By Miao Qing (Shanghai Star)
Updated: 2006-07-06 14:44

It is rare for a restaurant in the city to pay as much attention to its menu as the Chinoise Story does. This newly-opened restaurant calls its book-thick menu a "florilegium" and attached a Chinese poetic sentence to the name of each dish listed in it.

It is not only the menu that makes this restaurant so impressive for visitors. The Chinoise Story claims every dish it offers is an original production of its own and this creativity can be seen in some of the strange names its dishes bear, such as "Amouse Bouche."

Although the food served is based on Chinese cuisine-mainly Cantonese and Shanghainese - the restaurant has introduced a Western custom to its exquisite dining tables. Diners find knives and folks laid out on tables, in addition to the usual chopsticks. Dishes are categorized into starters, main courses, seafood, soups, vegetarian diet and desserts, all prepared in servings appropriate for the individual diner.

In my own scale of priorities, the dishes themselves always come first when judging a restaurant. During a recent visit to the Chinoise Story, I tried seven different dishes, most of them original enough to be first time experiences, presented with unusual artistry.

The starter "Amouse Bouche" combined two different dishes - "chawanmushi in abalone jus" served in an opaque glass, with crispy lychee crab meat on top. The white lychee flesh was wrapped by a thin fried wrapping which much resembled the real skin of a lychee. Inside the lychee flesh was a combination of crab meat and cheese. The "lychee" tasted crispy outside while its interior was very sweet due to the lychee flesh, but also savoury and slightly salty.

"Chawanmushi in abalone jus" was actually braised egg covered in abalone broth, which gave the dish a strong and delectable flavour. The braised egg tasted very tender, in perfect harmony with the broth.

What arrived next was the "home made fresh shark's fin salad," which included shark from Spain, based on a special method to keep the valuable ingredient as fresh as possible-this was not a dish that could be made at home. According to chef Shao Qinghong, the shark fin which had been frozen quickly was first soaked in mineral water and then added to a long-cooked broth before being cooled.

Unlike the more usual shark fin hot soup, the creative shark fin jelly tasted tender, fresh and mild. Mixed with XO catsup and slightly spicy vegetables, the salad was quite strongly flavoured.

The main course I chose was a fusion dish, combining grilled lamb cooked in what seemed a Western style and turnip cake cooked in the Chinese way. Shao said he had prepared the lamb imported from the New Zealand using more than six different spices, including green curry, in order to remove its original smell. Looking splendidly dark-red, the lamb tasted very tender, thick and well-seasoned due to the red wine sauce. The turnip cake was a bit more strongly-flavoured and so soft it melted in the mouth.

The other dishes I sampled also represented the innovative way the Chinoise Story integrated global ingredients while giving them a creative twist - for example, dumplings stuffed with shrimp meat, steamed fillet of soon hock (a kind of fish) served with three different mushrooms and black truffles, or ball-shaped ice cream contained in a hollowed green kumquat. The dessert at the end had a claim to the most impressive presentation, as a glass of volatilizable ice was used for decoration, which was inserted into a huge bowl of ice together with three cups of fruit juice.

The Chinoise Story, which occupies a two-level space and consists of four distinctively styled rooms, features luxurious and elegant fashion in its exterior design and furniture. One room on its second floor is especially interesting and nostalgic, for the tables and chairs placed there represent the typical splendid pattern belonging to the northeast of China. The whole restaurant has the capacity for 180 guests, in addition to five private rooms.

What also impressed me about the restaurant were the costumes of the waitresses, which also combined East and West. With a black background and colourful patterns, the dress designs resembled Western swallowtail style and even daringly bared the navels of the waitress.

The Chinoise Story
Location: No 59 South Maoming Road, inside Jinjiang Hotel
Tel: 021-64451717