Going With My Gut

Xin Ji Shi, Shanghai

I spent some time today putting together a concise list of my favourite Shanghai Eats for friends who are soon Bund-bound. Going over my notes and photos, I realised that somehow I had forgotten to write about Xin Ji Shi, my first real food find in Shanghai, and probably still my favourite eatery in the city.

I will now seek to correct this travesty.

I first stumbled into Xin Ji Shi while on a business trip to Shanghai back in 2006. It was a frosty February lunctime, and back then the glitzy F&B entertainment and retail complex Xin Tian Di (New Heaven and Earth) was indeed "xin". Many restaurant and shop spaces were still empty or else in mid-fit-out. I remember peeking into a restored but slightly dusty Chinese house, unsure if the sign outside meant that it was actually a restaurant. Yes it was, and soon my then-boss and I were seated at a round rosewood table with round rosewood stools. I fumbled my way through the Chinese menu and hoped for the best. Luckily for me, what followed was (in my opinion anyway) the single best meal on that expense-account-friendly trip, and also one of the cheapest.

Four years, the doubling of city subway network lines from 6 to 12, and a debut World Expo on home turf later, my parents meet Babs and me in Shanghai this past May as part of our 15-month round-the-world backpacking honeymoon. I'm eager to take them all to Xin Ji Shi, and mostly, I confess, to recreate that gorgeous lunch that girded me for the rest of that wintry day back in 2006.

But I'm nervous. Appetite for destruction in the name of progress is rife in China's cities. Did Xin Ji Shi age well? Did it still exist at all?

Much like China, especially Shanghai, it marched forward in a way that left me feeling ambivalent.

I'm glad I called to make a reservation, because it turned out they were fully booked for their prime dinner slots. We were to be seated at 8.30pm (luckily the Chinese eat early). Xin Tian Di is now fully fitted out and then some -- you have to elbow your way around to get anywhere, and the place is chockablock with ultra-stylish locals, corporate-suit and chinoed-cowboy expats and tourists alike. I could barely breathe on this humid May evening.

Xin Ji Shi, like the rest of the city, was spilling over with people. There are a lot more glass enclosure walls than I remember. Through the glass I see that many many many more people have now made the same discovery I did -- the restaurant now has 6 branches in Shanghai and has also expanded to Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei. Disturbingly I also see the waitstaff joshing around, 2 waiters mock wrestling each other while their colleages stand around watching.

I am pleased to report, however, that the food at Xin Ji Shi is as gob-smackingly good as ever. Perhaps not as magical on a summer's night compared to a wintry day, but I think this is still the first place I'd send any of my friends visiting Shanghai.

Behold, reason number 1: Melt-in-your-mouth hongxao rou, pork belly stewed in a sweet-savoury red sauce. Let's just take a moment to enjoy the afterglow of that first mouthful, shall we?

 

 

And now to blow a little hot and cold, in the most delicious way possible. This smoked whole-chicken soup is so sweet and so light on the tongue but warm on the gut. I could eat this all day -- and God knows I tried, after everyone else had given up. If dining in summer, you might prefer the poached chicken marinated in Chinese wine, served at room temperature. But growing up in Singapore, I personally have been trained to chug nuclear-hot soup in equatorial heat.

 

 

Another hot and cold pairing: Dou miao (snowpea shoots) stir fried in broth with bits of ham and garlic cloves cooked until they are soft and gentle. I love the delicate sweet silkenness of dou miao and given it was that time of year where everything was budding, I was ordering it anywhere and everywhere I could. A lot of chefs in China tend to over-grease their dishes, but I'm glad the doumiao here was spared. Below: A cold just ever so slightly pickled crunchy cucumber salad, garnished with a pinch of punchy raw garlic. Absolutely lovely for summer -- I keep meaning to try this at home.

 

 

Deep fried frog buried in dried chili and garlic was crispy and hot hot hot, but it left my slightly food-squeamish Dad cold cold cold.

 

 

And to bookend the meal, another porky triumph -- coffee-flavoured ribs. Ribs-lips-everyotherbodypart-sticking goodness.

 

 

So the setting is nowhere near as rustic and cosy as it once was, and the once shy and eager-to-please waitstaff now tell you to order everything you might want on your first go "or else later there might not be any left". But in the end I take my lead from the stubborn, almost transcendental Chinese ability to concentrate only on their food no matter what else is going on around them, even if the food at hand is a cup of instant noodles, and the "around them" is an overbooked long-distance train. What more when the food at hand is a chunky morsel of pork belly or bowl of ambrosial broth?

Ohm... nomnomnomnomnom.

P.S. If you'd like a copy of my Shanghai eats list, drop me an email at wenlin_soh (at) yahoo.com

 

Xin Ji Shi (Xin Tian Di)
Unit 4, Building 9, 169 Taicang Lu (by Huangpi Lu)
Shanghai, China
+86 21 6336 4746

When the Guests Cook: Not Your Usual Family Dinner

When you go backpacking for a year and a bit, you expect to eventually eat some truly weird food sometime, somewhere. Food that tests and bests the limits of your usually adventurous appetite.

I just didn't expect the strangest food on our odyssey to come from my own people.

Did my newly acquainted Hakka relatives in Dabu, Guangdong, know and secretly agree that the food coming to our table was on the far end of exotic, and therefore decided not to scare us off too early? Or did they just by sheer coincidence save the strangest stuff for the last 2 days of our visit?

Let's start with something easy. Eggs. Eggs are pretty innocuous, right?

But what if those eggs haven't yet been laid, and are served up in situ in the chicken's er... fallopian tube?

 

 

It tasted like... well you know what hard boiled egg taste like. Except this one had a skin instead of a shell, since the shell is the last part of the egg to take form. It also had a much higher yolk-to-white ratio, and so tasted creamier than a regular egg. Not a bad proposition from a taste point of view.

So there it is. Lunch, with a side of Chicken Anatomy 101. The photo on the right below? Chicken ovaries, enroute to being eggs. A real delicacy, says my Dad's cousin's wife Pak Meh.

I'll take her word for it.

 

Served at the same lunch: Snails. I'm cheating a bit here, really, because I actually really like snails. These tasted much lighter and grassier than their meaty French-escargot cousins, although their sluggy shape looks much more gross. Coaxing these buggers out of their shells with a toothpick is quite the art form.

 

 

I couldn't quite figure out the name of this restaurant. All I know is that it's on the 2nd floor of the Dabu Dong Han Le Research and Cultural Centre in the town of Xi He, or West River. A photo of the frontage below, if that helps.

