Yihu Restaurant, Shanghai

This was a fantastic dinner we had in Shanghai hosted by Hub's cousin HuiLing and his wife Mingtze, who flew in from Windsor, Ontario.

Yihu Restaurant is new and there were some hiccups and mix up with the dishes but generally, the food was great with some improvement needed in the desserts. The portions were smaller than in most restaurants but that's always the case when restaurants go nouvelle. Since there were so many dishes, I'll post the cold ones first. Just looking at the dishes makes me hungry (more so when I'm dieting to loose the weight before I go yet again on another eating spree the second week of December). When I look at the photos and see how many dishes I ate in one week in SH, I still can't believe that I can eat so much. Some of the banquet meals were back to back, lunch and dinner on the same day.


Duck's tongues. I found the flavor too, well, tongue-y.


Deep fried fish in a sticky sweet sauce. Yum.


Anything with Shao xin hua tiao wine is good and chicken feet is crunchy and fun to eat. Especially drunken ones.


Boiled soy beans in Shao xin hua tiao wine. Addictive.


You should recognize this by now. Pumpkin and red dates is a quintessential Shanghainese cold dish.


If ever looks are misleading, this is it because the preserved veg was amazing in flavor. I could eat the whole plate myself. Ohh!


I've forgotten what this was. I think it was lamb ribs.


One of my fave dishes, bean curd sheets with a mushroom stuffing.


A lovely and delicious dish of stir-fried 'golden needles', lily flower buds.



Eel rolls, delicate and tasty.

Louwai Lou, Hangzhou

Westlake's famous restarant, Louwai Lou.

We couldn't find the restaurant on Westlake which a friend had recommended for cheap and good Hangzhou food so we opted for the most famous restaurant on Westlake, Louwai Lou. Louwai Lou is where dignitaries dine when they visit Westlake and photos of President Clinton and other world figures dining in the restaurant are printed on the menu. We were told that we shouldn't miss Hangzhou's most famous dishes: crystal prawns sauteed with tea leaves, beggar's chicken, Tung Po belly pork and Westlake vinegar fish. Since there were just two of us, and we were both still up to our throats with the banquet dinners that we had in Shanghai, we couldn't try all the dishes at one meal. The plan was to leave some of the dishes for dinner, especially the beggar's chicken which we couldn't handle for lunch. We've had crystal prawns with tea leaves before and although it was good, it wasn't something we particularly craved for. I wanted to try the Westlake vinegar fish, to see how it compares with my version, especially since this restaurant is famous for the dish.


Dried fish in Shaoxin wine, a Zhejiang dish my in-laws love. 

The dried fish can be bought in vacuumed packs. I don't like the flavor of preserved meat from the Zhejiang region. The offending flavor is very prevalent in Shanghainese vacuum packed preserved meat such as duck giblets and beef jerky. I wondered what the spices were and found a couple of cloves and a bay leaf among the fish. I don't know what else was in the seasoning but it made me shudder.


Brinjals with prawn roe paste.

I've never eaten a bad brinjal dish in any Chinese restaurants, in China or anywhere else. This one was delicious, as usual.


Tung Po pork. RMB16.80/RM8/USD2.50 per piece.

The first time I was served Tung Po pork was memorable. We were in Hangzhou on a tour 11 years ago. We were each served a covered bowl. When the lid was opened, a brownish square of fat and skin, with hardly any meat, sat in the bowl. We all gasped because we've never seen such a fatty piece of belly pork. Only one guy at our table dug in, and he raptured about it while we looked on, curious and appalled. He had more than two servings and I thought he was going to have a heart attack right at the table. For many years later, I've regretted not eating that piece of fat. When this little bowl was placed in front of me, I actually felt disappointed that the pork wasn't as fatty as the first piece I was served.



But Louwai Lou's Tung Po pork WAS GOOD, so good I could've eaten another bowl if not for my own belly which was overflowing onto my lap. I ate all the fat and the skin, mopping up everything in the bowl with the bun that came with the pork. I missed out 11 years ago and I wasn't going to again this time. Thank you, poet and scholar Tung Po.


Westlake vinegar fish.


Finally, the star of the meal. We chose the gui fish because the price at RMB99/RM50/USD17 per half kg was in-between the price for grouper at RMB198/99/USD32 per half kg and grass carp at RMB69/RM35/USD11 per half kg, something like that.

Hub said a good fish should always be steamed Cantonese style and I had to eat most of this dish myself. I found it very similar in taste to my attempt and if I may, I think my sauce was better because Louwai Lou's sauce was so acrid it choked us. However, they cooked the fish to just the right texture because it was very tender and the flesh was very fine and smooth. Like I've said before, when it comes to cooking fish, timing is most important.

When the bill came, I knew we've been had. The fish alone was RMB119.60/RM60/USD19, meaning that it was 1.3 kg. The fish measured one chopstick long from head to the beginning of the tail, about 25.4 cm/10". I knew from my years of marketing that a delicate fresh water fish of this size can't be that heavy.

Although the food in Louwai Lou was delicious, Hub and I both agree that it wasn't outstandingly so, given the fame and the prices.

Hangzhou's Westlake

The city of Hangzhou, 1 1/2 hours by car from Shanghai, is famed for Westlake (Xi Hu). Westlake conjures romantic scenes of ancient China with its lotus ponds, pagodas, willow trees, mist, bridges and plum blossoms. Look at the description of some of the spots on the lake:





If money's no problem, the best place to stay is in one of those old mansions further into the lake that have been converted into 5-star hotels. The part of the lake nearer to city, where most of the newer hotels are, is not impressive but further away into the other side of the lake, the scenery is beautiful. My first visit to Westlake was in winter and all I remembered of the lake was the mist. On this visit, the mist was replaced by smog.





