Consuming passion

The newly opened Wulixiang Restaurant in Beijing's Sanlitun area specializes in old Shanghai cuisine. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Stuffed river snails is a traditional delicacy at Wulixiang, but it's getting hard to find even in Shanghai because the dish is so time-consuming to prepare.

It's a complex dish where the snail meat is removed from the shell, diced, and mixed with minced pork leg and seasonings, before being returned to the shell and then gently steamed.

Eight treasures stuffed duck is another traditional dish that used to appear on Shanghai dinner tables. Wulixiang's version uses the most traditional Shanghai-style cooking method - a whole deboned duck stuffed with a mixture of eight high-quality ingredients, including sticky rice, lotus seeds, ham, chicken, dried scallops, dried shiitake mushrooms, and bamboo shoots - is first roasted before it's steamed.

The complicated boning, stuffing and steaming process can take three to four hours, but the gamy scent of the roasted duck and the rich, savory smells of the stuffing ingredients make it worth the wait.

The duck dish has to be pre-ordered because it takes so much time to prepare, as do many other dishes like deboned pig trotters, steamed crab scented with rice wine, and fish head soup in a clay pot.

Some dishes on the regular menu also show Zhu's skill and love for home-cooked Shanghai cuisine.

Sizzling eel is always the signature dish of dinner at Wulixiang, as the oil sizzles with fragrance as it is poured onto the freshly cooked strips of wild-caught eel. It is rich but not oily, as the oil merely coats the eel.

Hairy crab, which Zhu gets from Taihu Lake in Jiangsu province, can be cooked in a variety of ways in the chef's hands, but steaming is the best way to preserve its natural flavor. But flour-coated or stuffed-and-fried crab dishes both have rich flavors, Zhu says.

Soup with shredded chicken, ham and bamboo is a test of any chef 's knife skills, as each of the ingredients has to be sliced into equally-sized thin strips. Also, the light but richly flavored broth is another test of the chef's patience.