 

 

And then there was Guang Ming Restaurant in Yongding -- the same town as the Hakka tu lou or earthern mansions in south-western Fujian -- which serves a nose-to-tail menu of beef. We had novice dishes like beef meatballs and ribs, and then intermediate-exotic dishes like tongue and tripe.

But today would be the day I would try beef skin. Unsurprisingly quite tough and chewy. Probably more about texture than taste, this one.

 

 

And cow brain, lightly coated with flour and pan-fried with spring onions. Babs and I gingerly nibbled on a spoonful each. I don't mind the savoury coating and pan-fried ultra-thin crust bit. But I obviously do not have a sophisticated enough palette for the too-rich mush within. Or maybe I just don't have a sophisticated enough brain to block out images of mad British cows slipping sliding and slobbering all over the English countryside.

 

 

The meal that took the extreme eating cake was also our last one in Dabu. (Coincidence? I really wonder.)

It was at Ji Shan Yuan (signage on the right), halfway up a hill outside of town, at the summit of which is the local TV transmission station. My Dabu relatives describe the cuisine here as "wild food" or "mountain food". A good amount of the food here is hunted and foraged, rather than farmed, and is said to be high in herbal and medicinal qualities.

It was quite possibly the most rustic restaurant set up I'd seen thus far. Well, maybe not nearly as rustic as Captain Hadji's lovely front-porch BBQ pit in Zanzibar, but beach shacks are held to a different architectural standard, surely. There was a bunch of brick and concrete, but much more wood and aluminium siding overhead.

Here's the restaurant's front-of-house.

 

 

The indoor and outdoor kitchen.

 

 

On the left, the specials of the day, perhaps? And on the right: you know how some restaurants have an attached takeaway deli store to sell signature produce, sauces, chutneys and such? Ji Shan Yuan has one too.

 

 

Each hut along the slope on the compound is a private dining room.

 

 

Here's ours. What a view!

 

 

And now to the food. Let's start with something exotic but easy on the palette. Freshly dug up oh-so-tender bamboo shoots, stir fried with salted vegetables with just a touch of shredded pork.

 

 

I'm convinced these long, slim, fragrant stir fried green leaves are the equivalent of wild garlic in the UK -- a dish I'm going to try and recreate when spring rolls around.

 

 

Moving on. Below is what I'm calling The Food Chain diptych: A medicinal-tasting rabbit stew on the left, and braised fox on the right.

Fox is definitely a first for me. I was told that it would usually cost a fortune -- maybe 1,000 RMB -- in China to eat a dish like this, if you could get your hands on any at all. Typical. Stick a high enough price tag on anything and the status-conscious Chinese will immediately put all their energy into eating said item into oblivion. Tell you what. I'll tell you for free that fox tastes mostly like lean pork. There. Done.

 

 

I'll eat just about anything, but thus far I've drawn the line at food that's still moving, and insects. I've been bested by the wet-wood stink of steamed silkworm pupae in Seoul (a popular street snack), and I stayed far away from the satay sticks of baby scorpions at the touristy food alleys of Beijing.

But where is the wriggle room when your own family puts down a platter of deep fried cicadas right in front of you?

 

 

So Babs and I grit our teeth (literally) and crunched down on a cicada each.

I don't remember it actually tasting of much. Like the deep fried batter of anything, it was crispy on the outside, and had a touch of softness on the inside. Deep frying is the fail-proof solution to making any questionable food vaguely palatable I guess.

Not that Babs or I could bring ourselves to eat a second cicada, however. Those beady eyes and stripey thoraxes still freak me out as I go over these photos now! Why the same doesn't bother me with prawns, crabs or lobster is a mystery. I am a confessed lobster nut, but one really must ask, who was the first loony-toon who convinced himself to eat the oversized insect-looking creature from the deep?

It's probably the only time during our visit that I'm actually thankful that my Dabu cousin Zhiguang is well stocked with maotai. I am highly amused that this evening's firewater is packaged in a rocket-shaped bottle. Maybe we were supposed to light and launch the bottle rather than decant it, but we'll never know now.

 

 

Towards the end of our meal the owner of the restaurant joins us at the table for a few drinks. He's a handsome ruddy-faced fellow, with gorgeous shock of white hair. There's a lot of chitchat in Hakka that follows, a good portion of which I can't follow.

 

 

I do remember, however, that the conversation ends with the owner insisting that he give us some chicken to take home with us. I think to myself: we've left almost half the food on the table (it's a Chinese custom for a host to grossly overcater a meal to prove his generosity) and he wants us to take home a whole different dish?!

Just before we drive off I glance into the boot of the car to check out our goodie bag. The bag flutters as my cousin opens the bag, and a live chicken, beak, comb, feathers and all, looks up and blinks at me.

Best. Chicken. Takeout. Ever.

 

 

On the way back into town I ask another Dabu cousin: "Do you eat at this place quite often? You seem to know the owner quite well. Or is the boss just very friendly?"

"Oh yes, we like eating there," he replied, "he's my wife's relative. So we're all family."

Deep fried insects notwithstanding, I could not be more delighted that such crazy cuisine springs forth from closer to home than I'd ever imagined.

When the Guests Cook -- House Rules: What Goes Around Comes Around

 

Back in May, as part of my debut pilgrimmage to my ancestral village in Dabu in Guangdong Province, we daytripped across the border into Yongding county in southwestern Fujian. Yongding county is famous for the architectural phenomenon called Hakka roundhouses or tu lou (earth buildings). This landscape of donut-shaped mansions allegedly caused quite an international kerfluffle in the 1980s when US President Reagan and the CIA thought that satellite photos of the region showed a whole mountain range of Chinese missile silos.

To be fair, the tu-lou -- built over a period spanning the 12th and 20th centuries -- were indeed built with military strategy in mind.

 

Above: A view of the concentric-circle structure of a roundhouse tu-lou, from a model at the Hakka Museum in Dabu.

 

Because imperial China was often awash with bandits, and because the migratory Hakkas (which literally tranlates to "the guest people") weren't always welcome by the incumbent southern Chinese residents, these tu-lou dwellings were built also to function as fortresses.

Each of these buildings are between 3-5 stories, and there are no windows on the 1st couple of levels. The rammed earth walls are 1m thick at the base, and there is only 1 iron-reinforced door in and out of the building. Each house is built around a well, and there is space in the central courtyard to raise animals and grow vegetables. Add that to the food stored away within, and the fortress can be sealed off and stay self sufficient for up to 18 months, said our young and pretty local Hakka guide who still lives with her family in one of these fortresses.

