The secrets of a kitchen king

This time, Su invited Zhao to come to Shanghai and help him prepare the dinner together. "We needed to serve 580 guests at the same time, which is quite a challenge for chefs," Su says.

For the gala dinner, Su says, he and Zhao carefully selected domestic seasonal ingredients and then drew on paper what the dishes would look like before starting to cook them and adjusting the recipes along the way. They had to take into account the order of the dishes as they considered the flavors, Zhao says.

A beef dish the two created turned out to be a sensation, they say. They used beef from Dalian, Liaoning province, and marinated it for 12 hours before pan-frying it to seal in its juice. The beef was then steamed with vegetables for exactly 90 minutes, and after cooling the beef was cut into individual portions, put on the plate and served.

The other challenge for this grand event was to manage time, all dishes needing to be served within a set time, usually 40 minutes for four dishes as well as dessert and fruit platter.

"For a gala, each second counts," Zhao says. "For chefs it's like a battlefield."

Though working on such galas was exhausting, he says, doing them was a huge honor.

Zhao retired in 2018, but realized he simply could not do nothing, so he returned to Shanghai to help prepare the gala dinner for the first China International Import Expo.

After COVID-19 broke out, Zhao accepted the job of leading the kitchen in the Macao Chinese Restaurant in the Legendale Hotel in Wangfujing, Beijing.