Kent Wang

I'd say it's most similar to haricots verts but not as crisp or sweet, more of a savory vegetable. Their aim was very good, they would even do tricks like holding the kettle upside down over their shoulders. Several other restaurants in Yunnan also employed these kettles. A Naxi ethnic minority dance. Yes, steamed. I've never found Yunnan ham too dry, only too salty. It's difficult to eat more than two pieces in a row or else the saltiness overwhelms your mouth.

I see that All-Clad makes one. Is there a disadvantage to stainless steel over the traditional cast-iron? The multi-ply construction is substantially heavier but it seems like it will distribute the heat better. Perhaps the biggest difference is that it will not have the non-stick properties of a seasoned wok, but can't this be simply compensated for by using more oil when stir-frying? Stainless steel is also lower maintenance and easier to clean. Most professional Western kitchens have adopted stainless steel over cast-iron, is there a reason why Chinese kitchens should not as well?

How does it differ from Western versions such as Italian prosciutto, Virginia ham, etc.? Is it safe to consume uncooked?

So it's a pheasant and not actually a chicken? Kunming is known for its wild mushrooms. Pick out a few mushrooms... ...and they'll make a big pot of soup. Tea from undried tea leaves. It has a pleasant greener, more chlorophyll taste. My dad being poured tea from a very long kettle. Yunnan Flavor Restaurant, also in Kunming. Dragon claw vegetable. Turtle stew. Qiguo chicken. The chicken is placed into the bowl without adding water, placed on a steamer and the steam flows in through the hole in the middle of the bowl and condenses to form the broth. Custard with Yunnan ham and scallions. A restaurant in Lijiang. Fried caterpillar and dragonfly. Fried sweet rice flour sticks. Yunnan ham. Fried fish. Another restaurant in Lijiang. Roasted Yunnan ham. Rice flour sheets. Fried silkworms.

I went with my accountant on Friday. My previous visit a few months ago was rather disappointing: boring tasting menu, wine pairings not to my taste. As you can see, the prices are high as ever, especially the tasting menus. A five-course with wine is $97 ($19.40 per course) and a seven-course is $125 ($17.86 per course). Those are just a few bucks shy of Driskill prices: six course with wine there is $125 ($20.84 per course) and nine-course is $175 ($19.44 per course). The items on the tasting menu were mostly unchanged from my last visit: scallops, foie gras, arctic char, NY strip, cheese plate; only the char and NY strip were different. We split a bottle of one of the house wines, a Spanish tempranillo for $17, certainly a good price. The meal started off with a complimentary cucumber gazpacho that was nicely cool and refreshing considering the hot weather. Seared rare lamb with fennel-Fuji apple slaw, goat feta, and arugula puree. $15. An excellent, uncommon preparation of lamb. The fennel-apple slaw doesn't really fit in here. Also, this seems to be the only glass plate used in the restaurant. Did they run out of their porcelain plates? Nothing against glass but this plate felt like an orphan to me. Seared dayboat scallops with spring leeks, hearts of palm, and tomato confit. $16. Some serious searing here, very nice thick, crunchy crust. Vegetables were oversalted. Duck breast with BCF potatoes, oyster mushrooms, escarole, and 30 year balsamic reduction. $25. Another great searing job with oversalted vegetables. I like Muscovy duck a lot more than the Peking they used; the meat on this was rather tough -- and not as a result of overcooking as it was done to medium-rare. Seared sweetbreads on sunchokes with trumpets royale, cippolini, and white truffle verjus. $25. I agree with munchcake's review: this was awesome, clearly the best dish of the meal. Great mushrooms too. Lemon meringue pot, El Rey chocolate cake, creme brulee. $12. Both the El Rey chocolate cake and lemon meringue were excellent. I was a lot more satisfied with this meal. My guess is that Wink is successful because it occupies the very top of the trendy (not to mention crowded and noisy) restaurant niche. I still think that for the money a better meal can be had at Aquarelle, and for just a few dollars more a much much better one can be had at Driskill.

Let's jump straight into an example. This is one of the worst designs I've seen (from Wink in Austin): All center alignment is a terrible idea as the eye has difficulty vertically scanning the names or prices of each dish. All lower case is so amateur. Apps aren't seperated from entrees. This whole menu is done in only one typeface. They have a pretty cool logo and a decently designed website so they must've done the menu layout themselves; no way would a professional come up with such a sloppy design. A good practice that I like is to bold the primary part of the dish like: "seared sweetbreads on fingerlings with elf mushrooms, baby carrots, and dijon crème".

