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December 15, 2016

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Home » City specials » Hangzhou

Son of the soil specializes in farm-fresh dishes

By Xu Wenwen | December 15, 2016, Thursday | Print Edition

BORN into a family of farmers, chef Weng Dongping believes the best meals are made with farm-fresh produce. So when the Hangzhou native opened his own restaurant, Weng chose a suburban location close to farms.

His Dao Xiang restaurant on Haoyun Road sits near the city’s largest wholesale vegetable and fruit market, but Weng said the majority of his restaurant’s ingredients are supplied by peasants in local villages.

Every morning around at 5am, a restaurant employer knocks on villagers’ doors and asks for the freshest vegetables, meats and aquatic produce. He has to be early because “otherwise other restaurants get the best ones and leave me the old stuff.”

During his boyhood Weng, 37, only consumed food and drinks produced by his farmer relatives or neighbors. According to him, this diet was free of pollution, pesticides, and additives.

“Every afternoon my parents sent me to pick vegetables at 4 and they started to cook dinner at 5,” recalled Weng. “In our dialect we say those vegetables contains souls.”

It was a fondness for food that lead him to become a cook at the age of 18.

First he prepared Chinese foods, particularly traditional Hangzhou dishes. After a few years, he started to study Western culinary culture. In only six years, he became chef at a local hotel’s Western restaurant. 

Two year ago, the chef left the hotel and opened Dao Xiang. According to Weng, it serves “dishes that I want to make.”

At his three restaurants, he offers foods made of seasonal produce like those he ate when he was a boy. 

In springs, the restaurants’ tables are laden with newly-budding vegetables, like local bamboo shoots, shepard’s purses and kalimeris.

“Wild kalimeris and artificially-cultivated kalimeris are different,” he explained. “The wild ones only appear in spring, and are stout and short because early spring is cold. The artificial variety, however, is slim and long because it’s grown in high greenhouse temperatures, which lead to the lose of its special flavor.”

Summer is the season when fish and shrimp grow larger, and foods made with these aquatic staples are an important part of Hangzhou’s culinary culture. When the weather turns hot, Weng uses fresh eels, river prawns and fish to make the tasty dishes that are his signature.

A must-order at Dao Xiang is assorted the fish pot, made by boiling river fish together with soy sauce. The fish vary, depending on what are bought each morning.   

Autumn is the season for aquatic plants, such as lotus seeds, lotus roots, and water chestnuts. During this season, the restaurateurs follows his parents’ example — he serves tender chestnuts uncooked in cold dishes, sautés the mid-tender ones and simmers the old ones with meat. 

Winter is the time when farmers start selling poultry and livestock, such as geese, chickens and ducks. Home-made sausages and jianghuo (meat preserved in soy sauce) also come to the table.

Recommended dishes this time of year include Old Duck Pot, a Hangzhou winter favorite made of boiled duck and bamboo shoots; and Baiqieji (white cut chicken), a must-have dish during Chinese New Year dinner in Hangzhou households. The dish is so named because cooks boil their chickens for just three to five minutes, and then cut them into thick slices of white meat, with yellow skin.

As for the geese, Weng takes his recipe from a suburban Hangzhou favorite: scrub the animal with Sichuan pepper and salt and preserve it for two hours, “so the poultry odor is removed while the thick meat becomes firmer,” he explained. Then the bird is wrapped in gauze and steamed for two hours.    

“After I worked as a cook for almost 20 years, I realize that fresh ingredients coupled with classic recipes always make for good tastes,” said the farmer’s son.

Weng has made a few adaptations as well aimed to highlighting freshness and original flavors — like his shrimp boiled with preserved vegetable. The original recipe involves boiling shrimp with dried bamboo but Weng uses fresh bamboo shoots in spring, and winter bamboo shoots when it’s getting cold.

At his two suburban restaurants, Weng keeps meal prices at around 50 yuan per person. These budget-friendly prices are part of the restaurants appeal.

At his third restaurant, in a shopping mall in north Hangzhou, diners can try a number of fusion dishes, including mushrooms sautéed with snowflake beef, and pan-fried beef braised in soy sauce. 

Hangzhou


 

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