Fine dining with new look, taste and feel

Fried homemade taglioni with scampi and lettuce sauce.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Then there is paccheri, a cylindrical pasta similar to rigatoni, but wider in diameter. Combal by Tiago may well be the only place in Beijing you can try this. It was a first for me, and it set me off yet again on a search for various types of pasta, in its many varied shapes and dimensions, and their names.

"Paccheri is very rare in Beijing," Li says. "It's made of whole wheat flour, and we import this dry paccheri from Italy."

The wide and thick hollow pasta holds the heavy sauce well, in this case a fresh tomato sauce essential in Italian cooking that Combal executes admirably.

With the rich sauce that balances sweet and sour, the pasta is mildly chewy but does not stick to my teeth.

In another pasta dish, fried homemade taglioni with New Zealand scampi and lettuce sauce, there is a little more innovation. The salty-sweet, moist scampi flesh is wrapped in long, flat ribbons of pasta that are deep fried. As I bite it, the flaky texture reminds me of the deep-fried rhombus-shaped flour crust my mother used to make when I was a girl.

For a meat dish at a fine dining place, beef should top the list. In Combal's version, tough cuts of Australian black Angus filet come on a cast iron mini-grill. The fired herbs - thyme and rosemary - underneath give a smoky and piney taste to the filet, which is already superbly cooked sous-vide. This is served on a petite cast iron grill whose exterior is inscribed with Japanese script - but it is what sits on top of the grill that is worthy of the loudest fanfare: meat wrapped in a shell made of breadcrumbs and chamomile, crispy and crunchy outside, and pink and juicy on the inside.