Related stories

Shanghai Dining Experience in the Heart of Beijing Feng Ze Yuan: Old-World Charm in a Quality Hotel Best Food for Olympic Guests at Top Hotel Midas Touch Creates New Chinese Dining Standard Superb New Business Club ‘Crownes’ Plaza’s Success

Innovation Brings New Experience

China’s most popular cuisines are the Sichuan and Guangdong (Cantonese). It is said that there are more than 50 cooking methods in Sichuan cuisine including the most widespread “fish sauce” (yuxiang) method, gong bao (Gong is a name and bao a method of rapidly dipping meat in oil and withdrawing it) and “water boil” (shuizhu, which uses oil, not water, filled with peppers to cook fish or meat), while Guangdong dishes are good at using a broad range of raw ingredients, especially rare seafood. The most expensive Chinese dishes, such as shark’s fin and abalone, originated in Guangdong, but the Crowne Plaza Park View Wuzhou now presents some alternatives in its Chinese restaurant, and the comparatively common, but innovative and delicious dishes, are worth a try.

But what is common? If you study the menu, you will find the cooks have chosen to use some common ingredients.

Sautéed shrimp balls with sesame and dragon fruit, braised chicken and frogs served in casserole, fried bean curd with apricot seeds in chicken sauce and cold green kale sashimi are recommended by the chef and all the ingredients are commonly available, so the prices are also common, with most of them less than 100 yuan.

Why innovative? One is the cooking methods and the other the implements. The chef uses special methods. For example, the cold green kale sashimi is placed in a dish made of ice with a sauce for sashimi, and the diners dip the uncooked, or rather, fresh kale into the sauce and have it as sashimi. Braised chicken and frogs served in a casserole is called jiji wawa bao in Chinese. Jiji and wawa refer to the sound made when the dish is heated by fire. How to cook a dish that can “speak” is a chef’s secret and you’ll have to explore for yourself. Accompanying the unique cooking methods are the implements from both Chinese and international cuisines. To prepare a dish called double-boiled fish soup, the chef uses a special water-holding paper often used in Japanese hotpot cooking.

How delicious? Try it and then you will know.