 

 

Inside, the donut is "sliced" top-to-bottom into townhouse-style apartment blocks, with each individual family occupying one vertical "slice". The ground / first floor is often used for storage or housing the staircase-averse elderly, and younger members of the clan live on the upper floors. If a clan outgrew the house, it could simply build an additional concentric circle if it didn't want to build a separate house nearby.

 

 

 

Many houses have a central clan gathering area, anchored by a family altar and poetic couplets exhorting the clan to live in harmony, as exemplified by this well known one at Zhengchenglou. Definitely necessary as the concentric-circle architecture means secrets are almost impossible to keep in the clan!

 

46 Fujian Tulou sites were declared to be World Heritage Sites by UNESCO in 2008. Babs and I have grown to be very ambivalent about such sites as our travels progressed. Many a time we've seen such sites turn into tourist traps, housing uninspiring multinational fast food tenants or tacky souvenir shops in otherwise beautifully restored and preserved shells.

Tourism has risen in Yongding since the UNESCO inscription. There is now, for example, a very comfortable 8-hour express bus between Dabu and Guangzhou, which didn't exist when my Dad first visited the area in 2007. Only time will tell how the vibe in these tu-lous will evolve over time. It could go the way of the lurid painted shells, or it could persuade the younger members of the clan -- many of whom have gone to work in live in big cities -- to move back and make a life here.

 

Above: Many Hakka families have moved to the city, padlocking their ancestral houses and returning only for big family reunions. Some families don't have enough money to maintain their house in their absence, leading to the decay of the earthern walls.

 

In the meantime, many of the houses that are open to visitors still have the resident families living in them, with hanging laundry, spider webs and functioning kitchens et al as lovely "this is the real deal" touches. Spare rooms and empty spaces have been converted into tea, wine and mountain herb shops, as well a few as guest rooms which often house researchers interested in the area.

 

 

It's lush around here. Vegetable patches line the riverbanks and ducks drift serenely downstream.

 

 

I wanted to share this photo below to

1. Show that some tu-lou are built as concentric squares instead of circles -- in these cases each son of the family would get a corner or a wing of the house
2. Demonstrate some classic fengshui principles -- The Chinese love to have the back of their house back up against a mountain (for security) and the front of the house facing water (for prosperity)

 

 

I pause to take in the river running through the village.

 

 

The river takes on new signficance, in retrospect. Much later, as I work through my photos and notes, I recall that anyone selling tea or wine or any of the array of locally grown produce, kept harping on about the provenance of the stuff. About how they didn't use chemicals. And specifically, about how they are high up enough here such that there aren't any factory pollutants in the ground and water.

 

 

I thought about how the Hakkas had settled up here in the highlands all those centuries back, only because the incumbent populations had already occupied all the fertile lowlands. Which are now chockful with factories and all their by-products, leaving many Chinese people with more money in their pockets, perhaps, but increasingly insecure about the safety of their food. (These articles in China Daily and Facts and Details are just the tip of the iceberg.)

Funny how things go around...

... And maybe come come around again. If the food safety situation in China deteriorates at pace, I wonder if one day these earthen walls will once again come under siege.

When the Guests Cook: Rat Tails for Breakfast, Anyone?

 

You know why Hakkas have such a reputation for being tough?

It maaaaay have something to do with the historical habit of gritting our teeth and keeping our head down and making the best of any situation in all the strange places to which we've drifted (twas curiously delightful to hear a family sitting next to me in transit in the airport in Panama yammering away in Hakka). Hell, we've made human transplating such an art form that it's become our identity -- Hakka literally translates as "the guest people".

But never mind all that.

Personally, I think it's because we eat rat tails for breakfast.

You can imagine how that talk-smack showdown on the school playground goes down.

"I eat kids like you for breakfast!"

"Oh yeah?" *Ornery curl of lip* "I bloody eat rat tails for breakfast. Kids like you, you're just afternoon tea. When I'm dieting."

 

Actually, I'm talking about rat tail noodles -- lao shu fen in Mandarin, or lo shu pan in Hakka, or mee tai mak among vendors in Singapore and Malaysia. It's also called silver needle noodles in more polite circles, and apparently also called the equivalent of "snot noodles", according to Mei, my Cantonese foodie friend!

Rat tail noodles are made primarily from rice flour and cornstarch. I grew up with the factory-made version of the stuff in Singapore (see below) but its bland, half-hearted gummy-bearish chewiness never really captured my attention, even when it was dressed up in fish broth and fish balls and fish dumplings.

 

 

But that all changed in Dabu, when we went to visit my ancestral village in the hilly northeasten corner of Guangdong province this past May.

Here, rat tail noodles are made fresh for breakfast. The rat tail noodle vendor places a wire deckle (see bottom right corner of photo below) over a steaming cauldron of boiling water and scrapes a huge brick of rice-flour dough over the deckle.

 

 

Down the rat-tail shaped noodles go, *plop plop plop* into the cauldron. They bubble bubble toil and trouble away for a few minutes, then get hoisted up with a large slotted ladle.

 

 

The noodles are then doused with some magical mix of soy sauce and sesame oil and extremely savoury minced pork and chives. It doesn't look like much but MAN does it have personality. The Dabu version of the noodles are much softer than the factory-made version (higher ratio of rice flour to corn starch I suspect), and what looks like just a pinch of seasoning goes a long way. Taken together, I simply cannot get enough of this stuff.

But rat tails are just for starters, it seems.

The same magic mincemeat ragu is used to flavour blanched yellow wheat alkali noodles as well. Also lovely and delicious, much more bitey, but it just doesn't evoke that same comfort food afterglow as the rat tails. Here's some wheat noodling action at a subsequent breakfast.

 

 

And to finish, there is pig liver and intestine broth. With some kind of woody-stemmed cress.

 

 

If eating at a traditional sidewalk stall, remember to really hunch over your soup to prevent splashage.

 

 

After 4 days straight of working through these 3-course breakfasts, the eatery I recommend if you ever find yourself in that corner of the world is Ah Jin Handmande Noodles, on Ren Min Road. (That's as much of the address as I could make out. I hope the photo of the storefront helps.)

