Modern masterpieces

In 1650, the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) ink-painting masterpiece, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Fu Chun Shan Ju Tu), was divided into two sections to save it for posterity after it was partly damaged by fire.

And at Fu Chun Ju, chef Yeung Wai-kit similarly seeks artistic inspiration to create culinary masterpieces on the plates of his contemporary Cantonese restaurant－much to the delight of his customers.

Fu Chun Ju was awarded one Michelin star in the inaugural Michelin Guide Beijing two months ago, even though it had been open for less than a year. Yet for Yeung, it was actually his third year at the restaurant because he had already spent two years developing its menu.

"When I joined the restaurant in 2017, it was still under construction, but I knew the concept for the design would be about art, so I designed the entire menu to pair with the decor," he says.

From the wooden menu covers to the poetic names of the dishes to the plates they are presented on－Yeung took two full years to perfect every detail.

Yeung was born in Qingyuan, Guangdong province, in 1976. He moved to Hong Kong with his family at age 13. He has been making Cantonese cuisine for around 30 years. Five years ago, he started to learn about Huaiyang cuisine, and now his menu is a fusion of the two styles.

Most of the dishes on Fu Chun Ju's menu are taken from Cantonese cuisine, but it also offers some highlighted dishes from Huaiyang fare.

"When I first designed the menu, there was no kitchen. So, I just wrote the recipes on my computer and sketched ideas for their presentation. When the kitchen was completed in 2018, my team and I started to try to make the dishes and adjusted the recipes as we went along," Yeung recalls.

Plating was foremost in Yeung's mind when he was preparing the menu, as he wanted to give every dish a new look that went far beyond ordinary diners' expectations－while retaining all the authentic flavors of Cantonese cooking.

"The process of plating is like painting on the plate," he says. "But I didn't want to place unnecessary decoration on the plate. So, I made sure that every ingredient presented was edible and perfectly suited to the flavors of each dish."

Featuring cucumber, pickled radish, mushroom and wild black fungus, his Fu Chun Garden dish is just one example of his painting-like presentations. The radish and cucumber are cut and shaped into two flowers, while the mushroom and black fungus represent the soil where the flowers grow.

According to Yeung, the method for slicing the radish uses knife skills from traditional Huaiyang cuisine, where the chef slices and rolls the radishes simultaneously.

"Each slice is around 4 to 5 millimeters thick, because if it's too thin, the crisp texture of the radish disappears," he says.

The radish is washed to reduce its sharpness and then marinated in a special sour sauce before they are rolled together with a slice of red chili, for extra pep, and then sliced again. The pistil of the cucumber forms the petals of the flower.

The radish and cucumber flowers look incredibly lifelike on the wooden-framed black plate, which was chosen specifically by Yeung to pair with the dish. He searched several markets before he found the right kind of plates.

"The moment I saw this plate, I could imagine in my mind what the dish would look like, and the only other thing for me to do would be to arrange the piles of the radish and cucumber to make the flowers seem more realistic," he says.

Another dish that looks like a painting is the braised sweet-and-sour pork ribs. Yeung chose a black stone plate as the base and placed two piles of red pork ribs on it. He surrounded them with pine needles before topping it off with a light dusting of powdered white sugar.

"The pork ribs look like stones and the white powder looks like snow," he says.

In Yeung's mind, unlike in Western cuisine where a dish takes three or four minutes to plate before serving, there are only at most 20 seconds before hot Chinese dishes begin to cool and the flavors begin to ebb.

"Because hot dishes in Chinese cuisine are usually cooked at much higher temperatures than dishes in Western cuisine, they are harder to keep at the optimum temperature," he says. "So, for plating, I put more effort into the presentation of the cold dishes if there's enough time."

Yeung's hot dishes are also impressive in terms of their presentation. He goes to great lengths to serve them in unusual ways. He thinks presentation is an important element of the modern dining experience as people usually photograph the dishes before eating.

His pan-fried phoenix-tailed prawns with Longjing tea and tea leaves are served in a tea pot and a dozen teacups. Each cup contains a prawn that the waiters pour tea over during serving.

Yeung is very strict about hygiene in the kitchen. If the soup of the day doesn't sell out, he would never consider serving it up to diners the following day.

"I've experienced this in some restaurants, so I decided to create seven soups for every day of the week to prove that we only serve fresh soup every day," Yeung says.

Each is freshly made every morning, from Monday's double-boiled pigeon soup with dates and wolfberries to Thursday's sea cucumber soup with matsutake mushrooms to Sunday's pork tendon soup with bamboo fungus.

During the two years he spent developing the menu, Yeung built up a team of chefs from scratch. He now has 23 chefs, whom he chose personally, and each one has at least five years of culinary experience.

"I don't have chefs with only one or two years' experience in the kitchen because I think the job takes time to master and understand, and this simply isn't long enough," he explains.

To highlight his point, he uses the ingredients of fried mushrooms and vegetables as an example. The mushrooms draw in the seasoning faster than vegetables, so if the two ingredients are cooked and seasoned together, the mushrooms will seem much saltier than the vegetables.

"Inexperienced chefs would not realize this, because it takes time to completely understand the nature of every ingredient," Yeung says.

Yeung believes that the future of Chinese cuisine lies in the fusion of all the major cuisines from around China. Besides mixing Huaiyang with Cantonese cuisine, Yeung also plans to experiment more with Sichuan food－and wonders what sparks he could create in the future.