Chinese Culinary Influencer: Da Dong

As China's economy went through a transformation in the 1980s, people's attitude towards life gradually began to change as well. Where restaurants once served as social centers, they had become an outlet for personal expression. 

Well-decorated restaurants serving exquisite and pricey Guangdong cuisine sprang up and spread across many Chinese cities. Meanwhile, Sichuan cuisine, being both high-quality and inexpensive, became a favorite in Beijing. It was in this era that Da Dong became a chef. In 1984, he was 23 years old. 

That was the year he first ate roast duck. He had just started working as a stir-fry chef at the Beijing Roast Duck Tuanjiehu restaurant, but hadn't yet learned to make it himself. He and a chef specializing in the dish there swapped dishes, and it was then that he took his first bite.

When Da Dong recalls the aroma of that roast duck all those years ago, he remembers, “What attracted me most at that time was not the superior roasting technique. In fact, it had nothing to do with the taste, but rather the oily aroma, which was rare at that time."

After six years of persistence, Da Dong at long last had created a roast duck that was both crispy and non-greasy. 

Nowadays, this recipe is no longer Dong's exclusive recipe, but has instead become a popular new variety of roast duck in itself.

Since the market economy was still in its infancy, a large number of small private restaurants had sprung up like wildflowers. Additionally, entirely foreign-owned or joint Sino-foreign catering enterprises were being launched in Beijing. People's yearning and pursuit of food culture had altered to echo the new forms of catering being offered. 

At that time, many restaurants with a long history, which had once been full of diners, had lost their appeal. Countless state-run restaurants were on the verge of bankruptcy. The Beijing Roast Duck Tuanjiehu restaurant, where Da Dong was working at that time, was taking a heavy hit financially, but the relevant departments refused to invest in any form of change.

Having traveled abroad many times, Da Dong paid ever greater attention to foreign food books and magazines. He was astonished to find that the same dish would look completely different in a foreign magazine versus a domestic one. 

When a dish was placed in front of the diners, they first saw its appearance, then took in its fragrance, or even heard the sounds it produced. Only after taking in these aspects of the dish would they taste its flavor, which chefs of Chinese cuisine had traditionally put the most focus on at the expense of the other aspects.

Da Dong then aspired to upheave the entrenched stereotype of Chinese cuisine in the hearts of people all over the world. The pursuit of brilliance in visual presentation, like Da Dong's perfection of crispy yet non-greasy roast duck, couldn't be realized without an extensive process of deliberation. 

The team led by Da Dong started by considering whether the aesthetics in cooking was limited merely to visual presentation. After reading the masterpieces of aestheticians such as Jiang Xun and Liu Zongli, Da Dong found that the relationship between cooking and aesthetics didn't lie in one deliberately shaping the other, but in mutual discovery. It was this notion that opened him up to new possibilities in cooking.

As Da Dong said, the dishes in some Western restaurants in China are being made using methods that are decades out of date. For example, chefs felt that the cooking method for foie gras they had inherited from abroad had already been perfected. Little did they realize it had been modified several times in the ensuing years.