Dinner and opera

All Chinese dishes including sweet taro with pork here reflect authentic Chinese culinary art while appealing to foreign palates. [Photo by Feng Yongbin/China Daily]

Finally, when all ingredients are ready, he arranges them in a heated stone pot to serve, with a garnish of small red peppers, to contrast the broth color and complement the flavor.

The chef says each beef strip must have appropriate tendons, so that the strips remain chewy and tasty despite being boiled for a long time. He doesn't use pickled vegetable leaves, because they would become too soft after boiling.

The bistro also offers delicious authentic Guilin rice noodles. Chef Chen says his secret is traditional cooking and using rice noodles from Guilin, the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, which are relatively resilient and tough.

The meat slices in the noodle - usually beef - must be dry enough at the start to produce a sound when tapped, the Guangxi-native chef says.

He says the beef must be boiled in a broth made with more than 20 herbs, spices and other ingredients, including cloves, dried peppers, star anise and roasted pig rib bones, for at least two days, until the broth reduces from 15 kilograms to about 3 kilograms.

Then a spoon of the broth must be spread over a small bowl of rice noodles that have been blanched in boiling water, before chopped coriander, pickled beans and fresh pepper sauce are added.

There are more than 2,000 Guilin snack diners in Beijing, but few provide such authentic Guilin rice noodles, Chen says proudly.

Another must-have in the bistro is yellow fish fillet. Large yellow croaker is deboned, deep-fried, then torn into strips by hand, and finally, fried again with peppers and pickled beans.

The chef also makes delicacies with exclusive ingredients from Guangxi, such as Chinese yam with coconut milk, a cold dish that uses sticky Chinese yam in Guangxi, and tortoise (guiling) jelly, a dessert made from the herb guiling, which is said to have cooling properties to diffuse internal body heat in summer.

The menu also lists dishes originating from other parts of the country, such as Sichuan pickles and Wuxi-styled pork ribs from Jiangsu province.