I don't really understand the concern either. What do you usually do when dining alone? Read a book? I much prefer to keep occupied so that I don't eat too fast. I sometimes fiddle with my phone if the place is not too fancy.

After being gone for a month I was pleasantly surprised when I returned the market today. Pasta & Co. are now selling their fresh pastas there. Full Quiver Farms has a much expanded selection of cuts of pork. They and another vendor whose name I don't recall are also "selling" fresh unpasteurized milk. For legal reasons they're not technically selling the milk but rather you are investing a share in the cow and getting paid milk dividends. My investment advice: buy buy buy! It's now strawberry season. Nearly every vendor has tons of very ripe, dark red strawberries.

I recently discovered that Siena has a very affordable lunch menu: $12-15 entrees compared to $20-30 for dinner. Now that I live right across the highway from it I've been going way too often!

The bread pudding. Not too exciting to look at, though.

Guilin. Still not sure what these are. I started another thread attempting to identify them. A local specialty breed of chicken. The way they kill the bird is by smashing its head on the sidewalk right in front of you. Chicken soup. This breed of chicken is known for its flavor but is not very meaty. Stir-fried chicken. Candied taro. Note the threads of melted sugar. Once dipped in the bowl of water the sugar hardens and forms a sweet, crunchy layer around the taro. A riverboat on the Lijiang River, going from Guilin to Yangshuo. The galley. Clockwise from top: freshwater shrimp, freshwater crabs, fish. Steamed freshwater fish. Sea snails. Shrimp. Yangshuo. Sea snails stuffed with ground pork, a local specialty. Fish in beer, another local specialty. Honestly, because it's so spicy you can't really taste the beer used at all.

Superiour nuts like macadamia and almonds.

I haven't really been around long enough to remember the old Dirty's but most people say it's not. I prefer Casino El Camino and Hut's for burgers.

Not sure, but there seems to be a variety of colorfully striped crabs in that area. They're also a bit bigger than your average Gulf of Mexico or Chesapeake blue crab. Here's another striped one I had in Hong Kong: I believe their primary value is medicinal but they did not seem to contribute much flavor to the soup. It's fun to eat the remaining bodies as the bones become very brittle. Yes, that's what I was referring to.

Don't know about the wine, I just snapped the photo and didn't go into the shop. Now you've made me curious too. Each individual chili is very strong but since the fish is swimming in a lot of water the flavor is very mild for a Sichuan dish. Dragonfruit. I occasionally see these in the U.S. for $20/lb. In Hong Kong we bought 3 (about 1.5 lbs) for HKD 10 (USD ~1.20). They're very easy to peel but the flesh is not that sweet. The texture is similar to kiwi. Chuk Yuen Seafood Restaurant, Hong Kong. Sawfish nose, shark mouth. Ground shrimp wrapped in tofu skin and seaweed. A fairly original dim sum item. Soup with black-skinned chicken, seahorse, cordyceps. Cordyceps are a kind of vegetable that looks like a worm, you can see a few in the lower right. This of course is not the actual soup but rather the remains, sans broth. Shenzhen "restaurant row". Geoduck clams. Sea urchins. Not sure what these are but they are meant to be eaten. Baby octopus. Live squid. Vietnamese jackfruit. It supposedly looks and tastes like durian but not quite as "bad" or as much of an acquired taste. I like it a lot. The dried ones you can buy in bags are really good too.

Not sure. The way these restaurants work is that you pick your animal and tell them how to cook it. I believe the default preparation is just stir fry. The waiter said the texture is extremely soft while my aunt -- who I believe has eaten the same thing -- said the meat is all fat and unappetizing.

A Sichuan-style restaurant in Shanghai. Fish in hot chile broth. The broth is not intended to be eaten, you're only supposed to fish out the pieces of fish. Roasted pigeons. A small meat market in Shanghai. A cheap and dirty restaurant in Beijing, mostly for the working class. Youtiao. Fresh from the fryer, extremely fluffy. Dumplings. Steamed pork buns, soy milk. There appears to be some confusion in Beijing with the term xiao long bao. In Shanghai this is widely understood to be the classic steamed soup bun while in the north xiao long bao may also refer to this type of small pork bun with more dough with no soup in the filling. A makeshift steamer. Seven Treasure Old Town in Shanghai. Rice flour desserts. Rice flour is like the marzipan of China, used to sculpt any manner of designs. Jugs of rice wine.

