Red turrets cap this giant hotel, which is strategically situated near to the entrances to Sunlight Rock and the Piano Museum. Facilities are fancy, as the property is tailored to special groups and official visitors. Marine Garden is a sprawling landmark on the island’s southern shore, visible in every aerial shot of Kulangsu.
The large fine-dining restaurant sports luxury delicacies prepared with skill and care. A new buffet lures in non-hotel guests by offering a taste of this quality food—an unlimited selection of a wide variety of dishes—for just 68 元/person, a bargain.
They say that back in the day, every house on Kulangsu had a piano. This touristy but impressive garden across the street from the tea house is holding up the tradition–barely–with an out-of-tune upright that sits just inside the entrance. Otherwise, the restaurant’s name is a tease: there’s no live music here, except for the occasional round of Lightly Row played by a six-year-old. There is, however, a lush, expansive garden with a koi pond that elevates lunch here on a pleasant day into a zen-like experience, in spite of the screaming toddlers and inattentive waitstaff.
When ordering, use restraint. This is not the place to try top-end seafood, but the kitchen does a fair job of preparing and pricing Xiamen standards like spicy wok-fired clams (la chao hua ge 辣炒花蛤), which swim in a typical local brown gravy with rice wine, garlic warmth, and chili heat; or Chinese national dishes like sliced pork with green peppers and wood-ear mushrooms (qing jiao rou si 青椒肉丝). This dish, popular in Shanghai as a rice-bowl topping, has some back heat and metallic tang from the peppers and unsurprisingly dumps well onto steamed white rice. The wood-ears are the house addition, adding a spongy crunch. Worth missing is a relatively oily and undercooked version of shredded potato with red chili (酸辣土豆丝), China’s answer to hash browns. This dish is light and addictive when done right; try it elsewhere instead.
Tu long bao (土龙煲), a local species of eel without any English culinary name or paper trail, sounds promising: the Chinese name translates roughly as “dragon from the local land,” and it’s a Minnan delicacy prepared in a clay-pot casserole. Unfortunately, the reason it’s a delicacy is medicinal: tu long bao is believed to promote bone health. For this reason, a medium-sized eel costs more than ¥200, and possibly also for this reason, it has so many little bones in every bite that you may burn as many calories spitting them out as you ingest from the sticky flesh beneath. To complicate things further, the delicate clay-pot slow-cooking process is abbreviated, keeping mushrooms leathery. The dark, savory sauce is still delicious on rice, but that’s one expensive rice bowl.
This well-known romantic garden café on one of Kulangsu’s main tourist drags is one more piece of proof that you’re in paradise. Leaves blow in the sunny breeze, flowers bloom, and birds serenade you with a symphony while you sit at wooden tables under umbrellas in the shade of an old brick mansion.
Outdoor tables at Chu Family Garden restaurant & café, Kulangsu (Gulangyu)It’s an alluring respite for weary feet and jack of all trades for passers-by. You can spend many minutes wandering around the garden and exploring its nooks and crannies, gracious lawn furniture, shaded picnic tables, fountains, statutes, and friendly cats.
Plant life at Chu Family Garden restaurant & café, Kulangsu (Gulangyu) Chu Family Garden, Kulangsu (Gulangyu)Inside is a series of refashioned dining rooms, which were once living rooms and bedrooms of the old mansion.
Indoor room at Chu Family Garden, Kulangsu (Gulangyu)Once seated in the garden, you can sip coffee or tea or dig into satisfactory versions of basic pan-Eurasian standards like beef filet with black pepper gravy, Thai yellow curry beef or chicken, and spaghetti bolognese (65 ¥), which comes under-salted but otherwise correctly prepared—with a good dose of extra parmesan, it really hits the spot.
Spaghetti bolognese at Chu Family Garden restaurant & café, Kulangsu (Gulangyu)Beef-and-cheese pie is this kitchen’s version of an English pasty, with peppery, mincemeat-like ground beef and melted mozzarella baked into a greasy but still enjoyable pastry crust. It’s served with a petite raw lettuce and tomato salad–an oddity in these parts–dressed in a creamy, slightly sweet whipped-mayo-vinaigrette and tomatoes fresh with garden foliage aromas.
Beef-and-cheese pie at Chu Family Garden restaurant & café, Kulangsu (Gulangyu)The sweet mayo from that vinaigrette rears its big head again and nearly ruins, but doesn’t quite ruin, a competently pressed panino with tuna fish, basil, and pine nuts that evokes Wolfgang Puck’s late foray into airport quick-service.
