New chef elevates cuisine at Summer Palace
Print Edition
Hong Kong chef David Lui is working to turn Summer Palace at Jing An Shangri-La, West Shanghai, a luxury hotel restaurant targeting business customers, into a food destination featuring traditional Cantonese cuisine and targeting food connoisseurs.
“Traditional Cantonese cuisine distinguishes itself through its highlighting ingredients and serious, craft-dominated cooking,” said Lui, Chinese executive chef at Jing An Shangri-La. He’s spend 27 years in the kitchen and won numerous culinary awards domestically.
Seafood dishes, bao (food braised in clay pot with seasonings), siu mei (meat roasted on spits over an open fire), dim sum and double-boiled soup demonstrate the authenticity of the cuisine, Lui said.
Pursuing beauty and flavor
Lui holds a serious, even rigorous attitude sourcing ingredients. The final taste of a dish can be entirely different using the same kind of produce that varies in size and growing location, according to the chef.
In the case of his signature dish, eel fish clay pot, he uses only wild eel from Guangdong Province. It doesn’t have an earthy taste, he said. The eel also must be around 14 centimeters long and as thick as a finger to ensure a tender, crispy texture.
The focus on what goes into a dish is, to a large extent, driven by Cantonese chefs’ preferring to present the original flavor of the ingredients.
“But that doesn’t mean simple cooking and light flavor. Preserving the flavor of the food and bringing it out challenge a chef’s technique,” Lui said.
The restaurant is known for its warm, steaming and flavorful clay-pot dishes, in which various ingredients, from fish to preserved sausage, are braised in sauce. Each bite features rich, pure and concentrated flavor.
“Fine cutting also helps,” Lui said. One examples is his crystal king prawn, one of the most popular dishes, featuring a tender bouncy texture. The chef carves the shrimp into shape of blossoming flower to bring out the natural sweetness of the shellfish and help it absorb the flavor of the sauce, which creates a balance.
Lui introduces to Shanghai four siu mei recipes that are Michelin awarded in Hong Kong. Among them, barbecued pork and soya-poached chicken are highlights.
The barbecued pork, using a fillet, has a tender, bouncy texture and a shining, ruby-colored appearance. Lui locks the juice in the meat through precise heating control, making each bite sweet-and-savory and enveloped in a spicy aroma.
Lui breaks some general rules about running hotel kitchens in order to improve the food quality, including adjusting staffing and decreasing the diversity of the food.
Dim sum chefs in hotel kitchens are usually required to make all the dim sum in order to increase efficiency. But Lui asks each one to focus only on three to four varieties.
“That helps them more focused and experienced. It’s just like many street vendors put all their efforts into one or two foods, the flavors of which are more delicious than some fine restaurants,” the chef said.
Likewise, there’s only one soup available on the menu each day. The dish that requires the most time and skill — flower crab braised with rice noodles in sauce — is made in limited supply, only three to four times daily.
“I am more like a restaurateur who cares about food quality and reputation than a hotel chef under pressure to increase profits,” Lui said.
His attitude is partly due to his early days training at Lee Garden, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Hong Kong that hosts talented chefs competing to create the best flavors, he said.
Summer Palace has launched his latest, varied menu of dozens of dim sum. On weekends from 10am to 3pm, customers can choose from eight signature dim sum for only 18 yuan (plus 15% service charge) each.
Venue: Summer Palace, Jing An Shangri-La, West Shanghai
Address: 4/F, 1218 Yan’an Rd M.
Tel: 2203-8889
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