Best Food In China

Location

Quiet, inoffensive, authentic Cantonese food.
The hotel was very clean and neat, and as we were shown to the private dining room, we noticed how quiet it was. There was no music and no other guests (perhaps because it was a Monday night?) so this would be a good place to perhaps invite a business partner if you had important or private things to discuss. The hotel only opened in 2008, so everything is still very new.

We sampled a selection of traditional Cantonese dishes, starting with cold wood-ear mushrooms and thin slices of pig ear - both apparently very healthy, I was informed by my Chinese colleague! Next came a generous serving of pig’s trotters, which were covered in a sweet glaze. These were a little difficult to eat for those unaccustomed to gnawing meat from the bone/spitting gristly bits out, but once you did get some meat off, it was quite tasty. Apparently the English translation for this dish is ‘’searching for the flower in the snow’’, though we couldn’t quite establish why! Next came the cubes of lamb (on the bone), also covered in a sweet glaze and well-done. These were very sweet, like sherbert almost, which was a little too much I found, but again the meat was well cooked. We were served a huge plate of pak choi with ginger and garlic, which was delicious, and very nutritious I’m sure too, and also some lamb broth, which tasted very meaty as I think it would have been braised for several hours.

Next, we sampled a small selection of dim sum. This included some delightful-looking little egg custard tarts (or so I thought). However, just as I was tucking into one, noticing the strange gelatinous texture and a taste I couldn’t quite place my finger on, I was informed that they were in fact wood frog roe tarts (sadly not egg custard at all), at which point my enjoyment somewhat waned, and I felt obliged to down a few cups of jasmine tea rather quickly to clean my palette.

After dinner we moved downstairs to the hotel bar next to the lobby. This was a very odd place, it was clinically cold and bare, with (faux?) marble covering the floors and walls, and ‘’old-fashioned’’ Western postcards stuck to the wall sporadically, featuring sexually suggestive mottos from early drink-related adverts. There was a large TV screen showing the winter Olympics (with the sound turned off) and some odd adaptation of R’n’B music playing in the background. We tried a few cocktails, which to be fair were reasonably priced at around 35 RMB per cocktail, though they were nothing special and we believe one contained condensed milk (at room temperature), which was a little off-putting.

All in all, the hotel restaurant and bar were pretty average, nothing to really complain about but nothing to write home about either. We did leave feeling a bit hungry, so perhaps not the place to go if you’re a big eater! The menu was quite well translated into English, and the staff affable, though it should be noted they do not speak English.

-- by Lucy Chatters