BEIJING -- Ancient China invented gunpowder and movable type but then stood by as foreigners perfected and patented each idea.
Never again, vows Shen Qing. Today, with China under assault by foreign fast-food chains, the trailblazing chef has cooked up China's first patented dish fit for franchising: baked pig's head.Shen, a 65-year-old former government bureaucrat, turned to cooking six years ago when high blood pressure forced him to retire early. After four years of effort, he came up with a cholesterol bomb of a dish: a whole pig's head, yellow teeth and all, cooked for 12 hours in 30 herbs and spices and served piping hot with piglet-shaped dumplings as a garnish.
The fatty feast has made Shen's seven Baked Pig Face restaurants enormously popular -- crowded at lunch and dinner, with a lively takeout business in vacuum-packed porkers. While China's well-to-do would prefer, say, shrimp and cognac when they eat out, Shen's Beijing restaurants nevertheless are regularly packed with bankers, artists and other patrons hunched over steaming plates of hog heads, split in half and laid split-side down on a platter. Connoisseurs eat just about every part of the head -- cheeks, eyes, snout, lips, tongue and brains -- and wash it down with mugs of frothy beer.
"I come here about once a month with out-of-town guests," says Liu Xin, a claims assessor with the People's Insurance Co. of China. "No one makes anything like this -- it's really got a special flavor."
Shen also stresses the dish's health benefits. "The pig's head is the most important part of pork," he explains, jabbing his chopsticks into the pig's cranium. "Here is the brain, the most nourishing part of the dish. It can make you smarter."
While the meat has other merits -- dabbed in plum sauce and rolled in a scallion pancake, it is indeed delectable -- Shen owes his success as much to China's love of things modern. His bright, clean restaurants belie the peasant origins of his main dish, and he went the extra mile, not to get three stars in a restaurant guide but a registration from the State Patent Bureau.
A patent carries the cachet of modernity in a country hungry to catch up with the rest of the world. With its refined cuisine losing ground each day to the patented products of McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken -- McDonald's has 55 restaurants in the capital, while KFC has 30 -- the idea of fighting back with China's own patented food was a sure-fire crowd-pleaser.
Unlike most Chinese chefs, who shy away from divulging their secrets, Shen boldly disclosed his cooking methods and the ingredients -- one debristled pig's head, 30 seasonings, including coriander and parsley. "The herbs cut the grease and aid digestion," Shen says. "It's scientific."
Shen's story has been told in more than 50 Chinese newspapers and broadcast in half a dozen television programs. All heralded "China's first patented dish" and Shen's aspirations for modernizing Chinese cuisine. Armed with his standardized, patented recipes, Shen sees himself as the leader of a new movement in Chinese food -- the march toward ubiquitous fast-food outlets that can compete with the world's giants.
Shen's use of patents is more than a marketing gimmick. He has written three books on modern restaurant management, and his restaurants are smoothly run operations. Well-trained waitresses attired in caps sporting the restaurant's Porky Pig-like logo roam the floors, refilling beers and helping customers roll the tiny pancakes around the fatty meat.
With his main restaurant near Beijing's airport highway an overwhelming success -- more than 5,000 pig faces sold there each month -- Shen has launched three other Baked Pig Face restaurants in Beijing, franchised three more in other cities and opened 18 specialty stores that sell his swinish delights.
Pig's head is a traditional dish in northeastern China, where poor people, particularly, buy heads for 12 cents apiece and serve the sweet meat braised and lightly seasoned. Shen, by contrast, pays nearly 40 cents for a head of the highest quality. His preparation procedure is a precise 12-hour affair, with each step standardized, from the debristling to the baking time, temperature and basting of herbs and spices.
"This allows us to sell each head for 96 yuan ($11.60) because we've turned it into something modern," he says, with one note of caution: "You can't eat this every night like I do, or you'll get sick of it."