Delicacies
Savoring the best of East China
By Ye Jun (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-02-27 07:58
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Beijing
Yum Kitchen is a newly opened Zhejiang cuisine restaurant with rather good food quality. The eatery in Focus Mall at Wangjing provides some of East China's most popular dishes, presented in an innovative way.
The cuisine is known for being healthy and light, and the cold dishes are good examples. Lettuce slices are dried and marinated to proffer an unexpected crispy chewing sensation. Beef slices are served with chili sauce and crisp-roasted peanuts to launch appetites before the main courses.
Dried bamboo shoot is a traditional classic in the area, and here it is boiled and seasoned to make a fantastic appetizer. Lotus root filled with rice and South China-style smoked fish are also successful, with both salty and sweet tastes.
Marinated green crab in yellow rice wine, a classic Zhejiang specialty, tastes unexpectedly smooth but also fresh - the seafood smell is entirely eradicated by the rice wine.
There are even more good choices for a main course. The braised grass carp here are huge, weighing up to 1.5 kilograms, the bigger ones offer better taste than small ones. The fish has a flavorful sauce and exceedingly tender flesh.
Brown-braised pork feet served in clay pot are soft and flavorsome, although the one I tried unfortunately had a tiny patch with short, unshaved hair. Fried crab with glutinous rice dumpling and chili is a very interesting combination of sweet and spicy tastes. The reed wrapping of the rice dumpling is taken off and fried with crabmeat with cracked bone. The glutinous-rice dumpling absorbed a lot of flavor, and tastes as good as crabmeat.
Poached shrimp with dragon-well tea is artfully served on a bamboo tea plate. It had smoke coming out of its water tray with dry ice. The restaurant also serves a tasty duo of steamed bacon and preserved pork with great-tasting bamboo shoot slices layered beneath. Beef rib with bone and sauce must have been very nicely marinated beforehand, while a thoroughly boiled whole yellow chicken - very soft but light - was served with braised pork feet to present an interesting comparison.
Tender green peas are sauteed with pieces of preserved pork, a very healthy dish. Big pieces of turnip are boiled with bone-in pork leg to give it flavor. Finally, watercress and lean pork slices were boiled together in a clay teapot to produce a clear but tasty soup.
It seems the restaurant has a treasure trove of delectable Zhejiang dishes to explore. The dcor is modern and the waitresses good-looking, but sometimes you feel they are not very experienced. Average cost is around 150 yuan ($22) a person. But you can manage to pay much less. For example, you can order a whole duck soup at 108 yuan, and four bowls of rice - definitely enough for four.
China Daily
(China Daily 02/27/2011 page13)
