Up ahead: food feasts

Quanjude Group has launched set menus for Spring Festival celebration, featuring its time-honored and award-winning delicacies.[Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

Here, the potatoes are shredded and deep-fried, to resemble a bird's nest. The nest sits on a piece of cabbage, and inside it is the salad made of scallop.

The dish is bite-sized, and the combination of the potatoes, crunchy vegetable and the scallop salad create a flavorful delicacy.

The pine mushroom and chicken broth is a new dish based on a signature Sichuan dish, ji dou hua, or chicken tofu soup.

For more than 100 years, Sichuan's chefs have mixed minced chicken, egg whites and other ingredients in precise proportions and boiled the mixture in chicken soup so that the final result resembles tofu but tastes like chicken.

The Quanjude version does not use only chicken but also the flesh of the sole to make the "tofu", so that it looks whiter and had a tender texture.

The pine mushroom also improves the chicken soup, both in terms of taste and nutrition.

Another must-have is the dragon-beard cake, which gets its name because it looks like a dragon's beard.