(China Daily)
Updated: 2007-03-15 09:43

Many Chinese restaurants offering local cuisine claim to offer "genuine" local food. But who can tell if that claim is correct? Most of their customers will not know what "genuine" food tastes like anyway. The secret of making a genuine plate of local grub is to make it with ingredients from the area.

Yuguifei literally, imperial fish concubine, a restaurant offering Guizhou-style boiled fish in tomato soup, as well as other Guizhou specialities, claims to do exactly that. The wild tomatoes used to make their hot pot soup are said to be transported from Guizhou. Wujiang River fish, a speciality of the region, is shipped to the capital, along with a number of other major ingredients and seasonings.

The sour tomato soup is served from a stainless steel basin on an electric-magnetic stove. First of all the staff will get you a bowl of the soup to try, before putting the pre-boiled fish into it. As well as Wujiang River fish, there is catfish , grass carp , black fish, and sea bass to choose from.

The restaurant offers a special sauce to dip the fish in, which is a tasty mixture of preserved soy beans, preserved bean curd, and fried red chili and pieces of peanut.

When you finish the fish, you can add the vegetables, beef and mushrooms into the tomato soup, as with an ordinary hot pot.

Other Guizhou specialities worth trying are the rice bean curd with chili sauce , Guizhou-style preserved pork and sausage , and Guizhou rice noodles with beef . Steamed rice soup with eight treasures is a good mildly sweet dessert, with ingredients such as sunflower seeds and red beans. The sour sweet plum drinks and corn juice are also worth a try.

The restaurant is adapted from a previous restaurant and the decor is nothing special. The tableware is like what you would find in an ordinary home-style restaurant.

The menu is in Chinese, with the main dishes color illustrated. Average spending is 50 yuan per person.

Opening hours: 11am-11:30pm.
Address: Opposite Jing'an Market, 45 Jing'anli, Chaoyang District, 100 meters inside the three-way crossroad south of the International Exhibition Center.
Tel: 010-8608-1619.