Jiao Mei Restaurant — Restaurant in Guangzhou City

(Review from May 2016)

Whoever it was who first fried rice in goose fat, and added small pieces of goose liver - that person did as much for the general well-being of the world as any Nobel laureate.

Fried rice - sit down and shut up, Australian servicemen's clubs, you have no idea - is a delicacy. A delicacy which the foodie haven, Yangzhou, north of Shanghai, boasts of inventing, but it is here in Guangzhou, the real Paris of the east, on the reclaimed sand bar of Shamian, that chaofan reaches towards heaven. (Or, in truth, that Heaven reaches towards it, or would do, if the gods knew what they were missing.)

The fried rice is elegantly presented in an individual bowl, having been created with that attention to detail that sets apart the great cuisines: carrots cut micro-fine, green shallots also, a few - very few - wispy strands of egg. Nothing so gross as a pea or a kernel of maize.

The rice tells you about the restaurant.

We had a pigeon, fine-flavoured and - and this is hard to achieve - succulent all through; a wonderful noodle-nest of salt-and-pepper eggs (soft-yolked! How do they do that?); and pork with spiral snails (docked, to let the flavour out) with perilla.

Sell up where you are, buy a mansion on Shamian, and eat at Jiao Mei...