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Looking to hone the recipes they were playing with, Xu found a sifu, or mentor—a man whose name Xu wouldn’t disclose, who has been a veteran of high-end Cantonese kitchens for decades. Under his guidance, the chef and his partner Yao, both in their thirties, began shifting their attention to Cantonese cuisine in its purest, oldest form. “Neither of us was born in the age where Cantonese cuisine was at its most glorious,” Xu says. “We never experienced it, so our knowledge and understanding of Cantonese classics was the same as most other people, in that we didn’t know much about them. My sifu had worked in grand hotels in the 1960s and cooked dishes that I’d never seen or tasted before. He suggested that I start again and learn the fundamentals of Cantonese cuisine.” So Xu did. He started digging up old recipes and cookbooks and began to try his hand at reproducing them, from tiny coins of chicken minced by hand on top of pig skin to incorporate a little of the fattiness, designed to float in a milky, slow-cooked tonic