Hangzhou residents like to gather by the lake and sing Chinese opera.


These tea eggs were bland.


So was the tofu.


Westlake's water is green and murky, shocking for such a famous lake. People were spitting into the lake like it was a sport. I'd hate to be a fish here.


Steamed black glutinous rice.


Black glutinous corn too.

Yes, Marco Polo was here and I am one of those who think that pasta came from China.

The Leifeng Pagoda, one of the famous vista of Westlake.


There are many small gardens and museums in Westlake. This one here is lined with persimmon trees, some of the fruits still hanging. We didn't have the time or energy to visit any of the gardens and just walking around the lake took us 4 hours. Okay, we cheated by taking a buggy ride (which should be banned because the paths were narrow and the buggies were noisy, blaring cheap music instead of honks whenever they needed the pedestrians to step aside) across the lake. You can take the boats too.




Gorgeous translucent jade bowl.


A jade wine cup, usually for royalty and VIPs.


We checked out one of the museums (no entrance fees in Westlake) and the jade objects, as you can see, are beautiful.



It was October 10, 2010 and many couples got married in Westlake because of the rare date and also because the Chinese saying "xie chien xie mei" means perfect. It was also my son Wey's 16th birthday and the first time that I had not been there with him.

Apparently, there are ten scenic spots on Westlake that should not be missed. I didn't know that or I would've planned my walk on the lake to start earlier. There are plenty of good restaurants around the lake. An ideal holiday would be to stay in one of the upscale hotels inside the lake and spend a whole day exploring all the scenic spots, some of which are very historic, dating back to over a thousand years ago. Westlake is beautiful but the development done on the lake does not do the lake its aesthetic justice. I came away wishing that the Chinese would learn some landscape design from the Japanese.

Luke's Full Month Dinner

From left: Luke's great grandma, the nanny feeding Luke (who at over 6 kg is the biggest 6-weeks baby I've ever seen), great grandma's 93 year-old sister and a younger sister. The 93 year-old grandma's advice for a healthy body was to "eat until 70% full, never eat anything that's not worth eating and always be positive."

From birth, the only child in China is pampered by at least 6 people--the parents, the maternal grandparents and the paternal grandparents. Although an only-child has more attention and material things, when his parents grow old, he has to bear the burden of taking care of his parents (and maybe even grandparents) alone. On top of that, if his parents pass on, he is alone. However, only-children tend to gain much too. Other than the attention and never wanting for anything, they usually have better education and stand to inherit all from both sets of parents. Now don't you wish you are an only child.

The only-child policy is strictly enforced especially in the cities although these days, Chinese couples who are both only-child themselves and who have the financial status can have a second child. Because most young couples  are from second-generation only-child families, most of them do not want a big family and prefer not to have a second child because of the high costs of raising the 'spare' and also because young parents prefer to spend the savings on themselves.

Hub's cousin had her first grandchild a couple of months ago. Huiyi had delayed the full month celebration until we arrived in Shanghai. It is a Chinese custom to celebrate the birth of a baby 30 days later by having a big dinner for friends and relatives. The Full Month is celebrated on a very grand scale in China these days, not only because the baby is likely to be an only child but also because Chinese parents are so wealthy now. Just 25 years ago, Coca Cola was a big thing in China and LV or Ferrari was unknown. Now China has the second largest economy in the world and foreign currency reserves of USD2.4 trillion (Newsweek). The Chinese call this "The wind comes around". And typical of the US, now that they have gotten rid of Russia (remember how all the 007 movies were all about Russian bad guys?), the US has turned on China, blaming it for its own problems. What they should do is stop the spending (especially on wars) before  complaining about China's savings. It's like a man who spends all his wealth and when his money is gone, he blames his poverty on his neighbor who saved instead of spent.

This is about a Full Month celebration. Pardon me but I've been boiling over certain issues the past week. I have to do a post on sausage fried rice soon. Specifically PORK sausage fried rice.

Anyhow, back to baby Luke' Full Month celebration. In Shanghai and other big cities, parents throw money at professional photographers to photograph their newborn's every grimace and yawn. Luke's hair was shorn before 30 days and made into a paint brush, which "costs a lot" but I'm not sure what 'a lot' is in China these days. Luke's foot and hand prints were also cast in--get this--gold. My babies had their foot and hand prints in black ink.

This is what we ate at the Full Month dinner in a major hotel. Most of the dishes were Cantonese instead of Shanghainese, for a change, but both Hub and I felt that they should've stuck to Shanghainese because that's what they do best. First, 8 cold dishes:


Drunken chicken


Sween yu, deep fried fish marinaded in spices. My MIL's sween yu is better than this.


Cold sliced lamb.


A salad of Shanghainese veg with mushrooms


Braised bamboo shoots


Drunken prawns


Asparagus with shelled crab claw meat.


Fragrant duck wings.


Then came the soup, sharks' fins with frogs' glands. I don't do frogs' glands so I didn't taste the soup. Then came the hot dishes:


Tiger prawns cooked in two ways


Sweet pea sprouts with squid


Steamed live grouper


Crabs and rice


Western-style beef


Roasted duck


Abalone with flower mushrooms


Taiwan bak choy, bamboo pith and mushrooms


Noodles




I hope we'll never replace red eggs with vacuumned-packed eggs.


The young parents and baby Luke (named after Luke Skywalker, not the apostle).