Tongqing Lou

Tongqing Lou is the most senior Anhui banquet brand in Hefei. The flagship operates as a wedding-and-large-function venue - the kitchen routinely runs eighteen to twenty-four-course banquets for parties of fifty to two hundred - and the smaller private dining rooms handle senior business dinners at the city's most polished register. The room is the most respected Anhui-cuisine kitchen in central China.

The cooking is the full Anhui banquet sequence at its most considered. The signatures of the cuisine are run with deliberate weight: the slow-braised stinky mandarin fish (chou gui yu) - Anhui's most famous and most divisive dish, fermented and pan-fried with bamboo shoot and ginger - is presented in the careful banquet plate-and-portion frame. The Li Hongzhang hodgepodge stew is run as a separate fixed banquet course. The bamboo-shoot-and-ham slow-stewed soup is the room's most-ordered private-room dish, and the Huangshan stewed pigeon is the kitchen's quiet flagship.

The wine and Champagne programme is the most serious in Hefei - approximately 200 references with a confident Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne spine, a useful New World programme, and the baijiu cellar that the older Chinese banquet expects (Maotai, Wuliangye and the Anhui regional Gujing Gongjiu and Kouzijiao baijiu vertically). The tea programme runs to ten regional Chinese teas in gongfu format.

Service is the heritage Chinese banquet register: trained for senior business and ceremonial dinners, multilingual at the principal posts, and patient with the older Chinese diner who knows the menu intimately. For a Hefei wedding, a senior client dinner or a board-level Anhui banquet, Tongqing Lou is the unambiguous booking.

Tongqing Lou is the city's most respected senior-banquet booking. The brand caters to the top-of-range professional and ceremonial trade - weddings, government banquets, large business dinners - and the kitchen runs the full Anhui regional repertoire at the most polished register the cuisine has anywhere in China. For a strategic Hefei client dinner, this is the room.