Fish Head Soup

Read about the dish:

But best of all was the second soup. It brought gasps around the table, even from Uncle Xie. The live fish had been transformed into pale, fluffy fish balls, light and airy and ultra-fresh. These floated in the perfectly intense fish broth with shrimp, clouds of soft tofu, and tangy shreds of mustard green. She felt when she was eating it that it nourished every part of her; it was a soup she sensed she would remember all her life.
– from The Last Chinese Chef

Taste the Dish:

Don’t be put off by the name of this dish; fish heads supply truly profound flavor to soup. With its milky, intense broth and cornucopia of ingredients including ham, shrimps, greens, sea cucumber, tofu, and miraculously fresh fish balls, this is one of the best soups I have ever eaten. It is a specialty of the 100-year-old Hangzhou restaurant Shan Wai Shan (lit. ‘mountains beyond mountains’, a reference to the restaurant’s gorgeously wooded hillside location.) To make it the restaurant buys only live Silver Carp farmed in the extremely pure One-Thousand-Isle Lake, a reservoir outside the city. Only large fish at least five years old are selected, and must be cooked the same day. This soup has become well known among Asian foodies; gourmets from Shanghai to Seoul to Tokyo trek to Hangzhou to eat it. So popular is Fish Head Soup that in addition to selling 800 orders a month, Shan Wai Shan runs a brisk little side business selling the soup’s signature blue-and-white serving tureen, above – custom-made exclusively for this soup in Jingdezhen, a town in Jiangxi Province which has been China’s porcelain-making capital for more a thousand years. Enamored diners take home the tureen for a lifelong souvenir of this unforgettable soup. I sometimes find myself wishing I too had lugged one home. Should you take a trip to Hangzhou, try to squeeze in lunch or dinner at Shan Wai Shan and experience this soup for yourself. Shan Wai Shan, 8 Yuquan Lu, Hangzhou Botanical Garden. Tel. 0571-8799-5866. English menu.