Masterly ... Robust ... If you don’t live within 100 miles of a real Chinese restaurant, or an H Mart, this book will not only entertain and instruct you — it might make you go mad with longing.
Offers food tours to help people like me develop a deeper appreciation of the varieties of Chinese cuisine ... Dunlop brings the cuisines deliciously to life with her ample powers of description. This is a tool of the food writer’s trade, and she wields it expertly ... The text is erudite, too, dense and lively, enriched with history as well as fragments of archaic poetry and proverbs, the etymology of food terms, and playful examples of the cross-pollination of Chinese food and life ... Dunlop sets out to change those misguided views. The result is a joyously sensual, deeply researched and unabashedly chauvinistic read, a feast for anyone curious about how 1.4 billion people eat.
An ecstatic compendium of her Chinese romance. Chapters are divided into banquet 'courses' ... The book is not without difficulties ... Dunlop’s China and her themes become more nuanced ... Dunlop brings a similar verve to the Chinese past. Her historical figures are sadistic and sexy.
Fascinating ... Impressive here is not just her evident mastery of her material, but also the skill with which she translates it to her audience ... Though Dunlop’s prose is lively and engaging for the most part, it is not unmarked by repetitiousness.
As a whole, however, this book is an erudite joy that makes you yearn to taste the delights Dunlop describes. Her sensory writing is so vivid that I felt I was actually there with her in the food markets of China.
[A] love letter ... Another food writer might be suspected of trying too hard, but such is the range and depth of Dunlop’s erudition, and so infectious is her enthusiasm, that she is above suspicion on that score ... Dunlop has developed a vocabulary equal to the daunting challenge of conveying the huge range of values, ambitions and experiences embedded in Chinese gastronomy ... Compelling.
Dunlop is an astute and enthusiastic observer, with a fine sense of the intercultural differences and the thread of ignorance and animus that has persisted ... Dunlop’s observations are particularly timely in this era of environmental challenges, suggesting this traditional wisdom can be applied in a modern context.
