Eating With Eddie      12/03/2008  

Michelin’s First 3-Star Chinese Restaurant Unveiled - At Last

After 100 years of reviewing, the Michelin Guide has finally given a Hong Kong Cantonese restaurant its highest 3-star rating. Lung King Heen restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel in Central was deemed worthy by the guide’s inspectors,  who reportedly visited the property 12 times.While some are calling this a break through for Chinese cuisine, my questions is what took so long?

The obvious answer is that this is the first time there has been a Michelin guide to Hong Kong and Macau, but to those of us who have enjoyed the pleasures of a hi-end formal Chinese banquet, Michelin’s revelation is long overdue. To really experience the heights of Chinese cooking one has to preorder a formal banquet. It is in this format, where the head chef personally supervises and cooks for you himself, that the level of sophistication equals or surpasses the best of French, Italian or Japanese cookery. Typically 8-10 elaborately decorated platters are served one course at a time and sequenced to create a progression of flavors and textures that play off of one another.

In NYC an experience like this can be enjoyed at…

Ping’s (22 Mott St or 83-02 Queens Blvd in Elmhurst), but you need to be prepared to spend upwards of $100/person (with a 10 person/one table minimum) and you also need to insist that the owner, Chef Ping, cooks for you himself. Tell him you’re bringing Ruth Reichl to dinner and he’ll probably pull out all the stops.

Another venue for such a feast is Shun Lee. For years both their east (155 E 55th St.) and west side (43 W. 65th St.) branches have offered what they call a ‘Dragon & Phoenix Banquet’. It typically starts with an elaborately composed cold platter that is in the shape of what else, a dragon and a phoenix, and may include such classics as a whole braised sharks’ fin or a beggar’s chicken that has been stuffed, wrapped in clay and baked. Legendary proprietor Michael Tong is excellent at orchestrating a meal like this.

Back to Lung King Heen, though: Normally we’d be skeptical about a Frenchman’s taste in Chinese food, even with the Asian reviewers Michelin reportedly included, but highly respected Hong Kong food experts do speak quite positively about LKH and we plan to stop by on our next Hong Kong visit. The restaurant’s master chef, Chan Yan-tak, who was lured out of retirement to head up the culinary program, specializes in both dim sum and classic Cantonese seafood dishes, many with luxurious touches. Some items that caught my eye were Baked Stuffed Crab Shell with Onions and Fresh Crab Meat, Wok-Fried Wagyu Beef Cubes with Morel Mushrooms, and Simmered King Prawn in Champagne Sauce with Gold Leaf. Doesn’t sound bad but it makes me wonder, did those inspectors think more favorably of LKH because they found non-Chinese luxury elements such as morels, champagne sauce or Wagyu beef? By the way, LKH even has a kid’s menu. It includes that famous pacifier: Braised Bird’s Nest Soup with Chicken.

–Eddie Schoenfeld

Eddie Schoenfeld, New York’s leading authority on Chinese food, writes regularly for The Feedbag. He can be reached at Eddie@eatingwitheddie.com

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