At The Black Pearl, contemporary Cantonese cooking is about treating them with the patience, precision, and quiet confidence required to make them feel new again
“Contemporary Cantonese” can be a slippery phrase; in some cases, it means taking a classic dish and dressing it up for modern tastes. For The Black Pearl however, executive chef Dee Chan takes a more convincing route – his new menu, available from 4 March onwards, builds upon tradition: preserving the rigour of heritage cooking, while subtly reshaping certain dishes into something more refined.
That balance between old and new is best understood through the work that happens long before the plate reaches the table. The Stir-fried Mini Buddha Jumps Over the Wall with Pearl Rice, for instance, begins with premium dried ingredients such as abalone, sea cucumber, and shark’s fin being rehydrated in-house over three to four days, with the water changed twice daily to prevent off-flavours. In practical terms, the dish is nearly five days in the making before it’s ready to be cooked.
Yet Chef Dee does not stop at faithfully reproducing the classic. Traditionally served as a rich soup, Buddha Jumps Over the Wall appears here in a dry, stir-fried form. It is, to us, a thoughtful shift rather than a radical one: the luxurious ingredients remain, but the delivery changes, allowing the pearl rice and other components to absorb the concentrated broth fully. The result? Something lighter, more structured, and distinctly contemporary without losing the soul of the original.
The same philosophy runs through the rest of the menu, particularly so with the Eight Treasures in Whole Winter Melon, which features a broth slow-cooked for over 12 hours. In the same vein, the Braised Dongpo Pork Belly with Aged Hua Diao requires at least four hours of prep, moving through multiple stages before arriving at its melt-in-the-mouth finish.
Even the 75°C Drunken Prawns, cooked sous vide and finished with a bespoke sake-infused sauce, feel less like modernisation for its own sake than a more precise expression of a familiar dish.
What makes this menu compelling, then, is not simply that it is new. It’s that Chef Dee understands Cantonese tradition well enough to treat it both with reverence and restraint, honouring the labour behind the classics, while refining their form for today.
