This Polish Chef Runs One of Shanghai’s Hottest Chinese Restaurants

Comments · 52

• SA

  @saintcavish · 1 day ago (edited) · pinned

  1. as ever, we are on Patreon, if you&apos;d like to contribute to our travel budget: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/saintcavish">https://www.patreon.com/saintcavish</a><br><br>2. this episode was important to me, personally, because I see alot of myself in Michael and Jiro. when I moved to China in 2005, and quickly realized I was more interested in Chinese food than the cuisines I had been cooking in my career, there was no path for me to follow. after many many years, I have sort of made my own. Michael and Jiro have done the same, with the added burden of tying it to the rollercoaster of being independent restaurant owners. it takes stubborn, idealistic people to follow their interests this far (I know because I am one), and I respect that tremendously.<br><br>on top of that, there is the greater question of why there aren&apos;t more people trying to do this. I wanted to untangle (and dismiss) the ethnicity question, and think about what&apos;s really going on here. I don&apos;t think I&apos;ve found any definitive answer but I hope these two videos go some way towards starting that conversation, and showing the result (Bastard) when those challenges are met and overcome.

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• SC

  @scottyt798 · 1 day ago

  always a good day when saintcavish uploads

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• TS

  @tschmidhuber · 23 hours ago

  Thank you for that wonderful video! Yes, a huge barrier into getting into Chinese cuisine is the language. A second barrier is the mindset of many Chinese chefs: it&apos;s too complicated, a foreigner cannot learn it (which is actually closely connected to the language barrier). It took me a decade to make friends with restaurant owners in Nanjing who finally let me have a glance into their kitchens and teach me a few simple lessons about what makes good Chinese food. After two decades of travelling to living in China, I finally came to the point where my Chinese friends tell me: tastes like home. But it was a long and somewhat painful process. So yes, I understand why there are so few foreign chefs in China (and all around the world) cooking Chinese food.

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• VI

  @vividai5006 · 18 hours ago

  For me, this is another masterpiece bringing your series to the next level!!! You have been talking about Chinese food culture for so long. And this episode comes from a totally different perspective, how it is like for a foreigner to explore the food culture not in the dining room, but in the kitchen. There are a lot of barriers in working and living in another country. For chinese living abroad and for foreigners living in china. At the end, it is all about love and commitment.❤

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• GR

  @gregknudson · 1 day ago (edited)

  Really enjoyed this one. Great contrast and vibrant colours, loved the night scenes and atmosphere. &nbsp;I find people like Chef Michael interesting - those that get lost in a foreign place and seek out exotic foods and how to cook them in depth. Fuschia Dunlop is another who comes to mind! I&apos;m grateful I was able to travel to Shanghai once - even if just for that 1 week - because it was heavily food oriented. I experienced a lot of different dishes and flavors. I was also grateful to have met many Chinese friends during my studies at university here in Atlantic Canada, when we went through a time of bringing in many exchange students from that region. They&apos;d bring me to their choice of local authentic restaurants (which were newly spawning at the time) and Asian markets as well, introducing me to their homecooked versions of dishes, communal hotpot nights, and giving me some strange(to us) things like Sichuan pickled chicken feet to snack on. These gave me a baseline from which to dissect a lot of individual ingredients - chilis, spices, etc a point where I now can &apos;anticipate&apos; the flavors of a lot of different profiles and dishes that I haven&apos;t had yet, and to an extent cook them before trying it more authentically <br> <br>I consider the knowledge to now be a prized treasure or superpower of sorts that I&apos;m rather proud of, due to the barriers he mentioned &amp; especially in times that I can&apos;t afford travel, and even eating out has become absurdly, insultingly expensive in what feels like a short time. I can still rely on a large number of dishes I learned or taught myself how to cook and refined until I could reach the standards &amp; taste memories of favorite Chinese restaurants (some of which have since closed :( ), or supplement online from people like Chef Wang Gang, Chinese Cooking Demystified, Woks of Life and so on. They also know me at my local Asian market and no longer warn me that something is spicy, or question whether I&apos;m sure I want it, which I always got a kick out of. Sometimes I&apos;ll even get ideas for techniques or ingredients by sight, from these kinds of videos, where they don&apos;t necessarily need to be in the form of a recipe.

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• HE

  @hehe-mq2bk · 14 hours ago

  your production is always top tier

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• JO

  @josephsyng3017 · 13 hours ago

  The Bastard team getting the shine it deserves……representing Shanghai and Hong Kong is one intimate dining space. Keep shining the light on others @StCavish!

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• HE

  @hehe-mq2bk · 14 hours ago

  more restaurants need to have modern Chinese cuisine. we need to explore CHINESE food as it exists in the future. I love seeing people In China experimenting with Chinese cuisine

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• US

  @user-jk5um1om8l · 19 hours ago

  Another double whammy, love it. Anyone can cook Chinese food with a bit of immersion - look at Fuschia Dunlop! Why should it be any different than English chefs cooking French food? Loads of those, no one bats an eye.<br><br>There’s an Indian guy in Singapore who runs two successful Chinese restaurants (Mr. Blecky’s seafood and Xiao Hei Tze Char). He was adopted by a Chinese family and speaks flawless Cantonese - so his background might have been a bit of a novelty at first but if the food is good, it’s good. 🙂

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• JA

  @jamesfullwood7788 · 17 hours ago

  Seems like Chinese fusion to me...

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• SA

  @SabineZhang · 11 hours ago

  wow, what a treat! for me mapo tofu was always the baseline to test the quality of restaurants. Michaels white mapo tofu really shifts the whole notion! love it - or better - would love to taste it!

• FR

  @FrankWhitesUTube · 20 hours ago (edited)

  Went in may this year was fantastic prolly our favourite meal in Shanghai! Will be goin back next march 💯👌🏽

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