In addition to the ones I've already posted I have a number of miscellaneous photographs that individually do not warrant a thread of their own, so I thought I would combine them together in this thread. Perhaps others can also use this thread to share their food photos from China. To facilitate organized discussion more detailed, "un-miscellaneous" photos should have a thread of their own.

I think they were well liked, as far as I could tell. The Kewpie mayo adds a lot of sweetness and lightness to the yolks. The burners were the bottleneck so their use had to be well planned for. The order went something like this: cook miso soup bring stock to boil and hold for the risotto cook risotto make roux cook mushroom sauce, add roux cook penne, combine with sauce steam fish fry crabcakes fry shrimp The dishes that kept well, temperature-wise, were done first. Of course I enjoy risotto and penne hot off the stove but I had to hold them for a while while I finished the rest of the dishes. All the chopping I did as early as I could, before I started up any of the burners. You can never have too much mis-en-place.

A restaurant in Guilin, Yunnan province, China had these guys on the menu. I'm not really sure what they are but was told that they were delicious. I regret that I didn't have a chance to try one.

Wrap shrimp or asparagus in thinly-sliced prosciutto or pancetta, then pan-fry.

The only times I encountered a service charge during my month-long stay in China was 15% at CourtYard, a Western restaurant in Beijing, and 10% once at a large Korean restaurant in Shanghai when he had a party of more than ten.

I always eat my pasta and salads with chopsticks. I find that they're more efficient. I think the cherry tomatoes are eaten like fruit. My aunt one day bought home a bunch and laid it out on our fruit counter -- it's just a counter on which we always leave some fruit as a snack.

I think it's a better alternative to the more popular -- at least in America -- bacon-wrapped shrimp as the prosciutto is much thinner and will shrink and bind to the shrimp. Bacon-wrapped shrimp, in my experience, often results in undercooked bacon with overcooked shrimp. I took a nap afterwards. I bought the pre-mixed salad greens from Carrefour. We went to several other dinners at restaurants that served raw vegetable salads and no one seemed to have any compunctions about eating them. Perhaps this is less of a problem in the big cities?

