With a history dated as far back as the 11th century Song Dynasty, we take you on a short but stimulating cuisine journey to the city of Shanghai in Eastern China. Located along the southern estuary of Yangtze River, the city’s name is derived from the Chinese characters shang (上) and hai (海), together meaning “upon the sea.” Shanghai therefore is the city upon the sea, where our star of the day, Mr. Yao hails from. Having grown up in Shanghai and travelled extensively, Mr Yao decided to make Nairobi his home. Here, he introduced a modern Chinese restaurant in 2019 to give Kenyans a taste of classic Chinese cuisine with a touch of contemporary flair.
“On behalf of Mr. Yao, we’d like to invite you to an intimate tasting of their oriental menu and distinct tea selection.” This was our invitation to the media tasting at Mr. Yao on August 26. Having had our last media tasting in January, we were excited for this eat-tunity and ready to put our chopstick skills to work.
Arriving at 2:00 pm at Kenrail Towers in Westlands where the restaurant is located, we were right on time as we did not want to miss out on a single dish by arriving late. We were welcomed by the friendly staff, who gave us a brief tour of the restaurant before sitting down for the luncheon.
“The art of Chinese cooking is to make meat taste like vegetables and vegetables taste like meat, without either losing their original texture”, so says one Master James Wei of Chinese cuisine. We got to experience this for ourselves with Mr.Yao’s assorted menu, which could make meat lovers like ourselves become vegetarian, even just for a day. For the starters, we began with Mr. Yao’s signature black fungus dish made with fungus mushroom, garlic, chili and lemon- the very first of its kind in Kenya. Others starter dishes included chicken wings and chicken dumplings. We all know that a Chinese cuisine experience would be incomplete without dumplings, right? So we got to chopsticking and savored every bite of the dumplings.
Moving on to the actual main course, the menu was composed of braised pork belly, which is slowly cooked with Sichuan black bean sauce. We also had dry chili beef where the beef is sliced, then with chili and cashew nuts. Other dishes included fried rice and vegetable noodles. After the feast, we got to have a simple desert; a classic date pancake with vanilla ice cream that was excruciatingly delicious.
After a feel of the oriental cuisine, we washed it all down with some exotic tea from Mr. Yao’s Tea Room, where we got to indulge in Mr.Yao’s finest tea selections. From their 12 item high tea menu, the first was the spiced purple rose iced tea, made from a blend of purple tea and enhanced with aromatic spices such as ginger, cardamom, coriander, fennel and a lavish taste of rose. The other was the oolong jasmine, an elegant kind of tea with sweet jasmine fragrance and a sublime balance between black and green tea. We also had the Yunnan ginger, which is a refreshing tea with an earthy flavor, made of blended orange pekoe tea and ginger. Quoting the words of Chinese scholar Lu Yu, we definitely had our minds harmonized and bodies refreshed from the tea.
It was an afternoon spent reliving Mr.Yao’s days in Shanghai through his oriental Chinese dishes, the very best from the land upon the sea. A taste of classic Chinese dishes with a touch of contemporary flair, Mr. Yao is where you need to go for the authentic Chinese cuisine experience.
– Beautiful images courtesy of Bali Shah.
