In traditional Chinese cuisine, a wide variety of spices and flavors are used to deter peculiar smells of, add flavors to or highlight the original tastes of the ingredients that crawls, flies and swims or just grows in the fields, forests and mountains. But at a tea banquet restaurant in Shanghai, chefs use different teas instead to prepare and cook food. 

Liu Qiuping, general manager of the tea banquet restaurant, said tea is modest, unthreatening and not overwhelming and it "silently highlights the taste without covering the original flavor of the food."

The choice of right tea for different food is Liu's secret. However she explained tea can be divided into five different types according to their nature - cold, cool, plain, warm and hot. For example, green tea is cold, black tea is hot, oolong is warm.

At Tian Tian Wang, all food has been prepared, marinated and cooked with different types of tea, in accordance with the nature of the food.

For example the beef is not conventionally prepared with the red soy sauce. Instead, chefs use a kind of black tea, hot in nature, to cook the beef, also hot in nature. To strike a Yin-Yang balance, the chef adds some orange skin which is cold in nature.

Recommended by waitresses who were wearing Chinese blue calico jackets and pants, we ordered the set meal for two.

The tea ceremony before the meal was a spectacular ritual. The waitress chanted some basic knowledge of tea and introduced the tea we ordered. We were asked to watch the tea leaves in a small plate, smell its fragrance and then she poured water into the glass cups and asked us to appreciate the movement of the soaked tea leaves. And finally we drank the tea.

Now it was time for the tea banquet. First came a large plate of cold dishes which included the elaborately-made beef with red tea.

The dark-color beef looked no different than any beef prepared with red soy sauce, but it had a different flavor - tasty, cool and refreshing.

All the food was stylishly presented and the waitresses explained to us the ingredients.

A bean curd dish was named "Spring shines at the Su Bank," one of the 10 top scenic spots in the West Lake in Hangzhou. Mushrooms and vegetables were used to stand for peach and willow trees, red pepper pellets for blossoming flowers. One swallow cannot make a spring and there were four swallows flying around the food - they were carved from carrots.

It was so beautiful that we felt it hard to raise our chopsticks and destroy and devour food.

Another interesting food was a congee called "Taiji Biluochun" (See the picture on the left).The congee was a pellet mixture of bean curd, yellow croaker and water chestnuts. One the surface was sprayed a design of Taiji with a mixture of vegetable juice and Biluochun tea powder.

The snack was two lotus cakes fried to an attractive gold color. They were presented with lotus flowers carved out of onions. The cake was made of lotus root with pellets of chicken, shrimp and pork and invariably tea. It was very tasty.

Highly recommended was the fried noodles. Having been marinated into a mixture juice of vegetable and tea juice, the noodles took the color of light green. It was fried with thin shredded pork that was pink and celery that was green. Free from too much oil, the noodle was very delicious. 

Source: Shanghai Star            Editor: Li Guixiang.