Midas Touch Creates New Chinese Dining Standard

It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that newcomers to the Kempinski Hotel's new-look Dragon Palace Chinese restaurant would be so overwhelmed by their surroundings and milieu that any thoughts of dining would immediately take a back seat. Happily, a glance at its recently redesigned menu would jolt them, mouth still agape, into one of the customized, faintly-Regency-style chairs, there to place a discreet, inquisitive finger on the superb tableware and all else that breathes sheer class into this arguably most luxurious of all Beijing Chinese dining venues.

Still agog, no doubt, our new guests would be equally enamoured of the gold-leaf, recessed circular ceiling and the restaurant's unique mix of carefully chosen artifacts, an ocular feast of old and new pieces of mainly Qing Dynasty furniture, bowls, sculptures and pictures, the last including a dominant depiction of an ancient Chinese banquet. The picture is teamed with a carefully preserved gu zhong, a stringed instrument on the lines of an elongated zither.

Such additions to the decor were very much the brainchild of Kempinski managing director Rene Schmitt, in his private life a considerable collector and expert in Chinese antiques, in collaboration with a designer.

"We were anxious for an old-and-new theme," he explained, "hence the coupling of, say, a Qing cabinet and modern piece of pottery, or vice-versa. The picture of horses near a forest was picked up quite cheaply at a Sunday market, a price multiplied four times by the cost of the frame. The important thing was that the picture was right for the Dragon Palace's ambience. So, in decorative terms, is a quite old silver winter-melon soup tureen, which we retrieved from hotel storage."

Whatever the antecedents of individual items on display, the "whole" makes the exercise justified. The pieces are not placed willy-nilly, the failing of the average restaurant lacking in real taste. Selection has been careful, settings properly thought through. For guests, the items are somehow complementary to the dining experience, and in no way intrusive.

The catch is that if one acknowledges Dragon Palace's main dining room as the ultimate, then take a peek into its two eight- or 10-seat private dining rooms. These offer intimate settings par excellence, which is why every lunchtime and evening sees them graced by a clientele straight from the pages of both the international and Beijing Who's Who.

Again, gold-leaf recessed ceilings -- and a whole lot more that elevates these venues out of sight of any competitor. Everything from the dragon-decorated Lazy Susans to the gold-plated tableware, including the cutlery, chinaware and everything else that form the elements of sheer class ... well, they are here, and they also include gold-tipped chopsticks and monogrammed napkins that almost defy the insult of one's dribbles.

For a restaurant reviewer, the agony of Dragon Palace is that there simply are not enough superlatives that pay it, its private dining rooms and integral Symphony Room full justice. One can only take a stab at it, knowing full well that even to produce a critique of its contemporary Chinese and Cantonese cuisines would be superfluous because, almost by definition, they could in no way suffer from shortcomings. With Chinese executive and sous chefs such as Wong Hok Yuen and Jack Zhang, no diner can go wrong. Both maestros, it is said, are credited with having never put a single grain of rice wrong, so to speak.

Reviewers naturally shy away from restaurants' descriptions of their own food, usually because they are delivered with all the subtlety of a bucket excavator and make claims that border on the laughable. I am not a critic, per se, but what I do know is that if you go to the design, quality and other lengths that keep Dragon Palace firmly among the top culinary experiences in Beijing, its cuisine must rate among the very best.
All those VIPs, many a gourmet among them, can't be wrong.