 

 

Within this compact workshop which serves a full range of rat tails, rice noodles and wheat noodles, Ah Jin's proprietor moves quietly and deftly -- like a ninja! -- but with a lot of obvious loving care for his hand crafted noodles. Look at his poise while draining excess water from the noodles with chopsticks! There's that same lovely mince garnishing, but here at Ah Jin's the vegetable is a lovely bright green kong cai aka kang kong aka water spinach, which I like a lot more than lettuce.

 

 

Tuck in! We've got Hakka tulou -- traditional mud mansions -- to go see later today across the border in southwestern Fujian. But hell, I reckon these hearty Hakka breakfasts will sort you out for any big voyage you need to embark on in life.

 

From left: My Dad, his cousin Ah Pak -- our family link to our clan in Dabu -- and Ah Pak's wife Pak Meh or Auntie Mei Gui (Rose)

 

Intrigued enough to try some rat tails? Here are a few great leads to start

Singapore: Toast Box via Keropokman; Golden Sands Seafood via Hungrygowhere

Malaysia: Pek Kong Cheng, Penang via VKeong; Restoran Law Shi Fun, Ipoh, via Motormouth from Ipoh; Ngau Kee Famous Beef Ball Noodle Stall, Kuala Lumpur via Food.Recentrunes; Petaling Street in Kuala Lumpur via We Ate This

Any other leads elsewhere in the world? I'd love to hear from you!

When the Guests Cook -- The Great Grandaddy of Homecooked Meals

 

When you're travelling and kitchenless, being invited to a homecooked meal is a very special thing. Especially when that meal is at one's great grandfather's house (above), which one is visiting for the first time.

The Soh ancestral home is nestled in the Hakka hillsides of Dabu, Guangdong Province, China. On our drive in from the urbanised lowland side of town, the main crops I spied were rice, vegetables, bananas, and fields upon fields of tobacco.

A view of the neighbourhood from the house:

 

 

The size and the relative elevation of Great Grandfather's house suggest that he was fairly well-off in his day. I grew up with part-told, part-whispered, part-hinted, remainder-imagined stories about how he made his fortune opium-dealing in big bad Shanghai, but lost then lost it through an embezzling business partner and the toxic gambling habit of some secondary wife (not my biological great grandmother, Ah Pak assures me). Hence the need for my grandfather and later his nephew Ah Pak to board a slow boat to Singapore to eke out their own living, and hopefully make a fortune which they could send back to China.

Granddad never did catch his lucky break in Singapore. Regardless, he sent back to China what he could, even if it was sometimes just tins of rendered pork lard, recalls my Dad.

But then "lucky" is relative. When my Dad and his older sister Tai Gu (Big Auntie) first visited Dabu some 3 years ago, and mentioned the tough times their father went through in Singapore, Ah Pak's sister who stayed back in China apparently replied, "Your father was the lucky one. He managed to get out."

Having read Wild Swans by Jung Chang -- a memoir of the travails of a politically well-placed family under China's Communist rule -- I might be inclined to agree.

But now as I gaze at the bounty on the lunch table, I can only feel thankful that we're here at all, that life has improved by this much within 3 generations. The rest of the elders can debate about who was lucky and who wasn't. I am well aware that I am.

 

 

Most of today's lunch is being whipped up by my cousin Zhiguang's sprightly mother-in-law. I have no idea how old she is, given her long jet black hair, but she whirrs around washing and chopping vegetables and pig intestines alike at the pace of a ninja on speed.

 

 

I offer to help out but guests chipping in with muscle doesn't go with the etiquette around here (more likely they're worried I'll just get underfoot I reckon). So I wander off to see the rest of the compound.

Here's the wood-fired kitchen. Not quite your designer magazine centrefold, possibly, but I think it's gorgeously rustic.

 

 

Here's one of 3 upstairs bedrooms, now long uninhabited and very dusty. Pak Meh tells me this was her room when she used to come visit with Ah Pak, a few decades ago.

 

 

Possibly the most fascinating spot in the house: A wall of photos by the upstairs stair landing. On the left are various relatives I've never heard of or met; on the right is Pak Meh, Ah Pak and their 5 kids. We estimated this photo to be around 35 years old.

 

 

And there he is. Great Granddad. I recognise the eyes, and the wide-as-a-movie-screen forehead both my Dad and I have.

I have so many questions for him. What were his Shanghai cowboy days like? How did he react to the advent of the Kuomintang and then the Communists? What did he like to eat? What would he think of China today? Could he have imagined it, or would he actually think -- technological advancements aside -- "same same but different?"

 

 

I wander back downstairs and outside, to the half of the house that hasn't been maintained. Was this caused by dilapidation or destruction? Either way, it's fodder for a helluva restoration project someday. *Wistful sigh*

 

 

Outside, I stroll past a structure that used to house pigs, chickens and ducks...

 

 

... a room that looks like it was usually used for brickmaking. Further on, a closed-off courtyard labelled as a "gathering place for the Sohs". Through the crack in the door I spy chickens scratching around in the grass. Must've been pretty lively around here back in the day.

 

 

A chain of hollers filter through the compound to announce that it's time for lunch. We sit down to a feast of (from top left, clockwise) crunchy sliced pig ears, suan pan zhi (yam gnocci), salt-baked chicken with chunks of gizzard, a reddish-brown crystalline chewy dough I still can't name, sauteed bamboo shoot slices, savoury glutinous rice, braised duck and yong tau foo (tofu stuffed with marinated minced pork and shitake mushrooms).

Yeah. I realise. Hakka food is very... brown. Not that you'll keep thinking about it the minute you start chomping down.

The chicken and duck have an almost gamey flavour and muscle tone that makes me optimistic that the animals weren't kept in battery cages all day. The bamboo has that lovely clean taste that suggests it was recently picked, and the suan pan zhi has bite but isn't overly chewy, which suggests a generous yam-to-tapioca flour ratio. This be the real deal.

 

 

Oh wait, you didn't think that'd be all, did you? How about some boiled intestines and their flappy bits stir-fried with ginger and salted vegetables? Not my favourite thing, but bang-on authentic, judging by how the elders are slurping it up.

 

 

It's customary (or so we keep being told) for the hosts of a meal to toast elders and guests at these big meals. There is a laaaaaawtta maotai (the local firewater) and brandy swishing around the 2 tables. Especially ours, as Ah Pak is essentially the current patriarch of the clan. You gotta keep scarfing down food just to prevent the stuff from burning a hole through your stomach lining.

Many many MANY gan-beis later, the table finally disperses. The women adjourn to pack leftovers away; the men adjourn for more drinks, smokes and nuts.

