In Beijing you talk, in Shanghai you shop and in Guangzhou you eat, as the saying goes.

Cantonese cooking is associated with a wide variety of flavours and tastes. If you like stir-fried dishes with light oil and salt, you may want to try Mingxiang Restaurant.

Located on Dingxi Lu near Yan'an Xilu, where at least four big restaurants operate in its neighbourhood, Mingxiang, the new Cantonese restaurant, managed to have over 60 percent of its seats occupied on the evening we visited. Like many other Chinese restaurants, it is cosy but noisy.

Stepping inside, what awaited us were several big aquariums where various kinds of seafish swam vigorously, and four big jars from which the scent of soup wafted by us, carried by the breeze.

One dish we ordered was guo tie chao tang cai. It was presented like a flower. Fresh greens were cut up into very tiny piece and coated with a layer of flour, which was made into the shape of a petal.

Quick-frying makes the flour layer crisp and fragrant in taste. I dipped it into the ketchup which was offered accompanying the dish, and when I tasted it again, the rich flavors of sweet, sour and milky exploded in my mouth.

Another dish, tai shi hua xie bao, deserves recommendation. It was cooked in that Thai style. Crab, tomato, egg and vermicelli made from bean starch were added into the clay pot. Special seasoning made the soup a little spicy. The crab was cooked just right for its meat to be tender and fragrant.

Zhu wang lu yu, weaver presented on a bamboo-made net, was poorly presented, the dry and thick shallots heavily covered on the weaver drove half of our appetite away. Poking away the shallots, we found the weaver was not fresh either. It was a pickled one, and the fish meat was a little sticky in taste.

The restaurant offers you a plate of free shrimp if your expenditure exceeds 50 yuan, and you may decide the cooking way for the shrimp. The average cost of the restaurant is 60 yuan per person.

( Shanghai Star August 12, 2002)