Active imagination

Whenever he gets a hankering for Shanghainese food, Benny Li Shun-yan heads for Liu Yuan Pavilion in Wan Chai. There, the newspaper columnist, novelist and TV host orders some of his favourite dishes.

The presentation of the deep-fried Mandarin fish with sweet and sour sauce is impressive, drizzled with the orangey-red sauce with pine nuts. "With this dish, it's all about the chef's knife skills, because when the fish is deep fried, the slits into the fish all stand up," he says. One of Li's favourite dishes is the deep-fried pork knuckle with spice salt.

When it's cut into slices, there are layers of pork skin, fat and meat. The pork knuckle is boiled first to release the oil from the fat before it is deep fried. "This dish is very good with red wine. It goes well with beer too, but wine is better," he says.

Another staple dish for Li at Liu Yuan Pavilion is the stir-fried fresh shrimps with black truffle.

"Traditionally, these shrimps are either stir-fried on their own or with longjing [dragon well] tea leaves," he explains. "But one of the owners here loves to eat both Western and Chinese food, and she thought of adding black truffle to the dish. It goes very well with the shrimps, and this is the only place where you can eat this dish, because no one else has thought of this combination."

Finally, there's the small sugar snap peas, stir-fried with Chinese ham and "chicken heads", or spiked lotus seeds that look like small chicken heads. "You cannot get fresh 'chicken heads' in Hong Kong - the closest place is Suzhou," Li explains.