Latest news with #ChristopherSt.Cavish
South China Morning Post
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
This week in PostMag: China's salt capital and a cruise on the mighty Mekong River
I was scrolling through Instagram, as one does, when a particularly arresting image stopped me. Roughly hewn wooden beams and rafters holding up a high ceiling. Puffs of steam caught in the light. A floor blanketed in white snow-like powder. 'I really thought this was AI or game art' read one comment. Advertisement In fact, it was a photograph of a salt well in Sichuan province posted by Shanghai-based writer Christopher St. Cavish – the first in a carousel of photos from a week-long research trip to Zigong, once known as China's 'salt capital', for an episode to air on his newly launched YouTube channel with photographer Graeme Kennedy. I messaged him immediately. It sounded like a story too good to miss, an expertly woven tale of how centuries of history can shape the way we eat today. The piece that came from it – this issue's cover feature – is accompanied by a striking image of Sichuan's salt drilling fields, taken by Swiss geologist Arnold Heim in 1929, along with photos of contemporary Zigong that Kennedy shot earlier this year. Bibek Bhandari transports us to the Chinese capital (and back to the mid-noughties) as he chats with Glen Loveland, the American author of the recently published Beijing Bound. In 2007, Loveland moved to Beijing, which he describes as unexpectedly open. My first visit there was three years later and it was exactly that feeling that convinced me to make the move from New York. For Loveland, this openness led to a self-described gay awakening, and while I didn't have the same story, reading his made me recall my own early years in the city and the particular energy of mainland China at that moment. The rest of the issue takes us on a tour around Asia. Traversing Cambodia and Vietnam, David Swanson takes a cruise down the Mekong on the AmaDara where he reckons the region's violent past with its present. It's a beautiful and powerful journey that juxtaposes megacities against bucolic rural scenes. In Osaka, Julian Ryall gets a sneak peek of the Expo 2025. He previews its many pavilions – I'm particularly intrigued by the Saudi Arabian one, which Ryall describes as 'a tangle of alleyways, sheltered courtyards and water features like oases'. I've never been to a World Expo, but it turns out this is my year. I'll be in Osaka in May. And you? Advertisement
New York Times
11-02-2025
- General
- New York Times
My Obsessive Quest for a Thrilling Beef Noodle Soup
A few months ago, I fell down a rabbit hole. Actually, it was a noodle hole. It all started with an Instagram photo: a bowl of steaming beef broth as clear as a polished window, with a tight coil of noodles, a crimson puddle of chile oil, thin shingles of beef and radish, and cilantro leaves peeking through the broth. The whole thing was so cartoonishly pristine it seemed ripped from an anime series. That image touched off an obsession in the way only an alluring picture of noodles you randomly scroll past on the internet can. I had never even tasted the dish — called Lanzhou lamian, or Lanzhou beef noodle soup — yet it had all the makings of my new favorite food. I went into research-paper mode, and learned that this wasn't just any regional dish. Several historians told me about Ma Baozi, a Hui Muslim from Lanzhou, a city in northwestern China, who in 1915 began selling a translucent beef soup with hand-pulled noodles; it proved a staple business for Hui Muslims, and later became hugely popular throughout the country as inexpensive, filling breakfast food. I watched mesmerizing videos of chefs pounding and stretching noodles by hand at a school in Lanzhou, where people travel from across the world to master the craft of noodle pulling. And then I ate 16 bowls of noodles. Lanzhou is not exactly a tourist destination, and its beef noodles are not as widely known outside China as dishes like mapo tofu or dan dan noodles. But in recent decades, the dish has begun to go the way of pad Thai. Local government officials in China have promoted it — subsidizing Lanzhou noodle restaurants and touting the city's noodle schools — to stimulate tourism and economic development, said Christopher St. Cavish, a food writer in Shanghai. Lanzhou noodle restaurants have opened over the past decade or two in cities like London, Sydney and New York, where there are several new shops. The soup's popularity grows even as Hui Muslims flee political oppression in China. Some have immigrated to Queens, finding refuge at shelters serving the dish. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
