Yueshihue 悦食荟 @ Xiamen

This was meant to be a working lunch, but as usual there’s so much food during these conventions and meetings. Today I was in Xiamen for our annual user conference, and for the working lunch we went for some local home cooked favourites.

Located beside Wuyi Square is the RT Mart Mall, and if you go to the basement, it’s a food street mall with lots of local goodies.

Yueshihue 悦食荟 is a local restaurant that served Minnan favourites using simple ingredients sourced locally. As Xiamen is an island, so you can expect a lot of seafood.

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Besides Hokkien cuisine, they also serve some Sichuan dishes as Sichuan is the current favourite among the younger generations.

This is a classic Hokkien dish where strips of pork loin are marinated with fermented bean paste and then coated with flour and deep fried. 小酥肉 Crispy pork strips from this restaurant used a slightly fatty cut so there’s bits of crunchiness from the pork fats. Delicious.

As Xiamen is an island, there’s plenty of fishing activities at the port. And with that, there’s always unsold fish of different sizes and species. Locals would take them, pan fried them and stew them in a soy sauce. 杂鱼酱油水 Pan fried mixed fish with soy sauce was a delightfully simple dish with simple flavours. Reminded me of simpler days of yesteryears.

Xiamen is just next to Jinmen, where they produce Gaoliang, a distilled wine made from grains. So this wine is often featured in their cooking. 盐酒鸡 Steamed chicken with salt and wine has a fragrance left behind from the Gaoliang wine and together with the free range chicken, it was delicious.

Hokkien and Teochew are only separated by a river and they share many culinary similarities in terms of ingredients and preparations. Green olives are cultivated in this part of the world, but the olives are quite bitter if not processed. But Hokkiens and Teochews love this bitterness. 石橄榄猪肉汤 Green olives and pork meatball soup has this bitterness, together with the sweetness and umami from the pork.

The techniques is usually reserved for spinach, but it works with asparagus. 上汤金银蛋芦笋 Asparagus in broth with salted and century eggs used the two types of processed eggs to impart their flavours to the pork bone stock when cooking with asparagus.

This, in my opinion, was the best dish that was served for lunch. 海蛎紫菜煲 Clams with seaweed used clams and seaweeds harvest around the nearby waters and stewed the two with strips of pork belly and dried shrimps. The result was a umami bomb.

The lunch was simple and good, and everything was on the table when we arrived. However the oil and claypots helped in keeping the temperature of the food. We were in and out in a jiffy because we needed to go back to the conference. It would be difficult not to get into a food coma.

Yueshihue Minnan Restaurant 悦食荟|水煮 闽南 家常
体育路95号大润发商业街1110号店铺
Tel : +86 (0592) 5093533; +86 18965835351

Date Visited : Jul 2021