Healthy, bite by bite

Brandon Trowbridge, chief chef and menu designer at Tribe Organic in Beijing. Zhang Wei / China Daily

It's a Western-style restaurant, and many of its staff members speak English. The chef recently developed Tribe's own version of xiaomian, a traditional numbingly hot noodle soup from Chongqing, inspired by a friend from the area.

His favorite dish on the current menu is the green-tea cold noodle, adapted from a Korean classic with some simple changes to make it his own version, such as replacing the traditional peanuts with cashews for their health benefits.

One secret to make healthy food delicious, the chef says, is to meld flavors, mixing spicy, sour, bitter, sweet and salty flavors into each dish to make it delicious.

Another secret is using ingredients that are "fresh and as close to raw as possible", he says. The fresher and less processed the ingredients are, the more nutrients will be kept, he explains, adding almost all dishes on the menu feature something raw.

On my recent visit, just as the chef predicted, I liked the green-tea cold noodle very much.

It was ice-cold refreshing, and had a light but pleasant aroma of soybean milk, with plenty of fresh cucumber, kale, pickled radish and sesame.

The noodles got softer as we waited for the photographer to finish taking photos, but they were still very tasty and chewy.

To make the soybean milk used in the dish, the chef soaks the beans in water for more than two days, instead of the usual few hours, until they start to sprout.