I was born in Suzhou in 1968. My grandmother kept a small kitchen behind a courtyard and let me sit on a stool to watch her work — the kind of slow, deliberate cooking that the Huaiyang tradition is named for. At sixteen I joined the kitchen at a state-owned hotel as an apprentice, and I have, in one form or another, been in a professional kitchen ever since.
Six years later I was at Songhelou doing cold-station prep. Five years after that I was a sous chef in Hangzhou. In 2002 I went south to Hong Kong and spent six years in a Michelin-starred Cantonese kitchen, which taught me a different kind of precision — Cantonese cuisine punishes any cook who can't tell the difference between a fish that's been off the heat for nine seconds versus thirteen. In 2008 I came back north, opened an eight-table private kitchen in Beijing called Shi'an Shisi (时安食肆), and ran it for ten years.
I closed the restaurant in 2018. Not for any dramatic reason — I was fifty, my legs were tired, and I wanted to teach. I've been a consultant since, and I keep a notebook of the dishes that mattered, the dishes that almost killed me, and the dishes I want my niece to know how to make. That notebook is becoming a book. ecook.wiki is where the book is taking shape.
What this site is
It's a record of how thirty years in Chinese professional kitchens taught me to cook — written carefully, in English, for whoever is standing in a kitchen far from China and trying to do something the right way. Every recipe is one I have cooked enough times to know what goes wrong before it does.
I am not interested in flashy. The best Chinese cooking is precise, not flashy. The recipes here have a section called Why this works — that's where I tell you what's actually happening on the pan, which is the part most home recipes leave out and which is also, in my experience, the part that decides whether your dish tastes like restaurant food or like something you cooked while distracted.
What this site isn't
It's not a video site. It's not a lifestyle blog. There are no Amazon links. I don't use my own face — partly because I don't enjoy it, partly because my hands have spent thirty years doing this work and they are more honest than my face is.
The recipes are free. They will stay free. If you find them useful, the most helpful thing you can do is share the page with someone else who cooks.
How to reach me
Email me at [email protected]. I read every message; I don't reply to all of them, but I try.
— Shi'an