29 Oct, 2010
On a wet, dreamy evening, smoke unfurls in front and behind you like partitions to keep your dining private. If you overlook them, you can see a myriad of nationalities. A caucasian lady, holding her chopsticks with her left hand, and her college, who's indian. An asian lady, conversing in mandarin, and her english partner, who's maneuvering the chopsticks with his left hand.
The two tables speak about their love for chinese food. Adjectives, punctuation, come in. They travel around the world but they keep their penchants radiating out from the chinese.
Here at Paradise Dynasty, you are introduced to both northern and southern chinese cuisine. To understand what is in the head of the chinese, you have to understand the flavours they conjure, or somewhat, like what Paradise Dynasty interpreted.
They are to be sampled in this following order: Original (white), ginseng (green), foie gras (brown), black truffle (widow), cheesy (yellow), crab roe (orange), garlic (grey), szechuan (pink). As the flavours get more intense. You have to wipe out the taste of the original with ginger at the first step.
They are all springy and thin-skinned holding a different soup base inside. The black truffle was soft, pulpy and almost meatless. The cheesy was like curdled milk, tame for dairy. The szechuan had a sweet-tasting soup, not too fiery like its smothered pink. The crab roe had a deep oceanic smell to it. The foie gras was sweet too- sweets of the adults? And the ginseng had an acrid edge to it, complex and satisfying.
P.S. These are the flavours conceived by the chinese. Somewhat different from the rest of the continents, if you were to ask them to frame 'rainbow'. XLB, chinese catching up with fusionopolis, or modernity. Surreptitiously it has sneaked into the dictionary of the west, and the young, or the informed. There was a bunch of youngsters celebrating their birthday meal here at Paradise Dynasty. XLB, for birthday.