Ah Pak (far right) shoots the breeze with his China relatives. I lean over and whisper to Dad, "Who are those 2 old women who just showed up?"

Dad whispers back, "They live in the village, so we're related somehow. But I have no idea how."

 

 

They look fabulous when they laugh. The woman on the right kinda looks like my late paternal grandmother.

 

 

All too soon, it's time to head back to town, but not before Dad and I get a shot together at the front door. See that red sign behind us? It just about reads: "Peace out"... from the Wu Tang Clan.

 

When the Guests Cook -- A Hakka Meal of Grave Importance

Above: We Chinese are dead serious about food

 

It was our first morning in Dabu. Today is the day I'll get to see my great grandfather's house for the first time, and have lunch with my new-found China relatives there.

But first, an errand of grave importance: "Lunch" at my great grandfather's memorial stone.

It's ancient Chinese tradition to venerate one's ancestors, based on the belief that they in turn will continue to look after and guide their descendents from the other side. During major festivals -- such as Chinese New Year, Qing Ming (tomb sweeping) and the Hungry Ghost Month (where the dead are given a one-month pass to roam among the living) -- as well as during during big life events, it is custom to offer food to one's dead ancestors. The belief is so deep seated that it survived even the mass bludgeoning of Chinese culture and traditional family bonds during the Cultural Revolution.

Dabu these days is a bustling urbanised town, so we're on the road for half an hour before the landscape starts to turn green and the pace of traffic starts to slow down.

 

 

We approach the village and drive under an arch heralding 2 words that translate to "Five Halls", or "Five Paternal Cousins". My eyes widen and I start to laugh uncontrollably. My Dad and Babs reckon I've lost it.

Between guffaws, I read out the sign in Mandarain: "Dad, you didn't tell me we were part of the Wu Tang Clan!"

Word.

We pass a large plaque that pays tribute to all those who helped to finance the building of the road between town and village. I'm proud to note Dad's and Ah Pak's name on the list. Ah Pak -- my Dad's first cousin -- is our link to our relatives here. He comes back every few years to visit his siblings, and over the decades has contributed towards the building on roads, schools and temples alike around here. The overwhelming hospitality our merry troop is shown here is due much more to the respect our relatives here have for Ah Pak rather than the novelty of my arrival, I'm convinced.

 

 

Finally it's a 10 minute off-road trek uphill to the memorial stone. Great grandfather died more than half a century ago obviously, and his initial grave was elsewhere. This memorial was erected only in 1996 because that's when the family could afford it. I'm not even on the property ladder yet and now I find out we might not be free from real estate upgrades even in death?!

Zhiguang's wife sets up the lunch offering and joss sticks so that Ah Pak, his brother and Zhiguang can pay their respects. I was raised protestant, so Dad, Babs and I will hang in the back.

 

 

But before they get started proper I sneak a quick preview of lunch for later. I spy noodles, rice cakes, salted chicken, braised duck, suan pan zhi (yam gnocci), savoury glutinous rice, fuji apples and oranges... and... well that bottle may say fruit juice, but the fumes say it's Chinese wine.

 

 

The view from the memorial stone. I'm not convinced great grandfather can actually enjoy this, but at least I can.

 

 

Now that great grandfather has been "fed", he'll want a big night out on the afterlife town. And so he'll need some spending money. Or so ancient Chinese logic goes.

And so Ah Pak and Zhiguang get down to sending him some, the old-school Chinese way. They buy a ton of hell money for burning. At traditional Chinese funerals, stacks upon stacks of these are lit on a pyre, together with elaborately constructed and painted paper houses, paper cars, paper credit cards, paper mobile phones and whatever else one can imagine to make the afterlife more comfortable.

Pimpin'.

 

 

And now the grand finale. Firecrackers. An alarmingly large roll of it. I am a wuss when it comes to firecrackers -- the result of a Singapore upbringing, where firecrackers are illegal and every Chinese New Year brings sensational news stories about idiot kids blowing their their hands or their eyes into oblivion because of this stuff.

So I'm going to stand over here and just max out the zoom on my camera, thanks.

 

 

About an eternity later the long string of explosions are finally done and I can see our group again through the smoke. It's time for lunch at the house now. Sorry, wassat? I'm deaf. I can only hear ringing in my ears.

IT'S TIME FOR LUNCH AT THE HOUSE NOW!

Right. Coming.

We didn't have a red-carpet welcome coming here, but we sure as hell have a red carpet exit now.

 

When the Guests Cook -- A Hakka Homecoming

Above: Chikininabuckit, Hakka style, is poached, rubbed with salt, then baked just before serving. Hunting down traditional Hakka dishes such as salt-baked chicken was a big motivator for me to come "home" to Dabu in Guangdong province

 

After 15 months on the road, I finally came home this past weekend.

Whatever that means.

"Home" is a funny thing. "Home" in terms of this past weekend was London, the city I lived in for about 3 years before Babs and I started off on our honeymoon. "Home", as I write this, is my mother-in-law's place near Birmingham, our basecamp while we figure out what we'll do next. In my parents' and childhood friends' view I'm probably still not "home" yet, because in their minds "home" is sunny food-mad Singapore.

This past May I even managed to come "home" to a place I'd never seen, to family I'd never met.

Accompanied by my Dad, his cousins Ah Pak and Pak Meh (the same Pak Meh who taught me how to make Hakka suan pan zhi), and Babs, I came "home" for the first time to my great grandfather's village. I came "home" to Dabu, in the hilly northeastern corner of Guangdong Province in China -- widely regarded as the Hakka dialect group's capital of the world.

And even then, "home" for the Hakkas can be a somewhat ephemeral concept.

Hakkas, which translates to "the guest people", have been on the move for the last thousand years. Said to have originated from central and northern China, they fled south in waves, upon each onslaught of military conflict. In the last few centuries they clustered in southern mainland China provinces such as Guangdong, Fujian, Sichuan and Jiangxi.

The incumbent residents of these southern provinces already occupied the best agricultural flatlands, so Hakkas were often left to eke out a living from more mountainous terrain, or else no terrain at all. By sheer necessity, they emphasized education and exhorted their children to pursue careers in government and military service, or else seek their fortunes abroad. Well known figures such as China's Sun Yatsen and Deng Xiaoping; Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew; UK's Woon Wing Yip, Alan Yau and Jimmy Choo; and the strange phenomenon of "Hakka Noodles" being a staple on many a Chinese eatery menu throughout India, are just a few examplar products of this Hakka alchemy of ethos and circumstance.

