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Seafood, soup share a home
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Liu Fuzhong
IF you're planning to have a good Cantonese dinner, seafood will definitely be on the menu. However, the sad truth is that one rarely finds good seafood and tasty, healthy soup in the same restaurant.
The Gold Sticks Seafood Restaurant, however, located at 19 Bading Street, is one restaurant which specializes in both categories of cuisine.
Most seafood belongs to the “hot" category and, according to Chinese nutritional theory, is likely to upset the stomach or trigger allergies. Therefore chefs recommend combinations of certain seafood with certain types of soup.
Though their theory has never been proven by scientific study, the size of their clientele does tend to suggest they're on to something.
The restaurant's latest special is “sea fries". Chefs put well-prepared eels and other fish into a flat pan with hot oil. The fish is fried with salt, pepper and sesame oil sink. Then the fish sticks are placed in a big bowl with special sauces.
Chefs say the cuisine is actually from a recipe widely practised in Guangzhou. But the Gold Sticks Restaurant is one of the very few restaurants that can offer this dish in the original style.
“It requires great skill to leave the fire on for exactly the right length of time and mix it with the right amount of sauce," a chef said.
Though the restaurant views soup as a supplement to seafood, they also get a lot of customers who would rather have just soup. Big piles of earthen jars with names of Chinese traditional medicine evokes ancient times, when people only ate with what they could find in nature.
Altogether the restaurants offer 15 varieties of soup, each named after the herbs they contain. Indeed it takes some knowledge to understand their medicinal function. But chefs say one can simply ask for advice. It is part of the food culture they offer to customers, they say.
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