Chengdu chef Lan Guijun: the new emperor of Chinese gastronomy | Hacker News Reader

Chengdu chef Lan Guijun: the new emperor of Chinese gastronomy

ft.com

33 pointsquantisan6 comments

The author of this article Fuchsia Dunlop, has written a couple of fantastic cooking books that bring mainland chinese cuisine to a western audience. If you're at all interested in preparing some fantastic authentic Chinese food I heartily recommend picking up "Every Grain of Rice", available on Amazon.

New Yorkers: 5 star reviews

Ethnic Chinese person: a very ordinary Chinese Cookbook trading on the talents and titles of earlier authors http://www.amazon.com/review/R1Y6HWI3APK3CD/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt...

My feeling after living in China for a decade and comparing her review with the photo evidence: similarly unimpressed.

Her other books get comments like "Repetitive, disjointed and boastful", "trite anecdotes and sweeping cliches, all exclaimed wide-eyed and breathlessly", "The recipes are different from the traditional Chinese recipes", "Her excuses for eating fancy food and endangered species were bogus". The ones you can Look Inside! contain mentions of Mencius and Marco Polo, and describe 白酒 (baijiu; a critically important class of alcohols in Chinese banquet culture and cooking) as simply 'rice vodka'.

Fail.

Bah. Sounds like simple food with overdone presentation for profit. I've been to a few of those places.

Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan, a wealthy province that has been part of China since the Han Dynasty (~0; ±200years).

I live just next door in the next province to the south, Yunnan, which is far more geographically diverse, as well as culturally - as for the most part it avoided Chinese hegemony for another thousand to fifteen hundred years. As you'd imagine, frankly our general food standard is far better than that of Sichuan: the population is lower, ingredients are more numerous, fresher and less likely to be adulterated, and we still have dozens of concurrent culinary traditions. There's a far greater appreciation on wild or non market-supplied ingredients. The flip side to this is that we perhaps have less ultra-rich, and therefore the market for showy restaurants is less developed.

If anyone is seriously in to Chinese food and/or considering visiting this restaurant, give me a holler in Yunnan and I'll show you some local culinary masterpieces at a fraction of the expense. To be honest, I like the food so much, I'm considering opening a restaurant myself: bitcoin appreciated! :)

(Note: 14 years as a vegetarian, many of which were in Yunnan, so I came to love and know intimately the variety of fresh cuisine. Fern, bamboo shoots, wild shrooms, marijuana seeds, mountain goat cheese, loads of weird fruits, etc... yum!)

It's nice to see a Chinese chef marrying traditional cooking with elements of international haute cuisine. Hopefully this will become a trend, and Ms Dunlop is the perfect person to observe it.

- I managed to find some low-res photos of his dishes on this review site: http://www.dianping.com/shop/5423060

The 3 reviews are actually all positive despite one of them giving low ratings. They praise the place's traditional & intimate ambiance, intricate presentation and plating, and of course the taste of the food. Price per person is about RMB450, or US$73 - very high for China, as the article notes.

- I couldn't find evidence via Google that Japanese people are discussing the restaurant online, but maybe it's spreading via non-public word of mouth.

- After sharing this article on Facebook, I have friends interested in visiting Chengdu. Let's see if this becomes a small phenomenon among the international gastronomic crowd.

Good job tracking down the dianping reviews. There's 102 photos, with http://www.dianping.com/photos/23523792 the only one showing a fully set table. It looks like there's a strategy of using slightly uncommon ingredients for the southwest (okra for example) and, predictably, the time-honored strategy of serving everything in tiny portions (very rare in China; generally the opposite is true), with perhaps slightly uncommon but not necessarily expensive Jingdezhen (景德镇) porcelain (FT author was clearly confused here). Silken tofu in whatever sauce is still silken tofu, pure and simple. I would have been more impressed to see hand-made tofu products, which Sichuan has significant history in, including famous derived sauces. I see at least two references to Yunnan cuisine: the banana leaf wrapped meat and vegetables (frankly doesn't appeal, Southeast Asia and Yunnan's Tai (傣; dai) of 西双版纳 (xishuangbanna; my home for 2.5 years) and 德宏 (dehong) do it better), then some dragon fruit (火龙果; huolongguo). I feel the reliance on imported seafood shows the chef's strategy is more a poorly masked play to popular taste and business than a truly local tradition driven culinary exploration, as FT has presented it.

Hey, that's my hometown! Never thought I'd see it mentioned here, and about food, no less! Chengdu is almost regarded as synonymous with awesome food, and laid-back vibe in China. Oh and Pandas.

I'm going back there next week after two years, and I can't wait to get me some delicious, delicious Szechuan cuisine.

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