The Delicious Taste of Shunde Cuisine

Braised winter melon with crab roe and conpoy sauce

Shunde is a city of 3.2 million people located in between Hong Kong in the south, and Guangzhou in the north. Established during the Ming dynasty in 1452, Shunde is the birthplace of Cantonese opera, and Cantonese cuisine, making it a Unesco designated City of Gastronomy.

In general, Shunde cuisine is focused on fresh ingredients, such as fresh water fish like carp, rice, milk, such as buffalo milk, poultry like chicken and pigeon, and flowers. 

Flavourful Shunde soy sauce chicken

A restaurant in Richmond called A Bite of Shunde transports diners to the southern Chinese city with some delicious dishes that are different from Hong Kong-style Cantonese ones.

One is a soup called hand pulled fish soup, where the fresh water fish is pan-fried first. Once it's cooked, the fish meat is extracted from the bones and placed in a thick soup that includes ribbons of bean curd skin, wood ear fungus, and thinly sliced carrots.

Another soupy item is Chencun rice noodles in a deluxe chicken broth. The broth has a strong chicken taste, ensuring it hasn't been diluted much, and rice noodles soak up the flavour. It was total comfort food.

Impressive shrimp balls on silver bean sprouts

Speaking of chicken, the soy sauce chicken was also outstanding, better than the crispy chicken that is presented to the table standing upright with a pole through it. Then the staff proceeds to break the bird apart by hand which is quite unnecessary.

An interesting dish to watch cooked in front of us was steamed fresh Lingcod. It is deboned and thinly sliced and placed in a steamer and cooked in about two minutes and then dipped in soy sauce with chillis. The fish tasted sweet.

We were impressed by the flying fish caviar shrimp balls on a bed of "silver" bean sprout, where the head and tail of the bean sprouts were meticulously removed. The texture of the shrimp balls revealed the paste was made by hand chopping the shrimp, a laborious task, but the end result is a bouncy texture.

For vegetables, winter melon made an appearance in a poetically described "celebration of gold and emerald", when it is braised winter melon squares topped with a sauce of crab roe and conpoy. The presentation of the nine squares is artistic and not easy to present.

A Shunde specialty -- pan-fried milk with prawns

The test of a Shunde chef is seeing if they can make pan-fried milk. In Shunde buffalo milk is used, which is creamier, but here it's cow's milk that is mixed with egg white and it's not about stirring the mixture, but watching the heat and keeping it consistent. The end result is a fluffy milk finished with prawns. 

And Shunde cuisine isn't complete without claypot rice. Ours had various kinds of lap cheong of Chinese sausage steamed with the rice and some vegetable, and a dark soy sauce was poured into the claypot and mixed in thoroughly before being portioned out into bowls. The best part was the fan jiu, or the crispy edge of the rice.

Double-steamed milk custard

For dessert we had the well-known double steamed milk custard. Apparently in Shunde, a good one has the spoon laying on the surface of the custard, not sinking into it, which shows how thick it is. We all just lapped it up, it was so good, not too sweet.

A Bite of Shunde

4653 Garden City Road, #2215

Richmond, BC

+1 604 284 0119

https://www.instagram.com/abiteofshunde/