Tag: Peking duck

WING LEI for the Holidays

A man cannot be too serious about what he eats. – Confucius

Now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s time to pause, collect ourselves, relax a bit, and reflect upon…Chinese food!

Yes, Chinese food. The world’s oldest and greatest cuisine.

For as big a Francophile as we are, there is no gastronomia that competes with China’s for venerability and deliciousness.

To put things in perspective, China cooks were selling food to strangers, and codifying their cuisine, 500 years before Romans started feeding Christians to the lions. It is fairly undeniable among food historians and anthropologists that Chinese culture is the most keenly food-oriented in the world. And it’s no coincidence that the phrase “Have you eaten?” is the most common of daily greetings in the Chinese language.

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Sushi Deal of the Week – BAR MASA

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Continuing our Restaurant Week theme, this morning we’ll discuss sushi. Not just any sushi, mind you, but the superior stuff served at Bar Masa,  Masa Takayama’s outpost in Aria, where the delicately scented, barely warm, and barely-held-together rice provides the foundation for the freshest toro, hirame, hamachi, and akamutsu (snapper) this side of Tokyo Bay.

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Peking Duck at JASMINE

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Dining rooms don’t get much more gorgeous than Jasmine in the Bellagio. We’re told the space was originally planned for Le Cirque, but somehow it ended up as a greatest-gourmet-hits-of-southern-China spot, surrounded by windows on three sides and jutting into the Bellagio fountains, giving diners a superb view of the water show.

Equally superb is the food, and the service, all held together by Hong Kong native Chef Phillip Lo — one of the few executive chefs remaining at the hotel from when it opened twelve years ago. Twelve years ago? It seems like only a few, but as ELV always says: Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

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