Everything but the duck

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I'm in Beijing for a short business trip, attending a conference organized by a former employer.  As part of the overall program, I'm attending two dinners hosted by my prime broker, and Peking duck feature prominently at both dinners...

First up tonight is DaDong Artistic Conception Food (大董中国意境菜) - a branch of which I had hit on my last trip to Beijing.  The location tonight was within a shopping mall, and was in fact within walking distance from the Peninsula Beijing.  Pretty convenient for me.

We unrolled the scroll that was our menu tonight, and my jaw dropped at the number of courses we were going through tonight with the Winter Tasting Menu (冬趣).  I'd better not finish everything put in front of me tonight then...

Crispy mushroom in tomato (蕃茄脆菇沙拉) - the tomatoes were stuffed with mushrooms, which was interesting and actually tasty.

Goose liver hawthorn (山楂鹅肝) - half of these were hawthorn (山楂), and the other half were foie gras pâté made to look like hawthorn - much like the foie gras lollipops at Amber.

Skanky and spicy

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I was invited by some friends tonight for a casual gathering at their home. Dinner involved two things that don’t feature often in my eating habits – hotpot and spicy food, so things would be a little different for a change.

The hotpot was already bubbling on the table top, but it would have to wait. Our hostess was making fish filets in chilli oil (水煮魚) – a famous Sichuanese dish that I don’t normally eat because it’s deathly spicy.  She was in the kitchen stir-frying a pile of chilli peppers, Sichuan peppercorns and a whole lot of other stuff. The fumes coming out were pretty incredible.

Expensive menu change

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It's the start of January, and that means it's time to celebrate a couple of birthdays with the gang.  No prize for guessing that the restaurant of choice was Fook Lam Moon (福臨門)...  What was different tonight, though, was that our resident VIP wasn't able to join us.  With BM out of commission, only a couple of key items were pre-ordered, and the enviable task of deciding what we were eating fell onto my shoulders.

I decided that we should have a menu change, and order a bunch of dishes that I like but don't get to eat with this crowd.

Roast suckling pig (大紅片皮乳豬) - de rigueur.  As good and enjoyable as it ever was.

Backdoor cousins

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It's now January and I've gone off the reservation for the last 3 weeks.  I'm happy to see that I haven't gained back all that much weight, but it's time to get back to my diet.  I'm loosening the screws a little this time around, but I'm still gonna try to keep to no more than 2 cheat meals a week.

Tonight's dinner, however, was unplanned.  I've already got my two cheat meals later on this week, so I wasn't very eager to join my friend Susan for one of her restaurant reviews.  It was gonna be somewhere Chinese, so I threw out a trio of high-end Chinese restaurants which had opened within the last 6 months.  The one place that Susan hadn't reviewed?  The new branch of Sun Tung Lok Chinese Cuisine (新同樂魚翅酒家) in Central - just a couple of minutes from my office.  Ask and ye shall receive, so there was no way for me to back out of going to dinner...

Sun Tung Lok, of course, is historically famous for being the place where countless wealthy diners splurged on expensive ingredients such as shark's fin, abalone and bird's nest.  These days the restaurant still retains the word for shark's fin in its name, although it doesn't say so in English.  Our gang had a little chuckle about this.  A year ago, two of us joined Susan for a review of a new branch of another restaurant whose English name did contain the words "shark's fin".  When the South China Morning Post published a link to that review on this day EXACTLY a year ago on one of its Facebook pages, it unleashed a wave of fury from self-righteous, moronic readers who were mostly expats.

These people bitched, screamed and complained about the SCMP "promoting" shark's fin.  But they were complete MORONS.  Why?  Because I'm 200% sure that NONE OF THEM bothered to read the actual review.  All they saw were the words "shark fin" in name of the restaurant, and they exploded and hurled insults.  If they had bothered to click on the link and actually spent 2 minutes to read the review, they would have realized that at no point in the review was shark's fin mentioned.  Guess what?  We didn't order any!  I refuse to eat shark's fin, and I'm pretty damn sure the SCMP wouldn't have paid for it anyway!  It's amazing how many people in this world don't actually use their fucking brains...

Anyway.  I was the first to arrive after my little wine tasting, and almost immediately started to get a whiff of the overpowering air freshener being pumped through the dining room.  Why the fuck would a fine dining restaurant do this?!  The dining experience isn't just about what goes onto the tastebuds... the Chinese talk about the complete package of color, fragrance and flavor (色, 香, 味俱全).  So what's the rationale for filling my lungs with that much air freshener?!

It took the Worm Supplier and Kung Fu Panda some 10 minutes to go through the menu and figure out what dishes to order, as they tried to avoid repeating dishes they'd already had during their review for the other branch, while trying to order some of the same dishes they'd had at The Boss (波士廳) - the restaurant where, despite being situated just one floor below this one, the entrance is on the opposing side of the building.  The connection?  Part of the kitchen team at The Boss came from Sun Tung Lok.

Japanese new year feast

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Believe it or not, despite having spent a few years growing up in Japan and having eaten Japanese food for most of my life, I've never had the celebratory meals taken during the first few days of the year known as osechi ryori (御節料理).  It had never been a big deal to me, and I never remembered to make reservations at Japanese restaurants until it's too late.  This year, though, I decided that things were gonna be different.  I was determined to tick this off my to-do list.

I was too lazy to do research on which Japanese restaurants in town were offering decent osechi... I didn't ask my Japanese friends, nor did I bother to read this post...  It was New Year's Day, and I had just stepped into the apartment after flying back from Taipei... My knee-jerk reaction was to call up Nadaman (なだ万) and put myself on the waiting list for lunch the next day.

I arrived at the appointed time, and the friend I roped in for lunch had already decided she didn't want the special set, so she ordered some sushi instead.  I thought the new year kaiseki (初春懐石) was a little too elaborate for lunch - not to mention a little expensive - but since it was the reason why I was here in the first place... I went ahead and ordered it anyway.

Appetizers (祝肴) - as expected, this is the most elaborate part of the meal, with lots of little nibbles presented very nicely.  They were: