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Feng Ze Yuan: Old-World Charm in a Quality Hotel

Visiting the Beijing Feng Ze Yuan Hotel is an astonishing experience. Having completed a transition from its status as a Zhonghua Laozihao (China Time Honoured Brand) restaurant into a restaurant and three-star hotel, the Feng Ze Yuan ensures that its customers enjoy fine food and modern hotel comfort.

All this comes in a setting that incorporates Chinese culture into its decorations and buildings that awes those who stumble upon Feng Ze Yuan by chance.

Since its debut in 1930, Feng Ze Yuan has striven to be a top-class restaurant frequented by the literati, influential officials, noble family members, social celebrities and wealthy businessmen. Backed up by its famous cooks, it dared to be ambitiousness. In 1930, a famous restaurant manager named Luan Xuetang and a famous cook Chen Huanzhang quit the Xin Feng Lou restaurant, which was one of the eight best-known restaurants (people called them as “the eight grand restaurants”) in Beijing, at the same time. Twenty cooks followed them, and they opened the Feng Ze Yuan restaurant. By the end of the 1930s, Feng Ze Yuan had become the biggest and most famous restaurant in Beijing, with branches in many big cities on the Chinese mainland and even in Hong Kong and Paris.

Feng Ze Yuan always closely retained its main style and heritage, no matter how society or regimes changed. During the 1960s, Feng Ze Yuan restaurant was one of the most important places for national leaders such as Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi to entertain foreign guests. But sometimes the staff of Feng Ze Yuan was invited to The Great Hall of the People to serve a feast. Its cooks were even invited to some leaders’ family homes to prepare meal for family parties.

It is evident that the key to Feng Ze Yuan's success was and is its cooks. Grounded in Shandong cuisine, one of the main cuisines in China, the cooking skills relied upon by Feng Ze Yuan were passed down generation by generation.

One of the famous dishes at Feng Ze Yuan is the congshao haishen (stewed trepang with scallions). If you order this dish, a cook will prepare it at your table as you watch. As a white porcelain plate heats on a stove, the cook monitors its temperature before deftly guiding the trepang as it swiftly “swims” onto your plate. Sizzling sights, sounds and aromas fill the air. The bright red congshao haishen is set on the table. Sampling its fragile taste, the flavour of its scallions lingers on your tongue. So its no wonder this dish won a gold medal during a national cooking competition in 1983. People still call it “the king of the trepang.”

This also happens to be one of the most admired works of Wang Yijun, a multiple award-winning super chef recognized around the world, a skilled technician and the cooking skills director of Feng Ze Yuan. At 74, Wang has retired after working at Feng Ze Yuan for 60 years, since he was about 14. Yet, Wang, who has visited many countries for cooking performances and awards ceremonies, is modest. He cherishes the education given him by teachers such as Wu Xingguan, Wang Shizhen, Mu Changxun, Kang Wenming and Zhu Yongde, all of whom were mainstream cooks in Beijing in their prime. During Wang Yijun’s career, during which he served feasts for army generals and marshals and won awards such as China’s Top-Ten Cooks and Cooking Master of China, he learned much from his teachers to whom he owes a debt of gratitude and respect. So he has also passed down his knowledge to his students at the Feng Ze Yuan.

This is one reason why Feng Ze Yuan is more than just a place for dinner. But there's more: wander about the four-floors of buildings decorated in a traditional Chinese style and you will encounter corridors with twists and turns. The rooms are classed by style. If you are scholar or a literature-lover, you may be attracted to the Mo Yuan (room for literati) and Kongfu Ting (Confucius mansion lobby). The Mo Yuan is decorated with images of a zither and a Go (weiqi) game set on its walls, the four treasures of the study (writing brush, ink stick, ink slab, paper) and a screen featuring women dressed in traditional Chinese costumes; the Kongfu Ting is decorated with the pictures of Chinese-seal characters, Confucius travelling in an old cart and excepts from the Analects. The facial masks in the Li Yuan (pear garden, which is a metaphor for the place for performing opera in Chinese) fill this room full of Chinese style. The Liangshan Ting (Liangshan, the gathering place of the heroes in the Outlaws of the Marsh) is filled with Chinese stories, old weapons hanging on the wall, wine crocks and ancient containers and a painting featuring the characters in the Outlaws of the Marsh.

Tasting the special foods of Feng Ze Yuan, seeing the lightly furled curtain of window, and feeling the pure Chinese-style decoration, the thought of “Here is China” will certainly cross your mind.

Address: 83 Zhoushikou Xidajie, Xuanwu District, Beijing 100050

北京市宣武区珠市口西大街83号

Tel: +86 10 6318 6688

Fax: +86 10 6308 4271