Steaming soups
(Beijing Weekend)
Updated: 2005-03-18 17:34

China may be home to the most sophisticated soups in the world. Soup is not only a soothing and healthy way to start a meal, in China soups often contain many traditional medicinal herbs.

In Guangdong, where local people maintain the tradition of drinking nourishing soup everyday, different soups are designed for people with different physical conditions. It is said the soups not only help people become stronger, but also help them recover from some chronic illnesses.

Drinking soup before meals can replenish the body's needed water, while moistening the gullet and helping dry food to go down more easily. Soup is also easy to digest and helps prevent problems such as inflammation of the stomach and intestines.
Soups are especially good for people living in Beijing because of the often dry winters.

Shenji Best Soup (Shen Ji Liang Tang) is based in Shanghai. But its Beijing branch has been serving up steamy bowls of soup for more than five years and offers some of the capital’s best soups.

With a big red poster above the front gate of the restaurant’s traditional Chinese architecture, the eatery is quite eye-catching on Xindong Lu, not far from the Yuyang Hotel.

A look at the menu and one will discover many representatives of both Cantonese and Shanghai style dishes, priced from the mid to high-price range. There are also many choices of South China style xiao chi or small eats at the restaurant.

Although there is only one page on the main menu listing the soups that are available, there is a special stand at one side of the restaurant where around 10 different soups are sold.

Four soups are served in small white pots for one person. These include crab and Chinese gourd, snake and old chicken, abalone and chicken, and chuanbei (tendril-leaved fritillary bulb of Sichuan origin) with crocodile.

Other soups are served in small-sized and medium-sized clay pots with a big body and a small opening, which are prepared on the spot by the cooks at the stand.

Different soups can in fact help different ailments, but eating the wrong soup may do just the opposite.

The restaurant makes a point of this by listing, on the first two pages of the menu, a diagram about what soups people with certain physical conditions should drink. But unfortunately they do not go into enough detail to specify which soups are best for which conditions.

For the spring, one waitress recommends a pigeon soup and a duck soup, which she says both clear excessive heat in the body while replenishing qi or vital energy.

A small-sized clay pot of Kunbu (kelp), green mung bean and old pigeon soup can be divided into six small bowls, enough for two people.

The soup is mild but warming. After the soup was finished, a waitress scooped a surprisingly large plate of pork from the bottom of the pot. The pork is boiled with the pigeon to make the soup.

The pigeon cannot be distinguished in the pile of mild-tasting pork because it has been boiled for more than eight hours, according to the waitress.

The restaurant's Cantonese and Shanghai dishes are delicious and worth trying. Dou Ban Hua Zi Gu (cold horsebean and golden mushroom) and Xi Qin Bai Guo Bai He Xia (shrimp with celery and lily bulbs) are also recommended.

The restaurant offers adequate service and a friendly staff. An average meal costs about 80 yuan (US$9.69) per person.

Location: To the south of No 1 Xindong Lu, Chaoyang District

Tel: 6532-1177