My own family's nomadic history is a much humbler one: my Hakka paternal grandfather boarded a small boat from China and headed to Singapore with just the proverbial (but literal) shirt on his back; my Dad made Singapore his home but has undeniably itchy feet. I am still finding my feet in life, but have very obviously inherited itchy ones.

And this past May those itchy feet retraced some of those steps my ancestors had taken.

But not just yet. We're only at Guangzhou Airport, and Dabu is an 8 hour drive away. We've just been met by the Hakka welcome wagon, made up of Ah Pak's brother and sister and their sons, who still live in Dabu. Zhiguang -- the son of Ah Pak's dead brother -- is the chattiest of the lot and has signed up to be our guide for the next few days.

We pile into 2 cars, and AWAY WE GO!

Late that night we arrive at a nondescript streetside eatery in Dabu. The wonderfully authentic kind where the one-wok kitchen -- condiment array, live produce and all -- is out front for all to inspect, while the dining room is in the back.

 

 

As I tumble out of the car, bleary eyed, Zhiguang says to me: "Eat first. Eat first. Everything else, later."

Given their nomadic history, Hakkas are sometimes called the Jews of Asia. In which case, Zhiguang's utterance was certainly our shibboleth -- that was the precise moment I knew we came from the same stock.

And so began the first of many mindblowing "home"cooked meals:

Steamed chive dumplings, made fresh by hand (and 1 chopstick) just a few minutes before serving.

 

 

Offal in broth with coriander. We were to have a lot of this in the days to come. Especially for breakfast. You really do feel like you can take over the world after eating this. Or you should at least try. Just to burn off the energy.

 

 

Fresh-rolled springrolls, stuffed with shredded pork, hard tofu, beansprouts, chopped shitake mushrooms and other bits of bitey goodness.

 

 

Alkali wheat noodles with beef. Noodles -- especially the handmade variety -- and beef were going to prove quite the treat throughout our Dabu visit.

 

 

I can't believe I took so long to come home for the first time.

Shanghai: Fab Frontier Food at Southern Barbarian

Above: Yunnan eatery Southern Barbarian's simple mint leaf salad -- with a hint of acid and chilli heat -- is a gorgeously refreshing diversion from Shanghai's usually heavy, greasy cuisine.

It was inevitable. My friends are on to me. My friend Brian in Hong Kong was the first to actually call me on it: "So. You go around the world. You look up all your friends. They take you to to all their favourite, secret, food places."

Um. Yes.

Case in point, so goes my text message conversation with my friend Shin in Shanghai:

Me: I'm in town! Dinner tomorrow? You pick where.

Shin: Tomorrow ok. 7pm? You want classy or slummy?

Shin is an architect in Shanghai. And for the 12 years(!) we've known each other -- as newspaper interns in Singapore, undergrads in the US, housemates for a fortnight in New York, or party organisers / attendees in Singapore and Shanghai since -- Shin has consistently brought truckloads of ideas, spark and humour to any (always too short) conversation we've had.

So there's only 1 answer that I know will guarantee a great tasting dinner with a vibe that's edgier than its pricelist.

Me: Let's go to your favourite slummy place.

How else would I have found Southern Barbarian?

For a start, it's one of those hip places where it takes a bit of work finding the entrance (if your back is facing the street, it's a couple of doors left and upstairs of where you think it should be... it's not down the alleyway.)

And then there are the gastronomical discoveries. Tip: Best done when you simply refuse to open the menu, and ask your friend-slash-guide to go ahead and order for the table.

Would I ever have guessed that a salad of just mint leaves (above) could be so delicious? Would I have known to pick sauteed pomergranate flowers from the menu? Very light and crunchy, by the way, and the best part, just so damn unexpected.

And who knew the Chinese ate cheese? Well apparently the Yunnanese do. Goat cheese, fried, no less. Very much like a mild Greek hallumi.

Potatoes may have originated from South America, but China is now the world's largest producer of spuds (oh the random facts you learn at the Friet Museum in Bruge). The Yunnanese shoestring their spuds, pancake them and then deep fry them lightly. Babs -- very much a chips man -- couldn't get enough of this.

And did I mention the beer selection? One of the best in the city, I'm told.

How Shin started coming to Southern Barbarian is a story in itself. Year after year, his parents would vacation in Yunnan, much to Shin's curiosity and slight consternation. Who keeps going back to the same place for fun? And why?

"Then I finally had to do a trip there for work. And then it was 'Ok. I get it'," he said.

And now Southern Barbarian is where he seeks solace from Shanghai's sweet gravies and clinging frying oils.

Perhaps there's more street cred in making food discoveries on my own. But when a guide leads the guided to something delicious, doesn't the delight in the room tend to double?

What do you think? I'll take your lead.

Southern Barbarian
2nd floor, Ju'Roshine Life Arts Space
169 Jinxian Lu, near Maoming Nan Lu
Shanghai, China
+86 1362 1797 634

Edible Art at Wu Li Xiang (Art Salon Restaurant), Shanghai

Can one space do both art on the walls AND food on the table well? Sounds like a tall order to me.

I picture artists as slightly emaciated beings willing to sublimate their poverty and hunger in order to paint a table of food rather than eat it. On the other hand, I picture purist food obsessives as willing to crouch on a stool or stand in line at a food truck in a dank, fumes-filled parking lot, if the food is sufficiently legend.

Shall the twain ever meet? Indeed they do, at Wu Li Xiang (Art Salon Restaurant) in Shanghai's old French Concession. Judging by the number of awards jostling with paintings for space on the walls (as per photo below), I suspect I won't be the first person to tell you this. (If interested, read this detailed review in Best Food in China and a pithy one in shanghai.unlike, for example.)

Besides their uber high-backed dining chairs, I enjoyed these geometric canvases more expected in a hip Korean bar -- twas an eye catching departure from the usual maroons and mustards of Chinois chic.

But I enjoy even more art of the edible kind, and so stopped paying attention to the paintings the minute the food arrived, served up by the owners(?), a couple of muscly t-shirted ponytailed dudes who could probably get away with their own Shanghai Ink TV franchise. Perhaps I really need to rethink my artsy crowd stereotypes.

