A tasty challenge

Seven years ago, Sous-Chef Frank Zhang was faced with a savory challenge. He and his team of four were handed a "Black Box" filled with, among other things, 10 apples, five beets, two onions, demiglass, a square of cream cheese, balsamic vinegar, two lamb legs - the ingredients for a three-course Western-style meal.

All they had to do was to figure out just what that meal would look like - in 60 minutes or less.

In the end, Zhang, the sous-chef at Kranzler's Restaurant and Bar in Beijing's five-star Kempinski Hotel, concocted a pretty good meal - good enough to win first-runner up at the 2000 International Meal and Livestock Australia Black Box competition in Shanghai.

Now, the 44-year-old Zhang faces a fresh challenge: tapped to be the executive chef at the Olympic Village in 2008, Zhang will oversee a mostly Western-style menu to feed more than 20,000 Olympic guests - including athletes and the media.

Besides collecting ingredients and equipment, Zhang also must ensure that language and culture will not keep his brigades of mostly Chinese staff from dishing up palatable Western cuisine.

Like the ingredients hidden in the Black Box, the Olympic menu is still secret, says Zhang. But, he promises: "We will try our best to give the whole world the best impression." He's been cooking Western food since 1980.

Getting thousands of Chinese chefs to cook Western-style cuisine is no small thing. To help them out, the Chinese government has sent hundreds of chefs abroad to be trained. From Zhang's perspective, however, the cultural and language difficulties are manageable as long as the kitchens are managed properly.

"In every kitchen I have a section chef or sous-chef," he explains. "All of them are foreigners with expertise - German, Italian, American, Belgian, international, not just Chinese. They are in charge of their work place and there are clear organizational charts listing everyone's responsibilities."

Still, since the goal is to please the foreign guests - and give them familiar foods that also have a familiar taste - Zhang knows his hands are full.

Chef William Bolton, an American who worked for the 1984 and 1996 Summer Games in Los Angeles and Atlanta before moving to Beijing 10 years ago, explains why local chefs working for the Olympic Games face a huge challenge in making authentic meals for guests from around the world.

"Authenticity is in the palette," says 46-year-old Bolton, executive chef of the new restaurant Chef Too, as well as the take-out kitchen Chef To Go, located in Jenny Lou's food store near Chaoyang Park's west gate. "You can learn anything. You can learn a skill, but I don't think you can learn a memory. And taste has a large portion of memory attached to it."

Arthur Tian, who imports dairy products and Mexican and Italian ingredients for Beijing Prestige Foods Trading Company, agrees that a lack of history and culture can get in the way of authenticity if a Chinese chef is not trained well. He remembers watching a chef at a Holiday Inn in New York City spooning margarine onto a grill to cook bacon.

"He put on a lot - more than I thought he should," says Tian, 38. "But the bacon was crispy. I still don't know why he put so much margarine on the stove. He didn't measure, but he just did it and the bacon was crispy. If I was a chef I would add little, much less margarine because we [Chinese] think it's not healthy."

That's why Australian Chef Nicholas Blair, executive chef at China World Hotel's Aria restaurant, gets his chefs to taste the food they serve.

"For me, it's important that they eat what they make," explains Blair, 32. "You don't have to like it. Chinese chefs will always be Chinese chefs and they'll always love Chinese cuisine. But they're open-minded. They accept Western cuisine, but that doesn't mean they like it. So is that a cultural difference, or is that just an opinion?"

Blair rates language ability as the most important asset for Chinese chefs working in a Western-style restaurant.

"English is really a difficult language to understand," he says. "There are so many words that just sound the same - especially in the kitchen. We're brought up traditionally on French cuisine in schools. We talk in French, but we [also] talk in English. So how the hell does anyone understand what we're talking about? Equipment, food, names of dishes - I mean, if you just have a look at my menu, some in English, some in French. I'm surprised the customers understand, but apparently they do."

Thinking back to his early years in the kitchen, Zhang says that learning English was indeed the most vital part of his success as a Chinese chef working in a Western restaurant.

So did Aria's 38-year-old sous-chef Max Yan. He's one of a handful of Chinese chefs who was asked by the Olympic Committee to create an Olympic-themed dish based on a sporting event in the Games.

Yan's most memorable English lesson took place in a Western restaurant 20 years ago. It was memorable because he couldn't understand the German chef. He knew he had lots to learn.

It's this humility and work ethic that Blair says makes managing a kitchen in China less of a headache, despite cultural and language barriers that may arise from time to time. Based on his three years of experience in Hong Kong and Beijing, Blair believes Chinese chefs will do just fine during the Olympics.

"In Australia, all the cooks that come out of their apprenticeship call themselves chefs. That's the first thing they do. But if you ask chefs in Hong Kong or China what they do, [they'll say], I'm a cook. They accept that they don't know anything, but when they work they work with everything."

Although 37-year-old Raymond Liu, the pastry chef at the Beijing five-star Kunlun Hotel, will not be working at the Olympic Village, he's got the Olympic spirit anyway - and something to prove to the foreign guests staying at the Kunlun Hotel.

Liu has been making the sweetest of Western foods for almost 20 years. In 1994, he was in Miami, Florida, where he worked as a pastry chef for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.

"Back then, a lot of people still didn't know how much China had changed," Liu says. Modernization was turning China into a developed country, but, Liu guesses, many of the passengers on the cruise had no clue.

Some even called Liu and his Chinese colleagues "chinks" or "Chinamen". Besides disrespecting his nationality, Liu felt that they had also cast doubt on his ability to prepare pastries, cakes and pies the way Westerners liked them.

That's one reason why Liu takes his job so seriously at the Kunlun Hotel. Every day he has an opportunity to make desserts like cheesecake and Black Forest cake the way they're supposed to be made. Although they're generally too sweet for Chinese people, Liu says he's fallen in love with them.

In 2008, Liu says the world "will know that Chinese can do excellent Western food."

(China Daily 08/08/2007 page18)