Culinary replication at its finest

FThe Godly restaurant in Shanghai has for almost a century been creating cuisine that look and taste the same as the classics, except for one aspect — none of their dishes contain meat or nearly four decades, Zhao Youming has been cooking Chinese dishes at the kitchen of Godly with just a fraction of the ingredients other chefs use.

According to Zhao, about twothirds of the ingredients that are commonly used in Chinese cuisine cannot be used in the kitchen. After all, Godly, or Gong De Lin — it means “a forest of beneficences” in Chinese — is a vegetarian establishment.

But the 63-year-old chef is not complaining. In fact, he said he is “blessed” to be able to work with a limited selection of ingredients.

“Less is more. When we are deprived of a certain number of things, we can be more focused on the task at hand,” he said.

There have been more than 300 vegetarian dishes created and recorded by the nearly century-old Godly, the first dining establishment in the city to be certified as a national intangible cultural legacy. About a third of these dishes are now served regularly at two of its catering venues in Shanghai.

In 1979, following China’s opening-up to the world, Godly and several other State-owned restaurants were chosen by the government as key organizations to finance and revive traditional Chinese culinary culture.

It was around this time that chef Zhao’s father, who had been running the kitchen at Godly for nearly three decades, decided to bring his son into the picture as he believed that cooking in a kitchen had better prospects than being a brick worker, a job the junior Zhao had had for eight years before following in his father’s footsteps.

Though his father ran the kitchen, Zhao recalled that he did not receive preferential treatment, pointing out that his apprenticeship was tough.

“We were trained in as many skills as the chefs who cooked with regular meat and fish because we needed to know exactly how those dishes were made before we could create alternative versions with vegetables,” said Zhao, who admitted he is not a vegetarian.

As society becomes more aware about health and the environment, a growing number of Chinese are turning to vegetarian diets. As such, private and chain restaurants offering vegetarian cuisines have been mushrooming over the past several years in Shanghai. But chef Zhao does not think Godly is at any risk of losing its perch at the top. “It’s not about competing with others but about staying original and ahead of the curve, just like what we did a century ago when we invented the folk vegetarian cuisine,” said Zhao. Together with a dozen of his apprentices, Zhao introduces between 10 and 20 new dishes every year, and all of them are based on nothing more than four main ingredients: tofu, gluten, mushrooms and bamboo shoots.

“A vegetarian chef is like a movie director. We have the responsibility of discovering the potential of each vegetable and taking full advantage of them in different scenarios,” he said.

Founded in 1922 by the Xiao brothers who came from a Buddhist family, Godly is considered one of the first non-religious vegetarian restaurants in Shanghai. Godly is today owned by Shanghai’s dining conglomerate Xing Hua Lou Group. In 2016, it posted a revenue of 150 million yuan ($22 million), with up to 80 percent of it coming from mooncake sales.

The restaurant is also considered the birthplace of folk vegetarian cuisine, a subcategory of vegetarian cuisine. The other two subcategories are imperial and temple vegetarian.

In 2008, the cooking technique used by Godly to create vegetarian cuisine was listed as a national intangible culture heritage by the Ministry of Culture. Zhao, who hails from Taizhou, Zhejiang province, was named as the third generation craftsman of the technique.

Folk vegetarian cuisine is a combination of imperial and temple vegetarian cuisines. It has a much shorter history than the other two types of cuisine, which were believed to have peaked during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

This younger cuisine has a more relaxed set of rules than temple cuisine, which refers to food prepared for monks and nuns, and is considered less refined than its imperial counterpart, which was created more as a tribute to ancestors and gods than for consumption.

In folk vegetarian cuisine, eggs and milk are permitted. Other common ingredients include ginger, garlic and spring onions which are rarely used in temple cuisine because monks and nuns believe their strong odors unsettle the peace of mind.

Signature dishes at Godly are similar to those found at the most traditional Chinese vegetarian restaurants. They include “fried crab meat and roes”, a dish made from smashed potatoes and carrots, as well as “sweet and sour squirrel-shaped mandarin fish”, which features sliced mushrooms that look like the quills of a squirrel.

“These two dishes represent the key challenges of Chinese folk vegetarian cuisine — to look and taste like its non-vegetarian versions,” said Zhou Tong, a food critic and consultant in Shanghai who has been studying Chinese cuisine for decades.

Zhou said that the vegetarian crab dish is all about creating a similar, if not identical, flavor as the seasonal river delicacy that is well-loved in eastern China. Its primary ingredients are vinegar, sugar and oil. The key focus of the vegetarian fish dish, on the other hand, is on replicating the texture of carp’s flesh.

“Delicacies essentially can be broken down into two elements: flavors and textures. And the magic of Chinese folk vegetarian cuisine is that it manages to create a striking resemblance to meat dishes in either of the two, or sometimes both aspects,” said Zhou.

The restaurant’s ability to excel on these two fronts stemmed from the ambitions of its first general manager Zhao Yunshao, who was determined to turn Godly into a major culinary player in 1920s Shanghai.

Because he knew little about cooking, Zhao Yunshao hired two chefs who specialized in Huaiyang cuisine — it is famous for its fist-sized pork meatballs as well as sliced chicken and ham — and pushed them to create vegetarian food that tasted the same as the meat dishes. He also enlisted cooks from monasteries to help curate Godly’s menu.

Till today, the employee meals for both staff and management teams at the restaurant’s two locations in the city only contain vegetables and food made from bean curd and taro.

“Less than 30 percent of our regulars today are vegetarian for religious reasons. But it’s important that we preserve the tradition and be respectful to the minority by not killing animals, at least within the places they dine,” chef Zhao said.

BY GAO ERQIANG PHOTOS A vegetarian dish by Chef Zhao Youming that is inspired from traditional Chinese paintings. The main ingredient in this dish is sea cucumber.