Of cabbages and kings

The restaurant's popular "Yiyuan" chicken [Photo provided to China Daily]

Summertime diners at the restaurant won't want to miss the crawfish, a specialty offered now at the peak harvest time.

The restaurant group has a crawfish production base near Beijing, a few hours' drive away, to ensure the freshness of the freshwater crustaceans. Almost half of the "Chinese lobsters" cooked in the group's kitchens are from the base, and the rest are from Xuyi county, Huai'an city in Jiangsu province, famous for having some of the best crawfish in China.

Publicist Fu says Hua's Garden was among the first restaurants to introduce crawfish to Beijing menus back in the 1990s at its eatery in Guijie food street, otherwise known as Ghost Street.

The restaurant has developed dozens of crawfish dishes over time, but the classics on the menu are dishes made with ground garlic, chilies, salty water, or stir-fried. There are also Korean kimchi-flavored, super spicy and milk-flavored crawfish dishes, which are very popular among young people, Fu says.

We opted for the traditional garlic flavor. The process of eating crawfish is half the fun, working at the shell to get to the tastiest morsels. Sometimes a broken, sharp shell may seem threatening, but Hua's servers are ready to help diners pick out the delicious bits of meat.

We also liked the restaurant's popular "Yiyuan" chicken, a cold dish created in the 1990s for Anita Mui Yim-fong, a famous Hong Kong singer and actress, who died in 2003.

The generously portioned dish consists of chicken meat, noodles, rice jelly, mushrooms, and tomatoes dipped in spun sugar - each tipped with a long decorative spike that demanded careful eating. The platter also included a vegetable salad of cucumber, black fungus, purple cabbage and more, plus traditional Beijing snacks such as mahua (twists of fried dough).

Eaten with the restaurant's house-made spicy sauce, the dish had a rich mix of flavors and textures. The restaurant's attention to detail is also impressive: It offers fresh pear slices after dinner to freshen breath. Dinners can also ask for non-spicy sauce.