Chaimenhui: Sichuan's Twenty-Four Flavours, Put to Seafood

World Travel 编辑部 · 2026-09-10 · 6 min read

Chaimenhui: Sichuan's Twenty-Four Flavours, Put to Seafood

Chengdu was the first city in Asia to be named a City of Gastronomy by UNESCO (2010). Among the kitchens pushing Sichuan cooking's modern edge, Chaimenhui — one Michelin star — is hard to skip.

Sichuan is not just mala

To see what Chaimenhui is doing, start with the flavour system.

Sichuan cuisine, represented by the cooking of Chengdu and Chongqing, leans on ma, la, fragrance, freshness, richness and body, and works heavily with the three peppers — Sichuan pepper, black pepper, chilli — and the three aromatics: scallion, ginger, garlic. But its real depth is in flavour profiles. It is said to have "seven savours and eight flavours": the seven being sweet, sour, numbing, hot, bitter, fragrant and salty. On that base it builds more than twenty compound profiles — savoury, homestyle, mala, scorched chilli, fish-fragrant, ginger sauce, guaiwei, pepper-tinged, hot-and-sour, chilli oil, garlic, sesame, soy, smoked, lychee, five-spice, wine-lees, sweet-and-sour, sweet, tangerine peel, mustard, salty-sweet, pepper-salt.

Its techniques are just as wide — stir-frying, velveting, quick-frying, flash-frying, dry-frying, deep-frying, simmering, braising — with small-pan frying, quick stir-frying, dry-frying and dry-braising the most distinctive.

Chaimenhui's idea is to bring that system to high-end seafood.

Flavours meet the sea

Its signatures pair one flavour profile with one kind of seafood:

• Steamed mud crab in aged huadiao wine — the fragrant road
• Steamed grouper with chilli-bean sauce — Sichuan fermentation and pepper aroma against a delicate white fish
• Guaiwei snowflake beef — guaiwei, the hardest of the compound flavours to describe, at once numbing, hot, salty, fresh and fragrant, usually a cold dish, here set against marbled beef

The point is plain: Sichuan's real skill lies not in heat but in seasoning. When the seasoning is strong enough, the ingredient need not be local.

One Michelin star

The Michelin Guide judges ingredient quality, mastery of flavour and technique, the personality of the cooking, value for money and consistency. One star means "a very good restaurant in its category — worth a stop".

Chaimenhui holds one.

Practical

• Style: modern Sichuan with high-end seafood — for a Sichuan meal that is not the usual
• Order: steamed crab in huadiao, grouper with chilli-bean sauce, guaiwei snowflake beef
• How to order: the three signatures cover three flavour profiles, so a small table can manage all three
• Good for: business and family meals alike; flexible on group size
• Price and booking: by the current menu; reserve ahead at popular times

Related

• Xu Jia Cai: Folk Sichuan, Modern Technique, Another Road
• Yu Zhi Lan: Lan Guijun and the Knife-Cut Golden Thread Noodles

Photos

Sources

• Wikipedia: Sichuan cuisine; Chengdu; Michelin Guide