And now to the food! In Shanghai it's usual to start a meal with a few small plates of room-temperature appetizers before getting to the hot mains. But each plate's smallness is deceptive. The little cubes of ground up salted egg yolk sitting atop a sweet-savoury green bean paste were a diabolical combination -- so rich it took only 1 or 2 mouthfuls to satisfy. For balance, we tucked into a bowl of chopped up soft and silken tofu, laced with tiny dried shrimp to prevent things from getting too bland.

Another great balancing act between delicate tints and bold brush strokes of flavour: River shrimp -- sweeter than their briny ocean cousins -- sauteed with ginko nuts; and tender duck slivers stewed in sticky sweet and salty sauce.

But the bold and the beautiful won out by the time we got to the main dishes. This braised whole yellow croaker, native to the waters around Shanghai, had wonderfully sweet and soft flesh but its many intricate bones require a surgical touch with one's chopsticks.

And finally, an imperial rendition of a bolognese sauce, made of crab meat, crab roe and salted egg. So rich it could bail out Greece. Amazing on steamed plain white rice. Bet it would be heaven on earth, mixed onto a bowl of blanched Japanese somen.

I'm not much of a wine expert, but I reckon the best (or at least most interesting) wine at Wu Li Xiang is their homemade huang jiu (yellow wine), made from fermented glutinous rice. (The Foochows make a red version of this rice wine, which I learnt how to make from my mother and grandmother earlier this year.)

Wu Li Xiang's huang jiu was smoky and much much much mellower and more flavourful than the shots of bai jiu Babs and I downed with newly found family in Guangdong. The best way to drink this is to have it warmed up, then sipped with food on a chilly evening.

On that note, a toast to Mum and Dad who hosted dinner, and our Shanghai host Nicholas for recommending the restaurant. And to the muscly mustachioed crew of Wu Li Xiang, for such a masterful exhibition of my favourite art genre.

Wu Li Xiang (Art Salon Restaurant)
Nanchang Lu 164
Between Yandang Lu and Sinan Lu
Shanghai, China
+86 21 5306 5462 (Reservations recommended)

Noodle Loft: A Posh Perch for Comfort Food in Beijing

Above: You need 2 chopsticks to pick up these noodles, but apparently only 1 to make them

There are oodles caboodles of noodle shops all over China. On just about every street there is at least one humble one-outdoor-burner mom and pop stall with a couple of tables and stools in a literal hole in a wall (the best I came across during our time in China were in my ancestral Hakka village in Guangdong province, but more on that later). There is also a growing array of noodle fastfood chains such as Li Xian Sheng Niu Rou Mian (Mr Li Beef Noodles), and the mystifyingly named but sufficiently tasty Mei Guo Jia Zhou Niu Rou Mian (America California Beef Noodles).

For those meals where the budget in Beijing get to breathe just a tad without letting it all go, there is Noodle Loft, a Shaanxi-style noodle boutique (nootique?) recommended to me by @mitchtan and @limliken.

Noodle Loft is perched on the 2nd floor of the very swish Fairmont Tower office block and its adjacent service apartment complex in Wangjing. It overlooks what looks like an up and coming high-rise Korean neighbourhood and is flanked by a distinctly expat and China yuppie-friendly shopping mall managed by the Capitaland group.

As you watch the evening rushour go by, you can pick your noodles from a list that sounds more like a circus programme than a menu.

Behold, the amazing elasticity of the hand-pulled noodles! See for yourself the death-defying knife-cut noodles! Be not afraid...they taste better than they look... cat-ear noodles! And yes, the legends are true, ladies and gentlemen, I give you.... the daredevil noodles made with one single chopstick!

A cautionary aside here, hungry travelers! When visiting China make sure you do and download all your China food blog research BEFORE you enter the country. Censorship in the Middle Kingdom is as blanket as icing on a Krispy Kreme. Unless you have an overseas VPN service, or are skilled at working with proxies, you won't be able to send out those "where should I eat" SOS-es on Facebook and Twitter, and you won't be able to access entire blog platforms (e.g., any blog hosted by Google), even blogs that extol the wonders of China cuisine.

So it wasn't until I came out from behind the Great Firewall of China that I learned from blogs such as Appetite for China and World Foodie Guide that I missed out on some noodle open-kitchen acrobatics done by Noodle Loft's chefs. And also, apparently, a bar of noodle sauces and accompaniments. (They may been talking about the flagship Xi Da Wang Road restaurant. I didn't notice any open kitchen viewing area in the brance we went to. But now I'll never know!) So there we were, our noodles served just as we ordered them, sans the Cirque de Bowl-eil. Bah!

I had the very delicious one-chopstick noodles in hot and sour soup, pictured above. The softness of the relatively thin noodles together with the spiciness and tartness of the thick soup hit all my comfort food spots. Babs, who likes a more al dente bite in his noodles, had the much thicker, flatter, knife-cut noodles with chunks of beef in broth. This proved to be a very heavy combination, and he left some of his noodles behind.

And now to confess the real reason I schlepped all the way out to this northeastern neighbourhood of Beijing, a 20-minute walk from Wangjing West metro station, past dusty construction sites and city-blocks of unsold flats.

Shredded ass meat.

Well that's what @limliken's email said. How could I not go check it out?

Turns out he meant donkey. And what a yummy first taste of donkey it was. Shredded fine, slightly brined sweet and sour, and mixed in with slivers of cucumber and coriander and peppered with sesame.

For something green, I picked cold dish made of two of my favourite vegetables -- spinach and enoki mushrooms. A lovely light counter balance to the carby noodles and my meaty ass (that was less of a joke than I'd like it to be...).

The most expensive dish in our meal was also the most disappointing. A whole deep fried chicken stuffed with sticky rice and salted egg. Sounds amazing on paper, but that's about where it ends. The whole thing -- even with the salted egg, was bland and meh overall. I'll stick to cheaper experiments the next time I go punting.

Other than the chicken, however, Noodle Loft was one the best meals we had in Beijing. It's a great location to try the cuisine of Shaanxi while taking a break from the dust and smog outside. Top your meal off with one of the many exotic fruit drinks on the menu. The sea buckthorn juice was as delightful as it was luridly eggyolk-orange.

Noodle Loft
33 Guang Shun Bei Da Jie (Guang Shun North Main Road)
Fairmont Office Tower 2nd floor
Chaoyang District
Beijing, China
+86 8472 4700

From Wanjing West metro station, walk down (about 20 minutes) or take a quick taxi ride down Hu Guang Zhong Lu (Hu Guang Middle Road) until you reach the corner of Guang Shun Bei Da Jie (Guang Shun North Main Street).

