Dinner and opera

On Friday nights throughout summer, Courtyard Bistro is combining classic Chinese dishes with an onstage cultural performances. Liu Zhihua soaks up the scene.

Beijing has a vast number of hotels and restaurants, but Courtyard Bistro at the Red Wall Garden Hotel stands out for titillating both the eyes and the palate with its Chinese style.

That is especially true in summer, when traditional dramas and folk music are staged every Friday night, right through to October, on an open stage at the hotel.

Red Wall Garden Hotel opened in 2010 in Shijia Hutong, a historical Beijing area near Wangfujing shopping street. It is in the heart of the city but still manages to feel far from the hustle and bustle of the capital.

Resembling a large courtyard home, or siheyuan, the hotel radiates tranquility with its classic wooden furniture and exquisitely carved wooden windows, doors and stairways.

The bistro, surrounded by light-brown wood-frame buildings, is cozy, with comfortable rattan tables and chairs scattered casually in front of the open-air courtyard.

It serves about 60 diners at a sitting. Usually about half of the diners are hotel guests while the rest are Chinese or expats from all corners of Beijing who share an interest in Chinese culture, says Cao Ran, the hotel's publicist.

The Friday-night show included a 15-minute excerpt of the Peking Opera Guifei Zuijiu (Drunk Beauty). Peking Opera is a must-see for tourists in Beijing, and Guifei Zuijiu is one of the classics. The short excerpt gives foreigners a taste of the art form. The show also features snippets of face-changing from Sichuan Opera, folk music, shadow play, and some very engaging street vendors selling their wares.

I enjoyed dinner while watching the show.

I tried fried and steamed buns stuffed with butter and chopped green shallots. The bun skin was golden and very crispy, while the inside was very soft. It had a pleasant mixed aroma of hot wheat, butter and shallots, which was deliciously appetizing.

Head chef Chen Linfeng says he was inspired by bread in Western meals to create the unique bun.

He fries chopped green shallots in pre-heated butter, stuffs them into buns and then puts the buns in the fridge for a few hours before steaming them. In this way, the bun skin will absorb excessive oil in the stuffing, making the dough soft.

Most of the menu, however, reflects authentic Chinese flavors with no compromise to Western style, although there are a few Western food choices, such as pizza and fried potatoes.

All the Chinese dishes are carefully selected to appeal to foreign palates, while also reflecting authentic Chinese culinary art, according to Cao. For example, there are no dishes made with animal organs, while popular dishes among foreign visitors, such as kung-pao chicken and yellow-fish fillets, are always on the menu, she says.

My favorite dish was stewed pickled vegetable with beef strips, something that requires passion and patience to cook. The chef boils beef strips for hours in broth enriched with seafood sauce, rib sauce and various Chinese herbs and spices, including dried tangerine peels, licorice, star anise and bay leaves, to season the beef and to get rid of any musky meat smell.

Then he takes the beef out and boils pickled Chinese cabbage stalks with konjac (yam paste) tofu in the broth.

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.

Contact the writer at liuzhihua@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 06/09/2015 page19)