Chef Albert's New Menu at Jiang-Nan Chun is a Cantonese Well Spring - Men's Folio
Lifestyle, Wine & Dine

Chef Albert’s New Menu at Jiang-Nan Chun is a Cantonese Well Spring

  • By Bryan Goh

Jiang-Nan Chun new menu chef albert
Unlike its contemporaries, Cantonese cuisine provides a blank slate for experimentation. Its preservation of flavours is so pure that often, what one is served is not blanketed with lashings of sauce or peppered with tongue-searing spices. This harks back to the geographical conditions of Guangdong — one where the trees seemingly touch the sky during long warm days, vegetables that grow underneath reach upwards, and where the Pearl River Delta permanently shines a bright inviting blue.

This purpose of purity might seem insipid to a tongue used to heavy flavours but this is perhaps cultural programming. If the four parts of one’s tongue receptors do not fire off in a blaze of flavour fireworks, is it a good thing? Perhaps, according to executive chinese chef Albert Au of Jiang-Nan Chun, a lighter response to food with his new menu is a positive thing. Lightness is the easiest way to differentiate if fresh ingredients are used. It provides one with a more elegant dining experience — no uncomfortable shifting in his seat or the expelling of noxious bodily gas. Lightness, too, is style and sophistication. 


While it is humorously described that the “Cantonese will eat anything that flies except aeroplanes, anything that moves on the ground except trains, and anything that moves in the water except boats”, the new seven-course menu by chef Albert Au at Jiang-Nan Chun (available both at lunch and dinner) is where the land and sea meets.

The russet crispness of a suckling pig’s skin gives way to a thin, pillowy layer of clean, sweet fat. Briny osetra caviar coating one’s tongue and a red wine jelly cutting through the richness with acidity. Pillowy pieces of fish maw floating in a tureen of thick double-boiled soup, chewy sea whelk and dried scallops adding its brackish flavours to the soup sans sauce.

In between the steaming and stir frying or the braising and deep frying, the mainstays of Executive Chef Albert Au’s new menu for Jiang-Nan Chun are the dishes where he contextualises Cantonese cuisine into the now — Chinese cuisine that is not just for Chinese people but something contemporary in presentation and traditional in taste. Sweet, fleshy lobster flash-fried with buttery garlic and dried chilli — a brilliant streak of red on white like a Sung Dynasty painting — and braised pork belly with pineapple, a hearty yielding morsel of fattiness best devoured in one bite.

Both dishes taste even better when paired with a glass of Taittinger Prestige Rosé — pink effervescent bubbles rising to the rim of its glass with an aroma of wild raspberry and blackcurrant. 

This story about Executive Chef Albert Au’s new menu for Jiang-Nan Chun first appeared in our May 2021 issue.