Toronto chef cooks up ideas on road
Roving chef Liu Xin is happiest when he’s traveling the world looking for ideas for his clients’ menus and his new Chinese fusion restaurant in Toronto, Li Yingxue reports.
As dirty bread and dirty tea have become a recent new trend among Beijing’s young people, a new chicken dish has recently joined the “dirty” team.
This time the “dirty” part does not come from the addition of chocolate powder. Instead, chef Liu Xin uses cumin, pepper and edible activated charcoal to darken his newest culinary offering.
It’s one of the dishes on U Cafe’s new menu created by Liu, a selection of specialties designed to showcase his own take on contemporary Chinese fusion cuisine.
“I want to create a range of Chinese dishes that both Chinese and people from overseas will enjoy, which feature Chinese flavors but in a style that’s attractive to foreigners,” says Liu.
“I think the menu I designed will become a trend in the capital that will continue for a few years.”
Liu’s dirty chicken is made by preserving the chicken in salt water before it’s marinated in seasoning to create a Xinjiang-style dish. After being slow cooked for 48 hours, the chicken is then roasted to make it crispy on the outside, before being served with a vegetable pilaf popular in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
“To perfect the dish, I had to cook dozens of chickens over and over again,” says Liu.
Marinated salmon rice noodles with avocado, mustard, cucumber, kelp, green apple and Beijing churros is another of Liu’s new creations, which transforms the traditional hotand-sour Chinese rice noodles into a more Westernized dish, thanks in part to the addition of avocado.
“I got the idea from some rice noodles I had at a restaurant specializing in Lanzhou cuisine. I wanted to turn it into salad which could become a light appetizer for a meal,” says Liu.
Liu also gives Chinese chuanr (kebab) a new twist by making Egyptian-style lamb kebabs with crispy quinoa, spicy BBQ sauce and mint, Tunisian-style harissa chicken with peanuts and yogurt dip, and Korean-style bulgogi pork with bonito flakes and potato.
All the inspiration for Liu’s latest fusion dishes come from his recent travels around the world.
He graduated from the Beijing Jinsong Vocational School majoring in Western cuisine in 1993, and has spent much of his career working in Western restaurants in five star hotels in Beijing.
From Spanish cuisine to French cuisine, Liu has always worked with talented chefs and learned a lot from them, but this was not enough for him.
In 2015, Liu quit his job as an executive chef, and started to explore cuisines from around the world as an “on-the-road chef”.
He tried more than one hundred restaurants worldwide each year, and each city he visited brought him fresh inspiration.
“Before I ate at a new restaurant, I usually sent them an email indicating that I was a chef and would like to sample a range of their dishes and visit the kitchen,” says Liu.
He says he was always welcomed by the restaurants, and the managers were quick to offer him a tour of their kitchens. “Sometimes I got to try their ‘hidden menus’,” he adds.
For each new dish Liu tried, he took several photos from different angles and at different times so that he could study how the dish was prepared and presented.
Liu taught himself Spanish when he worked with a Spanish chef in 2000. Sixteen years later, Liu helped Spanish master chef Rodrigo de la Calle to present a “floral cuisine” dinner in Beijing.
The next year, Liu went to Calle’s restaurant — El Invernadero in Madrid — to work for a month. The one-star Michelin restaurant in the Spanish capital has only four tables, but serves 34 set-menu dishes each day.
“It was hard working each day from 9 am to midnight,” says Liu, who says the experience was well worth it.
Liu and Calle both believe floral cuisine does not necessarily have to be vegetarian, and that the vegetables can be cooked in meat or seafood broth, which helps to season the vegetables, but not highlight the taste of the fish or meat.
What Liu feels most proud of is a snack dish of marinated radish he created for the set menu, and the chili oil that Liu taught Calle to make that he now uses to highlight the flavor of the beet tops in one of the set dishes.
Spain is Liu’s favorite culinary destination. “When I don’t have any ideas for new dishes, I like to set up a trip to Spain — its food always inspires me,” says Liu.
Liu’s great grandfather used to be a chef at Beijing Hotel, which he thinks inspired him to become a foodie, if not a chef.
He has visited New York with his wife twice, but has never seen the Statue of Liberty, as he thinks the time it takes to visit the site could be better spent by sampling a meal or two.
Since 2015, Liu has also taken up the role of a consultant to create menus for new restaurants. The menus behind Origine and Algorithm in Beijing, Tribe Organic in Shanghai, and Cactus in Kunming, Yunnan province, are all his creations.
Most of his menus tend to revolve around Western food, but U Cafe is his first attempt to design an entire menu featuring only Chinese fusion dishes. Liu regards this as good practice to prepare for the launch of his new Chinese restaurant in Toronto over the next two months.
Liu is taking his fusion concept to Canada in the hope of creating a casual dining venue for locals to enjoy his take on modern Chinese cuisine.
“I’ll update the menu, and make the dishes less time-consuming to prepare,” says Liu. “Chinese cuisine is complicated, so I want to give my customers the chance to sample the flavors of Chinese dishes that don’t require the most sophisticated skills to make.”
“The seasonings will be Chinese style, and I’ll use some Western cooking methods which I’m good at,” Liu says. “For the Chinese rice noodle dish, I plan to update a version with beet tops to add a splash of purple instead of using avocado.”
According to Liu, his goal is to design one dish that would take off all across North America.
Hong Kong chef Susur Lee is one of the most popular Chinese chefs in Toronto, who specializes in Cantonese cuisine, while Beijing-born Liu aims to bring the flavors of northern China to the city.
“A good chef knows how to match the ingredients and make them balance. That’s my rule for creating Chinese fusion dishes,” says Liu. “At the same time, I’ll keep traveling and eating.”