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November 3, 2016

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Home » City specials » Hangzhou

Hotel chef creates Hangzhou fare with a twist

By Xu Wenwen | November 3, 2016, Thursday | Print Edition

OVER 20 years ago, Yu Feipeng chose to go to culinary school simply because cooks and kitchen staff typically enjoy stable work and good salaries.

Today though, Yu realizes that being a chef is about more than cooking. “It’s about nutrition, design, culture and accounting,” said the 42-year-old.

The Chengzhong Restaurant in Midtown Shangri-La Hangzhou, where he works as Chinese executive chef, opened just two months ago. It’s already proven a hit with local diners, who now have to make reservations up to a week in advance to guarantee a table at this new Hangzhou hotspot.

The restaurant serves Hangzhou cuisine, a selection of Shanghai fare, as well as fusion dishes. There are no service fees and over half of the dishes are priced at 88 yuan (US$13) or less.

On restaurant review website dianping.com diners have praised the restaurant for its affordable prices, high-quality service, fresh ingredients and authentic Hangzhou flavor.

While chef Yu is from Shanghai, he credits his grandparents, who were originally from Zhejiang Province, for his ability to create great Hangzhou cooking.

He also travels at least twice a year around China to study local culinary cultures.

“I combine recipes from various cuisines together to achieve the best results,” he said.

‘So much fun’

Exploring the country, trying new foods, developing new ideas about cooking; Yu’s job may sound like a lot of fun now, but he says working in a kitchen can be much more tedious than most people realize.

In fact, it wasn’t until about 13 years into his career, when Yu got a job working at a hotel in Macau, that he finally started to think about preparing food as more than just a job.

Macau was like a new world to Yu. All kinds of people converge there, so do all kinds of foods. Appetizing Southeast Asian foods, Teochew-style dishes, and local Macau cooking influenced by Portuguese ... Cooks in the city compete with each other by fusing the tastes of these different styles.

“Being a cook can be so much fun!” Yu recalled with an animated face. He soon began studying recipes from all over the world and fusing their various elements into new dishes.

Another lesson came in Hangzhou in 2011, when he became vice head chef at Four Seasons Hotel Hangzhou at West Lake, a hotel which excels at Hangzhou cuisine and creative-style dishes.

According to Yu, the attitude of a chef can have a big impact on how they prepare food. A good recipe should surpass the flavor of its individual ingredients, while an inferior recipe seeks to hide flaws.

The more Yu learned, the more confident he became and the more ideas came into his head. When he had the chance to lead the Chinese kitchen as executive chef at The Azure Qiantang, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Yu started his journey of making traditional and creative Hangzhou dishes.

Breaking with tradition

Some ideas seemed crazy. For example, he adapted a classic Zhejiang dish, liquor-preserved crab, into crab ice cream by freezing mashed roe and cream. Served in small cubes, it tastes like 10 crabs’ essence is compacted into a single cube.

In the Chengzhong Restaurant, the dish Midtown Four Beauties Soup is a best-seller. It contains stewed mushrooms, West Lake’s chuncai (an aquatic plant with tiny leaves), crab roe, and fish belly.

The recipe was invented some five centuries ago by Li Yu, a dramatist and gourmet from Zhejiang. Yu revived it.

Some traditional dishes are ameliorated. Longjing Shrimp is one of the most representative Hangzhou dishes. It contains sautéed shelled shrimps and Hangzhou Longjing green tea.

West Lake Vinegar Fish, another Hangzhou standard, should be made with grass carp according to most cookbooks. But Yu uses sunke fish (Oxyeleotris marmoratus) with less fishy smell and fewer bones to make it more palatable.

The traditional Hangzhou dessert Dingsheng Cake is a rice-powder pudding stuffed with red bean paste. Inspired by the cuisine of Yunnan Province, Yu adds a mix of rose petals to give his dish a pleasing floral aroma.

“I do not want to limit myself to making dishes as traditional as possible,” he said. “A cook’s goal should be making foods tasty, not sticking to tradition when they know that things can be improved.”

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