Tuna panino at Chu Family Garden restaurant + café, Kulangsu (Gulangyu)The beef filet is fresh, thick, satisfying, and expensive ( 178 ¥) with none of the off-flavors you sometimes get from frozen Australian steaks. The meat pairs well with the Chinese-style black pepper sauce, whose mushrooms invoke a German jaeger sauce, but the steak would be even more flavorful if it were salted and peppered before searing, as normal Western technique demands.
The menu is translated into excellent English, and lists a full range of other off-dry treatments for homesick westerners, like corn chowder with bacon, tiramisu, and “heavy cream blueberry cheesecake,” which is the precise consistency of Babybel cheese, i.e. slightly gummy and unnaturally melty, but not in a bad way. It’s set on a rich, delicate crust that’s just thin enough and drizzled with chocolate syrup and blueberry sauce.
Blueberry cheesecake at Chu Family Garden restaurant + café, Kulangsu (Gulangyu)Most people come just for sweet coffee drinks or juices, whose value proposition is far less clear, especially once alcohol comes into the mix. Espresso drinks are generally very small; a 40 ¥ iced coffee shaken with Bailey’s comes in a small white wine glass and is easily finished in two gulps. They’re good gulps, but these are full-on tourist prices.
House special iced coffee, described mysteriously in English as “Signature Beverage,” is mixed with passion fruit. If this sounds like a bizarre combination, that’s because it is: sourness and bitterness fight over your palate, and passion-fruit seeds floating in the cloudy brown glass are jarring. If you use your imagination a bit, though, the drink ends up taking on the flavor of an exotic dark chocolate. Or at least it seems that way when you’re in the midst of whiling away an afternoon, without a care in the world, on one of the island’s most pleasant gardens.
Coffee with Bailey’s and house special iced coffee at Chu Family Garden restaurant & café, Kulangsu (Gulangyu) Drink menu at Chu Family Garden restaurant & café, Kulangsu (Gulangyu)For more Kulangsu (Gulangyu) travel ideas, see the new Kulangsu Island Visitor’s Guide.
My 89-year-old grandmother’s name is Lu, and so is the mastermind behind this very local Minnan sweets and pastry shop, Lu Nai Nai (Lu Ama, in Minnan dialect). In our own family dialect, I call my Italian grandmother Nonnie, which is close enough to Nai Nai to complete the sweep.
There are two Grandma Lu’s shops within a couple busy street-food blocks of each other, right in the thick of downtown’s main plazas. A couple of young guys run the very yellow glass pastry counters, from which you can take away Western-inflected popovers stuffed with whipped cream and chopped mango, pineapple, or a mix of the two.
Pineapple-and-mango popover at Grandma Lu’s, Kulangsu (Gulangyu)Grandma Lu’s, Kulangsu (Gulangyu)
More interesting and local is Grandma Lu’s creative version of milk tea, xiao xian cao. This hearty brew is floating with all sorts of goodies, including sweet red beans the consistency of boston baked beans but with a charro-like savory aspect, satisfyingly chewy golden raisins, and dark medicinal grass jelly cubes made by boiling the grass in simple syrup and gelatin. The irregularly shaped cubes take on the wobble of panna cotta, and pair with the tea’s tannin better than the generic HK-style milk tea jellies do. Grandmothers, wherever they are, have always known just how to warm our bellies on chilly evenings.
This recent addition to the island took over a large swath of outdoor-bar territory just a few blocks down the waterfront. If you turn right as you’re stepping off the Lun Du ferry, it’ll be the biggest bar garden in sight. If you come to the Global Bowen Bear Hotel, you’ve gone too far. The most notable thing about this spot is its live music stage and expansive garden with bay views, complete with a kitschy white digital baby grand piano. Live music is mostly Chinese pop, and performances are of highly variable quality. There’s also an unremarkable, medium-to-high-priced menu of Western dishes. T-bone steaks with black-pepper gravy are thin but tasty, french fries are decent, and potato skins and other appetizers will help satisfy homesickness for Westerners. Torches warm things up in the garden on cold evenings in winter. Service is slow and indifferent.
The best locally made beer on the island, hands down, comes from the gleaming copper tanks at this cozy, convivial brewpub. There’s a solid variety of Xiamen, pan-Chinese, and Western food on the menu, and a wine list that’s curiously all-Hungarian.
