The Hindu Business Line : Golden Dragon's `Masterstrokes'

WHAT do you call a gustatory experience that is the result of cuisine masters in competition? Try `culinary Olympics' — a term that refers to Masterstrokes, a culinary extravaganza at the Golden Dragon, Taj Coromandel, Chennai, where three master chefs from Taj Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai are poised ladle to ladle in competition with one another. Their mission: to serve you the best of the all three Chinese restaurants — Taj Lands End, Tea House and Golden Dragon. Manojeet Bhujabal's, Sales Manager, explanation that the idea is to offer outbound travellers a taste of Taj's other outlets seems easier to digest.

The trio — Chef David whose turf is Taj Mumbai, Chef Lo-Ka-Yan from Taj Delhi and our very own hometown Maitre d' Chef Hardy — smile in competitive camaraderie as we ponder over the menu. After much dithering, the order read something like this: Ming Yang chicken, fish with pine nuts in Sichuan sauce, Mala chicken, pineapple spicy prawn fried rice, (courtesy Chef David), onion crab meat thick soup, sea food Wudong Shanghai style, chilli mountain chicken (chef Lo-Ka-Yan) and spicy cheese lobster (Chef Hardy). Well, we had to do culinary justice to all three masters!

With the chefs' specialisation in Cantonese and Sichuan cuisine, there's a heavy accent on the spice.

Our starters arrived, chilli mountain chicken, so called because of the formidable heap of red chillies. "It's not spicy. It's only part of the presentation," Chef David explained reassuringly. He was right, for despite its fiery appeal, the dish was all bark and o bite... a pleasing tang of sesame seeds and Sichuan pepper. The crab meat and onion soup was easy-going and mild, saturated with the natural flavour of the meat. Cheese on a Chinese platter? Thenagain, we didn't lay any lofty claims to authenticity. Chef Hardy explains, ``the North of China produced a lot of cheese and the South had an abundance of sea food, so with the English preference for cheese the two were combined in a single dish.'' Voila, the spicy cheese Lobster, which we hoped would be the piece de resistance, imagining the colossal crustacean to arrive in full regalia of shell and claw. It didn't, and instead succulent, meaty chunks came bathed in a creamy sauce, and we're still wondering where the cheese bit figured. The cooks could have notched up the spice too, but Manojeet explained that most of their foreign guests couldn't take the weighty spice levels.

Mala chicken, essentially Sichuan based, aimed at a two-fold effect — numb and spicy. Master Strokes is open for lunch and dinner till August 31.

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