Critic's Log: Cheon San, Imperial Palace’s Chinese-cuisine restaurant

Word Count:  791

Named after the contiguous mountain peaks of China, Cheon San serves just as wide a variety of Korean-Chinese dishes, featuring an a la carte menu, set menus, and fine dimsum prepared by a chef with serious serious Chinese cuisine credentials:  Chef Kenny Yong Tze Hin.  Here he blends his modern Cantonese dishes with touches of Korean, like the four-part appetizer reminiscent of kimchi. 

A starter of yellow-gold chrysanthemum tea was served first which we later realized was the key to lasting through the epic affair of fine Chinese dining.

The dimsum platter did not sound ominous at all when it was introduced.  We were to sample a piece or two each of the fist-sized portions of various dimsum preparations like fried bean curd wrapped in wonton wrapper, siomai with crab roe, gorgeously delicate steamed hakaw, and deep-fried taro puff. Then came the deep-fried prawn with almond flakes which gave it different levels of crunch and flavor.  I could feel all the bean bean curd and fried wonton settling in my stomach and I thought, I was going to have to skip dinner that night and breakfast the next day.

Perhaps now the Korean dishes will be served, but no, the golden crispy Peking Duck was wheeled in, carved and rolled in wrappers with slivers of cucumber, shallots, with a caramel brown sauce that lingered after each bite.  The duck, we later found, was flown in from Beijing just for the occasion. 

The more familiar King Prawns (with chili sauce garnished with chopped shallots) made its appearance.   It is among Chef Kenny's more popular preparations and smacks of the heavier-sauced predilections of South to Southwestern Chinese cooking.  Beautiful as always, especially when followed by another seafood dish with a contrasting texture: silky soft baked catfish, again with a sweet burnt caramel finish edged with tangy mayonnaise.  Most unfortunately, as the servers introduced the dish, they refrained from mentioning the cholesterol and calorie counts of each serving, so we turned to our tea cups and downed some more chrysanthemum tea and magically felt we could ingest more of this rich indulgent food.  The Peking Duck was later served with a nice chili sauce and champignon mushrooms.  This wasn't enough, says Chef Kenny, referring to the numbers rule in Chinese food service.  The number of dishes served must never be odd and there we were, stuffed tea-infused gluttons, still at dish number eight (not counting the chili-sauced duck).   

The crowd favorite came next---soft-shell crab deep-fried in egg yolk. The men ate it along with its vibrantly orange shell adding to the crunch (as well as the oiliness), the taste of briny sea and the sandy texture of crab roe.  As a fitting cleanser to the crab dish, freshly made egg-noodles in black-bean sauce came next. I thought of it as akin to the French onion soup judging from the amount of caramelized onions in it, but Chinese.  It tasted nothing like the French's.  This was thick and saucy, with the noodle's fresh starch contributing to the soup's texture.  It wasn't salty but it was full-flavored, truly something I would crave on a rainy day.  There was one other soup dish served earlier on---like a birds' nest soup with the feathery egg-whites in a viscous sauce but laden with an interminable list of chopped vegetables.  If I were on sick bay, that soup would have nourished me back to health.  Unfortunately, it wasn't welcomed with much enthusiasm by the other food writers, as it did taste more grassy than the usual gamey soups we're more accustomed to (chicken or beef soup). Another of the table's favorites were the taro puffs and of course, the dessert of homemade ice cream and various pudding-like sweets.  Thankfully, we had tea to wash all this down with. A wide variety of liquor and spirits were also available.  

The menu of Cheon San offers what strikes me as a heavily Chinese-style set of dishes rather than the Korean-Chinese promised by the staff.  They claim that this is the same cuisine served at the Cheon San Restaurant at  Seoul's Imperial Palace.  

Private rooms are available at Cheon San, each of the 8 posh dining areas can seat up to 16 persons and are named after the major cities of China.  Cheon San  is open for lunch  from 12NN to 230PM and for dinner, from 6PM to 10PM.