Sorry for the delay. This is a long post so it took me a while to write it. The dinner was moved to lunch on May 1, May Day, the International Workers' Day. Nearly the entire extended family was going to be in town for my cousin's wedding on the 3rd so I ended up cooking for fifteen people. My menu is the same as what I had decided on a few weeks prior: Deviled eggs Prosciutto-wrapped shrimp Crabcakes Salad with black fig vinaigrette Steamed fish in miso marinade Northwest mushroom risotto Penne with mushroom sauce Miso soup Bread pudding I'll provide recipes towards the end with the photos of the dishes. The ingredients I brought with me from America: dried Northwest mushroom medley: morel, lobster, porcini black fig vinegar by Cuisine Perel wakame seaweed miso paste, both red and white miso mirin (sweet rice wine) Old Bay seasoning On April 29, I went to Carrefour, a French-owned supermarket chain, to pick up some of the other western ingredients. There were a few surprises that I encountered: no cooked, picked crab meat but they did have raw claw meat -- score!; no liquid vanilla, only vanilla sugar packets; De Cecco products straight from Italy with the boxes written in Italian -- score again! -- I picked up their penne and vacuum-sealed arborio rice. After I got home I made a test batch of the bread pudding in the electric steamer. To my surprise it worked fine, just the top crust was a little unattractive. On April 30, I went to the local regular Chinese supermarket to buy a hen and then went to the farmers market for vegetables. As soon as I got back I started up a chicken stock. According to my aunt, the hens are ideal for stock as they have more flavor though their meat is tough and stringy. This was to be a traditional French stock, chicken and mirepoix, but I had some Chinese ham on hand so I tossed it in. Started soaking the mushrooms. The Northwest mushrooms for the risotto, the shitakes for the crabcakes. That night I made the rest of the bread pudding and mixed the crabcake and deviled egg batters. One dish finished and two prepped for. The next morning I started cooking around nine o'clock. First the miso soup, salad and deviled eggs as they keep well. At this point I had to recruit help with the repetitive, labor-intensive tasks such as scooping out the filling for each of the deviled eggs. My mom and her older sister helped the most and my cousin and uncle pitched in a bit, too. I stayed busy all the way until service at 12:30 while my helpers put in approximately six man-hours combined, which was a huge load off. Stirring roux (left) to be added to the mushroom sauce (right) for the penne. My mom and my aunt wrapping shrimp in prosciutto. All wrapped up and ready for frying. Between peeling, deveining, wrapping, sticking in toothpicks, frying and removing the toothpicks this was to be by far the most labor intensive dish. Pan-frying crabcakes. And now, for the dishes. Prosciutto-wrapped shrimp. Just a small portion of the dozens I made. Recipe: just prosciutto and shrimp, no salt is needed as the prosciutto is salty enough. The toothpicks are a huge help. Crabcakes. This was a Japanese-style crabcake that I invented a few months ago, though I had to make some changes this time to accomodate the ingredients available. I'm proud to say it's one of my most original dishes. Recipe: crab meat, bread, flour, reconstituted dried shitakes, reconstituted wakame seaweed, Old Bay seasoning, Kewpie-brand sweet mayonnaise, dipped in breadcrumbs before frying. See aforementioned thread for my ideal recipe. Steamed freshwater flatfish in miso marinade. The marinade is the same as a miso glaze, though I don't think it's technically a glaze unless it's used for roasting. Recipe: marinade: white miso paste, mirin, sesame oil. Penne with mushroom sauce. The sauce had a very nice rich, smoky flavor from the sauteed ham and carmelized onions. Recipe: sautee Chinese ham in butter until brown, add onions and sautee until carmelized, add stock and white button mushrooms, after mushrooms are cooked add roux to thicken, mix with penne. Of course you'll have to work out the timing for the roux, the sauce and the boiled penne so that they all finish around the same time. Northwest mushroom risotto. The dark color is from the mushrooms and the water used for soaking them. Recipe: EVOO, arborio rice, a small amount of diced onions, lots of stock, mushrooms (morel, porcini, lobster), no cheese. Miso soup. Recipe: red miso paste, wakame, tofu, fresh shitakes, stock, diced scallions added immediately before serving. The spread. Not previously depicted: Salad with black fig vinaigrette. Everybody in my family at least is used to salads and had no misgivings about raw vegetables. Recipe: pre-mixed greens, yellow cherry tomatoes, almond slices, vinaigrette: black fig vinegar, diced onions (no shallots available), EVOO, egg white as emulsifier. Deviled eggs. Recipe: filling: cooked egg yolk, a bit of cooked egg white, Kewpie-brand sweet mayonnaise, scallions; sprinkled with Old Bay as garnish and a bit of flavor. Bread pudding. I neglected to take a photo of it but this was a huge hit. My aunts even asked for the recipe. I'm making it again tonight so I'll have a photo in a few days. It's nothing to look at though; once you've seen one pudding you've seen them all. Recipe: coconut milk bread, 4 medium eggs, 1 3/4 cup milk, 1 cup cream, 3/4 cup sugar, 5 vanilla sugar packets, 1/4 cup butter. This makes enough for fifteen so you may want to scale it down. It's always hard to get honest advice from relatives but I think the overall response was positive, every last bite was devoured. I think the bread pudding was the crowd favorite, followed by the crabcakes and prosciutto-wrapped shrimp. The risotto was not as well-liked as I had expected because I cooked the rice to Italian standards which Grandma found to be on the undercooked side. But if I had cooked it more the arborio would've started breaking apart and getting really mushy. I think a smaller grain rice would've worked better. My personal favorite was the penne as I've never made the mushroom sauce before and the usage of the ham was a last-minute addition that proved to be crucial in taking the flavor complexity of the sauce to another level. Everyone was surprised at the labor-intensiveness of the dishes considering that most Chinese home cooking consists of fairly simple stir-fried and steamed dishes. A lot of them were just expecting me to make something simple like macaroni and cheese. A lot of them didn't even know that I would be cooking all the dishes for a fifteen-person meal. I was surprised at how smoothly everything came together. I was expecting to not be able to find some key ingredients and having to cut a few dishes. All the prep and cooking went like clockwork, thanks to good planning and a lot of help from my assistants. I wrote up a battle plan -- start prep for this while that is cooking -- which was essential being limited to just two burners. All the pre-meal discussion on this thread was vital to figuring out what dishes to make. Thanks everyone for your help! This was a major challenge for me as I've never cooked such a large and elaborate meal before, with the restrictions on ingredients and having to consider what would fit the Chinese palate adding to the challenge. I'm very happy that the meal was a success and that I was able to show my family my cooking skills.