20 Xi Da Wang Lu
Chaoyang District
Beijing, China
+86 6774 9950

Authentic Beijing Duck: Li Qun vs Da Dong

Where does one go to find an authentic Beijing duck experience in Beijing?

As it turns out, this may involve not just one expedition, but two. This was urged by @limliken and @mitchtan, both Singapore foodie friends, the latter of whom spent some time cutting her teeth in the hotel industry in Beijing.

"Go to Li Qun AND Da Dong. And then tell me what you think," she said.

You gotta love a debate where you engage by ducking the issue.

And so on our first evening in Beijing we trooped from our hostel past Tiananmen Square, onward south to Qianmen. Where after an entire city of government buildings, we came up against what felt like a virtual edge of a cliff -- beyond which one would fall and float into an eerie grey concrete wilderness of a largely abandoned hutong, a warren of traditional Chinese courtyard houses.

The only people out and about on this balmy May evening were the trishaw drivers trying to sell a pricey ride to Li Qun, Anthony Bourdain's pick when he visited Beijing. Everyone else, it seemed, had long relocated or else been evicted out into the neverending skyrise suburbs of new Beijing. At least these ghost-town trishaw drivers were a sign we were on the right track, we figured.

Preservere, pedestrians. Just a few steps beyond the tourist-trap transporters, you can simply read the writing on the wall to Li Qun.

Red lanterns -- the last rebel lights of this hutong -- and murals welcoming foreign visitors signal that you've arrived.

Enroute to your table, sneak a peek (and a long whiff) at the woodfired roasting oven. If you keep your eyes open you might just spot the duck drying closet in the main dining room.

Whatever heyday Li Qun may have once had, I suspect it's since experienced the Curse of the Tourist Tsunami. The setting in this old Chinese house is quaint enough. But duck prices had doubled since indications given in our pre-Olympics travel guide, and you have to order at least 1 whole duck regardless of the size of your dining party. Not a complete disaster for a couple of gluttons like Babs and myself, but pretty punishing for the solo diner already seated at our shared table.

This single Asian male traveller, obviously on a lonely culinary quest, had his 2 plates of duck slices before him. He religiously photographed every other duck roll he folded, and doggedly doggedly doggedly kept chewing in between.

I glanced sideways at Mr Party of One as we started to dig into our own duck, which came with all the traditional accompaniments -- a stack of paper-thin pancake sheets, plum sauce, cucumber spears and sprigs of spicy spring onion. Our duck rolls were heavy, fatty, greasy, more meaty than I'm used to for Beijing duck, and the skin not particularly crispy. Mr Party of One was still chewing, leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed, I suspect not with escatsy. If his duck had gone through death by a thousand cuts, Mr Part of One looked like he was quickly approaching death by a thousand mouthfuls.

By the time we were done with our own duck, our chests were tight with duck fat. Some Chinese tea to unclog, methinks -- a Yellow River's worth.

As we walked out into the quiet dimly lit streets of Qianmen, we cross paths with 2 trishaws of Western tourists. I hope they enjoy the ride they're getting taken on.

Da Dong

We bookended our Beijing stop by lunching at Da Dong just before we were due to leave the capital. It was clear we were in for a very different experience the minute we got spat out of Tuan Jie Hu metro station, into a visibly middle class highrise neighbourhood dotted with shopping malls. Da Dong's formidable and fancy 2-storey fortress was nestled up against a cliff of one of these housing blocks.

Its massive main dining room was filled with chattering well dressed Chinese people from a whole range of age groups; every one of them with a dish of duck on their tables. A good sign. Word on the street was that Da Dong took on board the feedback that old-school Beijing duck was too greasy, and developed a "super lean" duck that had proven a hit with locals. Also, it allows patrons to order half-duck portions with no disproportionate jack-up in price, a sure sign that its target market was no-nonsense Beijingers vs captive and scalpable pilgrims from afar.

My favourite part about Da Dong is that you can watch the deft duck carving action all around the dining room. My not so favourite part is the surcharge for Beijing duck condiments -- really, is anyone going to refuse at this point? Ah well, at least it's a pleasantly surprising array of experimental condiments, such as pickled-pink radish, raw mashed garlic and sugar, and 2 kinds of chye-por (preserved vegetable bits).

All of which combine into quite a delightful new Beijing duck experience. The skin here is crispy without the throat-clenching layer of fat underneath, and the various pickled vegetables together with a sprinkle of sugar and sweet sauce produce a few different layers of sweetness, but kept in check by a dab of raw minced garlic.

Another experimental accompaniment is this sesame seed-studded shell. A lovely crispy bite with a tinge of smoky toastiness, but its round shape is rather awkward for the rectagular slivers of everything else. A cheeky concession to the odd Western visitor looking for a hamburger fix, perhaps.

Riding on the success of its signature duck dish, Chef Dong has also extended his menu into high-end seafood dishes well heeled Chinese diners are so fond of (e.g. lobster and other exotic shellfish and sea slugs plated any number of ways) and all sorts of artistic looking meat and vegetable dishes. We try the spinach balls with mustard, and the broccoli with egg tofu garnished with crushed and caramelised dried shrimp. The former was a delicious and delightful way to clear out your sinuses, and the latter an interesting twist on 2 sometimes staid ingredients.

But what makes Da Dong so authentically Beijing for me is its still-slightly-awkward classiness. With every meal comes complimentary sorbet and a plate of fruit chilled on dry ice. Lovely. Except that the waitstaff serve up said sorbet and fruit at the same time as the rest of your meal. So the sorbet sits on the table and sweats as you eat, and is a puddle by the time you're actually ready for dessert. And if the table runs out of space, the staff -- more akin of the style of homey diners of their native provinces -- simply stack plates on their edges.

So there you have it. One, a fraying-at-the-edges entity that leaves you ambivalent about whether it's shaking a fist at the capital's relentless redevelopment of communities and cuisines alike, or simply milking tourists with a death grip on its outdated reputation. The other, an up and coming maverick still buffing his rough-around-the-edges team. Both for me emcompass all that is Beijing. Their ducks too.

Li Qun Roast Duck Restaurant
11 Bei Xiang Feng Hutong
Zheng Yi Road
Chongwen District, Beijing, China
+86 10 6705 5578

Da Dong Roast Duck
Tuan Jie Hu Bei Kou Building 3
East side of East 3rd Ring Road
Southeast corner of Changhong Bridge,
North of Tuan Jie Hu Park
Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
+86 10 6582 2892