Dining in a museum

What do you get from a visit to a museum? A lesson in history, and a good, hot meal at an incredible price.

You must be wondering if it was worth a visit to Shenzhen Museum given the short history of the region. I will described that in another blogpost. But a little bird told me that the office workers around the museum would go there for their lunch break. I am sure they are not there for a cultural experience.

The decor of the place looked like a museum on its own. Porcelain figurines and red wood furniture donned the place, ghastly at best, cultural appropriation at worst.

I believed it was supposed to be a teahouse for the museum visitors to rest their tired feet after the visit. There’s a cafe that was linked to the teahouse but that doorway was locked up due to Covid. Given the restrictions to number of daily visitors to the museum, I suspected that the owners decided to adopt as a result.

Drinking soup before the meal

I ordered their set lunch and a double-boiled soup. Cantonese are the best when it comes to double-boiled soup, and it is common practice to have a bowl of soup before the meal.

They had several soup on offer including a daily special. The daily soup was winter melon pork rib soup, which was not interesting. So I ordered their regular offer, Cordycep Militaris with Black Chicken.

Cordycep militaris is the poor cousin of the cordyceps. But I believe there’s not difference except the additional “protein” in the usual cordyceps. Also in the soup was red date and some Chinese herbs. It was an excellent soup.

Bozaifan 煲仔饭 in a museum.

And when you least expected, the restaurant provided claypot rice for their set meals for lunch.

Why do I say it was a surprise? Bozaifan 煲仔饭 Claypot rice requires an open flame to properly cook the rice to form rice crisp on the bottom. And open flame is not ideal in the context of a museum. Definitely a thousand fire safety codes have been breached in this context. But heck, this is China and anything goes.

I ordered my favourite meat patty with salted fish 咸鱼肉饼饭 for the topping of the claypot rice. It came with a liberal amount of salted fish. The salted fish was made from mackerel and was flaky and crumbled on touch, a texture that I loved with salted fish. And when mixed with the rice, it gave the rice a lot of salty umami.

And finally a bit of greens with the meal. The waxed meat oozed with fats that was really delicious with the broccoli. But it was really too oily and salty. I could not finish it.

The whole meal was only ¥128, but if I stuck to only the set lunch, it was only ¥58. This explained why it was totally packed with the lunchtime crowd, given the value-for-money. But still I worry for the museum, this restaurant is definitely a fire hazard.

Huaxia Chadao 华夏茶道
金田路2208号 (博物馆1楼)

Date visited ： Jan 2022