwits took to the pans.
If you've only experienced chinese food at the typical US chinese restaurant, then you may be deceived as to just how wonderful the underlying sauces and flavors can be. But if you get a chance to explore the space, you may want to look at the the "Chinese Cooking Demistified"[1] youtube channel, and on youtube there are 2 seasons of what look like culinary tourism bait called "Flavorful Origins"[2] (which is not exclusively vegetarian) I think that when you start to see some of the incredible available flavors in just the 2 regions they've covered (neither of which are szechuan, hunan, or shanghai, which are better known for their cuisine in the west), you may re-consider the sentiment I quoted.
Which in no way diminishes how incredible the vegetarian cuisine of india is.
> As for tantanmen, apparently real tantanmen (if you can call any food real) is the Chinese kind where there's a thick oily spice sauce at the bottom of the bowl and you have to stir it up. In other words there's no soup.
Oh, yes. The Chinese word is dandanmian, though, and most English-language menus will write it as "dan dan noodles" (and I've seen it written as "dong dong noodles", too).
Where I live (Dallas suburbs), there's one really amazing authentic Sichuan place -- Royal Sichuan -- which serves actual, authentic dandanmian, and it's some of the best food I've ever had in my life. I can't get enough of it.
> if I visit all 3 Chinese grocery stores in the Seattle area (Asian Food Center in Seattle, Ranch 99 in Shoreline, Jing Jing in Factoria), I could probably get 6 or 7 in total out of 11
Are you sure?
I’m pretty sure you can get all but the Jianshui one (I actually don’t know what this is) at 99 Ranch in San Jose.
The catch is that someone might not know what these various tofus are if they don’t know what they look like uncut and/or they don’t read Chinese.
> The "20 kinds of tofu" you can get in any Chinese grocery stores are often slightly changed variants (i.e. silk, soft, firm, hard tofu are pretty similar)
This is definitely not true at 99 Ranch. There are way more than that.
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.
I cannot speak for the intent of the other person in this thread, but I was attempting to tie it back to your comment at the root of this thread, but based on your response it appears that the comments are intended to standalone. I apologize for the misunderstanding.
Still, your comments about Chinese cuisine are strange.
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> The north is a lot more spicy stuff. The south is more about sauces and freshness.-
This is wrong, where did you get this information from?
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> Using a place which is intentionally pan-regional...
How is Sichuan cuisine "pan-regional"? Can you elaborate, please?
I didn't say the first quote -- that's twice you've misattributed the same thing -- and the second is what Chinese people tell me about Sichuan cuisine, that it incorporates spices and dishes from many neighboring regions.
This is a nice article, but it does have some parts that seem off base. First you can walk into any chinese grocery store (in america) and get 20 kinds of tofu, thats really not an issue, and chinese restaurants (in chinatown) will sell many kinds of tofu.
The other is that the author makes the mistake of over emphasizing the vegetarianism aspect (which i think some comments here also are). Many chinese dishes with tofu flavor them with meat. Outside of a temple, the vegetarian aspect isnt really important, tofu is just another dish. Tofus attachment with being a meat replacement or a vegetarian food is the major reason its not eaten more by americans.
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.
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
That's such a weird question. You're reacting to the headline as if it was the central part of the article and not, well, a hook for the article's story about China's rich tofu culture and the author's efforts to learn how to prepare it.
Honestly, I wish it was more of a staple if anything. It's surprisingly hard to find really good Sichuanese food. I've had mapo tofu that ends up tasting more like a poorly done Hunan dish because of an unpleasant sourness and thickened sauce, even in restaurants that claim to be Sichuanese.
By far though, one of the best Sichaunese dishes which is unfortunately (and surprisingly) overlooked is their whitefish. If you know you 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.
I can confirm some of the Chinese dishes are on point, such as the dim sums like HarGow, ShuMai, Cheung fun.
I appreciate they don’t even bother with a recipe, and tell you where to eat it. This conforms with the Chinese eating culture: there are foods that should be left to restaurants.
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