Family banquet
As part of the two-week exhibition Eat Drink Man Woman, two dinners are done in collaboration with Shanghai Supper Club, a London-based supper club run by Lillian Luk. Paying homage to the Chinese family dining table as a space of cultural memory and identity, the dinners feature an 8-course sharing menu of classic Shanghainese cooking.
Central to the exhibition ‘Eat Drink Man Woman’ is the showcase of the diversity and complexity of the meaning of “Chinese”. Chinese food in particular, is a giant conglomerate of numerous regional styles, techniques, ingredients, and traditions over thousands of years of history. Overseas, ‘Chinese food’ is an important space of diasporic identity and community, and as a symbol of cultural preservation and assimilation. Unfortunately, through this assimilation, what is often known is only a reduced version of sweet, greasy, and cheap.
Shanghainese Cuisine, or ‘Hu Cuisine’, originates from the East Coast of China in regions such as Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu. Shanghainese cooking has a heavy focus on seasonality, and preservation of ingredient’s natural tastes. The frequent use of soy sauce and sugar gives a lot of its dishes their signature red shine. Dishes shown here include: ba bao ya (8-treasure duck), drunken chicken, su ji (tofu chicken), cong you mian (scallion oil noodles), lion head (braised pork meatballs)…
The Family Banquet combines familiar home-cooking and formal banquet techniques, continuing Shanghai-born chef Lilian Luk's focus on cooking with seasonal ingredients and recipes from her childhood in China. Taking place amongst of the exhibiting artworks and on tableware by Eagle & Hodges, the Family Banquets continue the exhibition's look at self-expression and communication through food and social ritual, challenging the notion of "authentic" Chinese food.
ABOUT Shanghai supper club
Old school Shanghainese home cooking and street food
Lillian decided to quit her corporate job paper-pushing and finally pursue her life-long passion in food. Growing up in Shanghai with a grandmother who was a fantastic cook and a culinary fountain of wisdom in the neighborhood, Lillian had her first lessons on eating well at home, even though back then China still had food rations. Through her many moves and travels around the world, Lillian really honed her talent as a skilled eater. But alas, good eating jobs are hard to come by! Encouraged by her friends to take up cooking instead, Lillian decided to share her grandmother’s home cooking and hard to find Shanghainese street food with the lovely people of London. And with that, Shanghai Supper Club was born in 2014!
We host dinners every 6 to 8 weeks to showcase the food my late grandmother used to cook at home and some typical dianxin, or small eats, you would find on the streets of Shanghai. The menu is different for every dinner as Shanghainese food is very seasonal and uses many seasonal ingredients. We try to follow that philosophy in our cooking with dishes that reflect what we would eat at a particular time of the year or for special festivals like the Chinese New Year.
Contact info for chef Lilian Luk at Shanghai Supper Club
