The secrets of a kitchen king

A veteran of the restaurant world spills the beans on cooking that makes the grade, Li Yingxue reports.

Zhao Renliang has worked in restaurant kitchen for 57 years and, whether as an apprentice cook or as executive chef, he has never left the stove.

In fact, not even a brief flirt with retirement has been able to persuade Zhao, 83, that his place is elsewhere than in the kitchen. He enjoys creating new dishes and menus and working with young people too much to consider that possibility.

"Setting a menu for a meal is like a doctor preparing a prescription."

The chef has to consider both the diners' preferences and present different cooking skills in one meal, he says.

Zhao, who has expertise in Shanghai, Cantonese, Sichuan and Western cuisine, was named a National Model Worker in 1994.

Three years later he was honored with the China Craftsmanship Award. In its 25 years it has been won by 300 people, only three of whom have been chefs.

Zhao, born in Shanghai in 1948, started working in the kitchen of the renowned Peace Hotel in 1964.

"When I finished middle school in 1960s there were no culinary schools. Everybody picked up their skills from experienced chefs in the kitchen."

He learned from Lin Jiu, a Cantonese cuisine master chef, and for the first three years all he learned and practiced were the basic skills. He had to get up at 7 am and go home only once a week, he says.

Skills with a knife were one essential.

"These days all ingredients such as ribs, chicken wings or chicken thighs are separated and cleaned before being sent to the kitchen, but in those days a whole pig or chicken arrived in the cooking area."

He can debone a fish and cut off the maximum amount of fish meat in one minute, he says. In one cutting competition he managed to cut chicken breast into shreds in three minutes, with strict rules on size and dimensions. Judges put the shreds into a bowl of water to check that each portion of meat was completely and cleanly cut, he says.

"There's not a single dish that can be successful unless you have very good knife skills."

Carving is another skill Zhao became expert at.

"Unlike some current dishes involving carving in which each part is cut separately and then stuck together, when we were studying carving things had to be cut in one whole piece.

"My master taught me all about craftsmanship. He reckoned that in learning Chinese cuisine you needed to inherit traditional skills but also be creative enough to arrive at your own style. You need not only master the skills of each Chinese dish but also have enough courage to break barriers between them and fuse them."

In the 1980s he was invited to be the expert for a Chinese restaurant in the Romanian capital, Bucharest. There he took part in a national cooking competition and won the gold medal and best chef award with several Chinese dishes he created.

Zhao says he made a wax gourd soup for that competition. He used the wax gourd as a vessel and carved birds and flowers on the outside, and he put wax gourd balls in the soup, a creation that delighted the Romanian judges.

In 1988 Zhao took up duties in a Shanghai cuisine restaurant in a hotel in Beijing, the Kunlun, and his dishes became so popular that within a few years of his beginning to work there the restaurant's daily takings had risen from 10,000 yuan to 100,000 yuan, he says.

Zhao says one of his rules is that when creating new dishes you cannot be dogmatic about the flavor you end up with; rather, whatever flavor the diners like is the correct one.

From pairing the ingredients of each dish to planning the arrangement of each meal, Zhao pays attention to every step and every detail. He even shops around to find the best ingredients to use in the restaurant.

He also pays a lot of attention to training young chefs, he says.

The Chinese master chef Su Dexing started working at the Peace Hotel in 1972 when he was 19 and decided to try to emulate Zhao's cooking even though Zhao was only five years older.

"Zhao's kitchen skills were fantastic, and we were about the same age, so I thought we could communicate well," Su says.

He shadowed Zhao in the kitchen for many years until Zhao moved to Beijing.

"I thought about heading to Beijing with him, but realized I'd never be independent if I did, so I decided to stay Shanghai, and I would call Zhao whenever I had questions or difficulties in cooking," Su says.

In 1988 Zhao took part in the second edition of the national cooking competition organized by the China Cuisine Association and won a gold medal, a silver and three bronzes.

Five years later Su took part in the third edition of the competition. Zhao came up with a grand plan that helped Su win the gold medal and put him near the top of the list of 100 best chefs in the country.

After winning the award, Su got the chance to host dinners for leaders of many countries. Usually when he prepares the dinners he calls Zhao, and the pair discuss ideas, he says.

In October 2001 when the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Economic Leaders' Meeting was held in Shanghai Su was responsible for preparing the gala dinner for those attending the meeting.

This time, Su invited Zhao to come to Shanghai and help him prepare the dinner together. "We needed to serve 580 guests at the same time, which is quite a challenge for chefs," Su says.

For the gala dinner, Su says, he and Zhao carefully selected domestic seasonal ingredients and then drew on paper what the dishes would look like before starting to cook them and adjusting the recipes along the way. They had to take into account the order of the dishes as they considered the flavors, Zhao says.

A beef dish the two created turned out to be a sensation, they say. They used beef from Dalian, Liaoning province, and marinated it for 12 hours before pan-frying it to seal in its juice. The beef was then steamed with vegetables for exactly 90 minutes, and after cooling the beef was cut into individual portions, put on the plate and served.

The other challenge for this grand event was to manage time, all dishes needing to be served within a set time, usually 40 minutes for four dishes as well as dessert and fruit platter.

"For a gala, each second counts," Zhao says. "For chefs it's like a battlefield."

Though working on such galas was exhausting, he says, doing them was a huge honor.

Zhao retired in 2018, but realized he simply could not do nothing, so he returned to Shanghai to help prepare the gala dinner for the first China International Import Expo.

After COVID-19 broke out, Zhao accepted the job of leading the kitchen in the Macao Chinese Restaurant in the Legendale Hotel in Wangfujing, Beijing.

"After I retired, I got job offers from all around China and declined, but the Wangfujing job is just 10 minutes' drive from where I live, so even with my age that's OK."

Zhao has designed a special yellow croaker set meal for the summer season, all dishes made with the yellow croaker but in different forms and flavors.

He chooses high-quality fish that are the same size and debones them, using only the meat in what he cooks.

From fish sea cucumber soup to deep fried fish strips, and from pan fried fish with ginger to sweet and sour fish, Zhao creates a yellow croaker feast using various cooking techniques, and he still cooks.

"If cooking skills are to be properly passed on to young people you have to demonstrate yourself how things are done," he says.

"The value of us chefs is that we have to cook. No matter what title I have, I always stand in front of the cooking bench. I reckon the art of cooking is not about the beauty of arranging stuff on a plate: it's about being able to add exactly the right amount of seasoning at exactly the right time."

Contact the writer at liyingxue@chinadaily.com.cn