Chic 1699

Crab roe folded into rice

Crab roe is folded through hot rice until the grain takes on the shellfish fat; Krzysztof Waś, chef at Chic 1699 in Xiamen, works that register in Siming. His post here sits beside his work at Copernicus Restaurant in Kraków, where he moved from Deputy Chef to chef in 2023 after years inside the brigade. The two kitchens could not be mistaken for each other, yet the useful thread is control: richness checked by acidity, texture kept in view, seasoning used to pull a plate into line rather than announce itself.

At Chic 1699, that discipline meets a Fujianese and Minnan kitchen built around local seafood, Hokkien reference, and a modern dining room on the third floor of Building C at JFC Center. The house is the original Xiamen flagship of a local restaurant group, with later outposts carrying the brand outward. What can be read at the pass is a cooking language that favors contrast without noise: crab, fish maw, sa cha, mustard, coconut, ginger, rice.

Sa cha, fish maw, and the long stew

The menu works à la carte, with the signatures doing the anchoring. Shrimps in sa cha sauce carry the Minnan pantry clearly: firm shellfish, mild heat, and the nutty depth of the sauce. Buddha jumps over the wall brings the long-stewed side of the kitchen into view, a dish whose value is in time, extraction, and the patience to let ingredients give themselves over gradually. Crab roe stewed rice is more direct, almost a bench-side lesson in how fat, grain, and shellfish sweetness can hold a dish without decorative argument.

Soups mark the method just as strongly. Chic’s sea perch thick soup with fish maw leans into body and comfort; hand-made fish ball soup turns on resistance, with fish balls described for a tougher, fillet-like bite, broth kept refreshing, fish skin left crisp, and ginger held in balance. Mustard octopus brings moderate spice and a clean snap. Coconut chicken soup depends on the layered sweetness of coconut and chicken rather than simple boiling. The kitchen’s modernity is not abstraction. It is proportion.

Glass, steel, greenery, sea

The room at Chic 1699 keeps the work in a polished but intimate frame. Steel structures, split-level spaces, transparent glass, greenery, and ocean views toward the yacht club give the restaurant its faux-industrial shape without turning the meal into theatre. It is an elegant room, quiet enough for texture to register: the chew of octopus, the gloss of crab rice, the warmth of a thick soup moving across the table.

The counterpoint is important. This is not a street-food replica, and it is not a hotel dining room borrowing local names for the menu. The pass takes Xiamen harbor seafood and Minnan memory into a more composed setting, then leaves the regional vocabulary intact. The restaurant holds a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand distinction, but the plate makes the stronger case when the first spoonful of crab roe stewed rice reaches the table.