Our banquet at Yu Bo's restaurant in the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu, begins with a chequerboard of 16 square dishes, each one containing a different, vegetarian starter. Together, they are a rainbow of colours and flavours, among them tiny, geometric shapes cut out of potato and dusted with a tickle of Sichuan pepper; preserved quail eggs scattered with chopped green chillies; spiced water bamboo, and delicately tied knots of bitter melon.
This is just the start of the feast, a tasting menu that encompasses 25 more dishes. Some are served on grand platters, like the rice-jelly with fresh abalone in a rumbustious chilli-bean sauce and the tangle of dried squid with opened-out miniature peapods. Others, such as the delicate soy milk custard topped with glossy morsels of rabbit, are served in tiny individual dishes. Yu Bo's long-serving head waitress, Xiao Huang, explains every dish as it arrives.
There are no fancy gadgets in Yu Bo's kitchen, no centrifuges, dehydrators or liquid nitrogen. Two microwaves are used for reheating, but the electric spice-grinder and liquidiser are mostly kept in their boxes in a storeroom. Almost all the work here is done with minimal equipment: Chinese cleavers, wooden blocks, steamers and woks. Yet in its wit and artistry, its delicious flavours and extraordinary presentation, Yu Bo's cooking recalls in many ways the most acclaimed restaurants of the west.
Take, for example, the bing fen, a refined version of a Chongqing street snack. An icy, transparent jelly made from a local seed that is simultaneously soft and crunchy, it is served in tiny crackle-glazed bowls and garnished with haw flakes, sultanas and nuts. This, Yu Bo tells me, is one dish that attracted the attention of Thomas Kelleher of the French Laundry in California, who visited his restaurant a few months ago.
Earlier this year, Yu Bo and his wife and business partner Dai Shuang fulfilled their dream of opening a restaurant that recalls the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary China, when mandarins kept private chefs in their courtyard houses and created dishes of legendary artistry. The place consists of six private rooms, furnished with traditional Chinese furniture and ceramics and seating for 70 guests. There is no menu: bespoke banquets are arranged to order. Before you eat, you take tea in a wooden gazebo in the courtyard, listening to the twitter of caged songbirds and watching goldfish flit in the pond.
Yu Bo is one of a new generation of chefs who are revitalising their country's cuisine after the ravages of the Maoist years. First-time foreign visitors to China are now astonished by the superb quality of the design, service and cookery of the top metropolitan restaurants. Yet the outside world has been slow to offer due recognition to this revival of one of the world's pre-eminent cuisines. In 2005, the London-based Restaurant magazine included only two Chinese restaurants in its list of the top 50 in the world - and they were both in London. This year, they widened their selection panel to include some Asian food specialists - but the only Chinese restaurant to make the grade in 2006 was again Alan Yau's Hakkasan in London.
Why is it that western critics pay relatively little attention to this most sophisticated and diverse of the world's cuisines? The historical hiatus of the Maoist period, of course, looms large as an explanation. For decades China was closed off from the outside world, its society torn apart and its culinary culture wrecked by revolutionary politics. Yet perhaps there are broader cultural reasons, too.
For centuries, Europeans have been horrified by the apparent omnivorousness of the Chinese diet and the western media still shows a disproportionate interest in stories about dog meat, penis restaurants and other exotica. More than this, the Chinese fascination with texture foods and "mouthfeel" (kou gan) is generally incomprehensible to outsiders. Chinese people tend to love the gristly, slithery and squelchy textures that appal westerners and many Chinese delicacies, such as sea cucumber and bird's nest, have no taste at all in their raw state: they are eaten purely for the thrill of the bite. Radical chefs such as Ferran Adrià may be pushing back the boundaries of texture as an aspect of western gastronomy but we have a long way to go before we catch up with China.
Perhaps most of all, we fail to give Chinese cuisine its due recognition because cutting edge cooking is about much more than taste. Like any art, it is a kind of cultural dialogue, rich in references to its broader context, and an understanding of the themes and traditions being played with is essential in order to appreciate the food fully. Take, for example, Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck restaurant. A dish such as sardines-on-toast ice cream may taste delicious, but its wit and novelty lies in the knowledge that ice cream is supposed to be a dessert and that sardines on toast is a casual supper dish you don't expect to find in a top-class restaurant. Raw oyster with horseradish, passionfruit purée and lavender is exciting partly because of the extraordinary juxtaposition of ingredients. The familiar is shown in a different light.
