AN EVENING BY THE FIRESIDE
Where better to enjoy an international carnival of football than a place that combines ingredients, dishes and chefs from all over the world? Li Yingxue reports.
As the match between France and Australia at the Russia World Cup kicks off, the outdoor seats of Fireside Open Kitchen & Restaurant start to get crowded.
Three hours later, when Lionel Messi leads Argentina onto the pitch against Iceland, it’s standing room only.
There were four games in a row on that Saturday night, which is a carnival for soccer fans — they occupied the place until 5 am the next morning, when Croatia beat Nigeria 2-0.
At the beginning of each match, a new round of orders came from almost every table — French fries, popcorn chicken, Sichuan cold chuanr (kebab), and mutton kebab, all specially made each night after 8 pm, and all designed to pair beautifully with the beer, which was flowing freely.
However, that’s only one side of the place, Fireside is designed to be a fusion restaurant combining ingredients, dishes and chefs from all over the world. Even though it looks like a fancy, expensive high-end restaurant, the eatery actually aims to be a fairly-priced, Michelin star-style restaurant for everyone to be able to enjoy.
Fireside was opened last August by three men in their 30s hoping it could be a place for friends to sit down around a fireplace and enjoy their time together.
Zheng Zongyang, one of the cofounders — nicknamed the “anthropologist in the kitchen” by his friends because he studied anthropology for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees — lived in the Tibet autonomous region for a year to do field studies after graduating from University College London in 2010, and began to get picky about the food he’d eat.
“In August, after harvesting highland barley with the herdsmen, I would lie on it, smell its fragrance and eat some zanba (roasted barley flour) — made from highland barley and yogurt — while chatting with them,” says Zheng.
“That sweetness only belongs to Tibet,” explains the 33-year-old. “Just like the taste of meat from the black goats that live next to Aiding Lake and is unique to the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
“My original intention was to bring all these delicious ingredients, about which, most people are not aware of, to their lives.”
Zheng visited the edge of the Taklimakan desert in Xinjiang to find cistanche; he cut the fresh lotus seeds around Dongting Lake in Hunan province, and tried to find the green crab at the cold Kanas Lake in Xinjiang.
To gather the best ingredients from around the world, Zheng even asked his pilot friend to bring back fresh food from wherever he flies. “He is no longer the handsome captain that walks as if he is on the wing any more, because he is always laden down with ingredients,” Zheng says.
For one single salad at Fireside, the ingredients could come from eight different countries — tofu skin from China, Italian parsley, tiger prawns from England’s coastal waters, red snappers from Japan, avocados from Turkey and lettuce from Russia — all mixed and seasoned with Ukrainian black pepper and French butter.
The chefs at Fireside also hail from different places, fusing together Eastern and Western cooking methods. As a cofounder, Li Yao leads a team of nearly 30 chefs in the kitchen.
Li has been practicing cooking since he studied in Ukraine in 2004. He did parttime job at a Japanese restaurant and got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees of economics at the same time, before following his passion and becoming a full-time chef.
“Our food cannot be defined because it’s about innovation and creating art on the plate,” says Li. “For example, we use squid ink to produce Chinese painting styles on the plate, which not only looks amazing, but also adds freshness to our beef dish.”
Li has built a 180-squaremeter kitchen in the two-floor restaurant and it’s filled with both Chinese and Western kitchenware. The chefs at Fireside have used the kitchen as their stage to perform culinary magic, or in some cases as a laboratory bench for experimenting with ingredients.
“I encourage them to create new dishes together,” says Li. “We have a Chinese saying that ‘three cobblers are cleverer than Zhuge Liang,’ which is similar to the Western idiom ‘two heads are better than one.’ Well, we have two dozen chefs here.”
Li, who hails from Xinjiang, also gives his hometown’s signature roasted mutton a modern twist. “You may think it’s a Western dish because of the plating, but it’s actually made using the traditional Xinjiang method — the mutton has to be marinated with egg white so that it is crispy on the outside, but still tender on the inside,” Li says.
In Zheng’s mind, the purpose of Fireside’s kitchen is to tell the stories of the ingredients to the people in the capital.
“My hope is that people from different places or cultures gather here to enjoy the delicacies together,” Zheng says.