Chao Shang Chao

Control at the Chaoshan pass

The fish maw meets 30-year-aged dried radish in a register of patience. Cheung Yat Fung, Executive Chef at Chao Shang Chao in Beijing, holds that register through a kitchen devoted to Modern Teochew, or Chaoshan, fine dining. Hong Kong-born, he came to this station after leading the kitchen at Ji Pin Court in Shanghai from 2016 to 2020, a stretch that tightened the calibration now visible here: regional cooking carried into a composed room without being thinned into gesture. At Chao Shang Chao, in Chaoyang, his work is less about declaring modernity than arranging old disciplines with present tense control. The menu can move from braised fish maw with Chiuchow aged pickled radish to eel wrapped in lotus leaf, char siu pork, Chaoshan-style goose web, and hairy crab with yellow wine. Each dish asks the kitchen to keep texture in focus. Fish maw needs body without heaviness. Goose web needs the patience of deboning and glazing. Hairy crab needs the warmth of yellow wine and the balancing hand that Chinese food theory gives to ginger tea. Cheung’s role is to keep those decisions legible from the pass.

A tasting menu built from preserved things

The restaurant works in tasting-menu and à la carte formats, but its most defined language comes through sequence. A meal here can begin with Chaoshan-style pickled Chinese kale, marinated Buddha’s Hand citrus, peanuts with pickled radish, and warm lemon water made from that citrus marinade. The point is not decoration. It is appetite, temperature, and rhythm. From there, the kitchen has shown a green bean cake shaped like a pear, hairy crab with yellow wine, crab yolk, and caviar, goose web glazed after deboning, and mackerel in a frozen-style preparation with puning bean. The cuisine stays close to Chaoshan but does not police its border too tightly; char siu, from the wider southern Chinese table, appears when it serves the progression. Beverage service follows the room’s formal pace. Wine is curated, and tea sits naturally beside it, especially when crab, preserved radish, citrus, and ginger all ask for something more precise than weight.

The fourth-floor room in the CBD

The room is hidden on the fourth floor of a largely empty skyscraper in Beijing’s Central Business District, across from the CCTV headquarters. That placement changes the temperature of the meal before a plate lands. The city is close, but the dining room stays quiet, polished, and softly lit, with the service drawing attention back to the table rather than the view outside. Chao Shang Chao does not read like a street-facing regional restaurant lifted into luxury by surface. It reads like a controlled workshop for a cuisine that already had its own grammar: preserved citrus, pickled vegetables, goose, crab, fish maw, tea, wine, and the slow adjustments that make a tasting menu hold together. The small scale helps. So does the hush. In that room, Cheung can let a preserved ingredient carry more authority than an ornament.

Recognition without drift

Chao Shang Chao opened in 2022 and now holds three Michelin stars, recognition attached to this Beijing address and to the kitchen Cheung leads here. What has not shifted under the pressure of that status is the cooking, which still returns to Chaoshan texture, sourness, preservation, and measured richness. If the restaurant keeps developing its more upscale tasting menu, the test will be whether those older pressures remain intact. The close of the meal should still feel anchored by braised fish maw with 30-year-aged dried radish.