It was a visit to the French Laundry in California with Yu Bo and two other top Sichuanese chefs that prompted me to see the importance of cultural context. It was their first experience of western haute cuisine and though they politely ate their way through 14 magnificent courses, their dinner was an ordeal. They found the rare, blood-tinged lamb and "medicinal" olives revolting and had no idea what to make of anything else. "It's like not knowing a language," said one of the chefs. "All very interesting," added Yu Bo, "but I simply can't say whether it's good or bad: I'm not qualified to judge." I was reminded acutely of seeing European friends faced with their first Sichuan hotpot, with its strange, rubbery ingredients and furiously hot broth.
Well-travelled westerners may be better-equipped to appreciate unfamiliar foods than Sichuanese chefs on their first trip to the west but reading the witty subtext of Chinese haute cuisine can still be elusive. Back at Yu Bo's restaurant, we are served with an intriguing assembly of fresh, ice-cold ox foot tendons, glossed with a mustardy, sweet-sour sauce and topped with raw salmon roe. It's a thrilling textural experience, the sensuous burst of the fish eggs married with the slick chewiness of the tendons. But it's also a clever commentary on Chinese culinary tradition, because ox tendons are usually a dried food, reconstituted and then braised with rich flavourings, and raw salmon roe are a novel, Japanese-influenced ingredient. You need to know this to understand what he is doing: the pleasures of the dish lie as much in its inventiveness as in its tastes and textures.
Yu Bo also reworks traditional supper dishes, transforming them into banquet foods. A crayfish concoction plays with the flavour themes of everyday twice-cooked pork. The sublime artisan-reared pork with dried longans and garlic, cooked for 24 hours until the meat almost melts, is served with miniature Sichuanese flatbreads (I'm reminded of Heston Blumenthal's miniature Lancashire hotpots). And one of his classic side dishes never fails to amaze: a blue-and-white china jar filled with what appear to be calligraphy brushes. In fact, the brushes are made from a fine flaky pastry with hair-like folds, with a minced beef filling. You dip one into a china ink dish of sauce and then pop the brush part into your mouth, leaving the bamboo stem on the plate.
Understanding the context and cultural background of Yu Bo's cookery adds an extra dimension of pleasure to eating in his restaurant. Every dish titillates not only the tastebuds but also the mind. It is food designed to tease and provoke and yet much of its wit would be lost on the casual foreign visitor. English-speaking chefs such as Jereme Leung in Shanghai may be able to explain to westerners the cultural themes behind their food and to promote understanding of the complexity of Chinese haute cuisine. But language difficulties and cultural barriers make it difficult for other Chinese chefs to do likewise. It may take time for the western world of gastronomy to give Chinese chefs the kind of acclaim showered on the creative cooks of Europe and the US, but until then, perhaps we should acknowledge what we are missing.
Fuchsia Dunlop writes regularly about Chinese food for the FT. She is the author of 'Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province' (Ebury Press, £25), published last month.
Yu's Family Kitchen (yu jia chu fang), Chengdu. Tel: +86 28 8669 1975
TASTING MENU AT YU’S FAMILY KITCHEN
COLD DISHES (liang cai)
16 vegetarian starters
Five-spiced cold beef
Tea-smoked duck gizzards
Chicken breast and salted egg roll
Pork and lava seaweed roll
Boiled peanuts in their shells
HOT DISHES (re cai)
Rustic three-colour fruits
Beef and wild mushroom consomme
Tuna fish on fortune-telling sticks
Braised rich jelly with fresh abalon
Rabbit with sweet fermented paste on soya custard
Spiced snake Tibet-raised pork braised with longan fruit Iced ox foot tendons
Sichuan-style stir-fried crayfish
Pork and hair fungus meatballs on bed of choy sam Fragrant-and-hot snails
Sweet glutinous rice paste with ground roasted nuts.
SMALL EATS (xiao chi)
Jadeite fresh flower beancurd
Crisp calligraphy brushes
Iced bingfen seed jelly
Steamed hedgehog buns
Chicken-shaped pumpkin dumplings
Golden-silk noodles
