Crispy beef ribs, roast duck and tiramisu were on the menu Thursday at the state dinner where president Xi Jinping hosted president Donald Trump in Beijing, as Chinese chefs sought to appeal to Trump’s culinary preferences while using traditional ingredients and cooking techniques.
The Chinese capital’s specialities include the precisely roasted Peking duck and the richly flavoured zha jiang mian, a dish of wheat noodles topped with soybean paste. But Trump prefers to eat American comfort foods such as burgers, well-done steaks, fries and Caesar salads.
The menu Thursday included a mix of Chinese and international dishes: lobster in tomato soup, stewed seasonal vegetables, slow-cooked salmon in mustard sauce, pan-fried pork bun and what was described as a “trumpet shell-shaped pastry.” There was tiramisu, fruits and ice cream for dessert.
Chefs in Beijing took few risks during Trump’s first presidential visit to China in 2017. Their offerings included seafood chowder, kung pao chicken and stewed beef steak with tomato sauce – an elevated take on his favoured meal of steak and ketchup.
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Other world leaders have also been mindful of Trump’s tastes.
In October, during a visit to Tokyo, Trump shared a lunch of American beef and rice with prime minister Sanae Takaichi of Japan, a gesture of goodwill that broke Japan’s typical diplomatic practice of using local ingredients. Months earlier, Japan had reached a trade deal with the United States that included an increase in American rice imports.
During the same trip to Asia, Trump was served beef steak with ketchup and a salad with Thousand Island dressing in South Korea, and sandwiches made with U.S. Angus beef in Malaysia.
Months before he travelled to China in 2017, Trump hosted Xi at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where chefs prepared Caesar salad, pan-seared Dover sole and dry-aged prime New York strip steak. By Trump’s telling, a chocolate cake with vanilla sauce had just been served when Trump told Xi that he had ordered a missile strike against Syria over president Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons.
Barack Obama dined on a similar menu of beef steak and baked fish during his state visit to Beijing in 2009 when he visited as US president.
On a subsequent visit, in 2014, the first lady, Michelle Obama, earned praise on Chinese social media for her less cautious choice of eating spicy soup at a hot pot restaurant in Chengdu. In 2011, Joe Biden, then the vice president, ate zha jiang mian at a Beijing restaurant, skipping the restaurant’s fried liver speciality.
During visits to China during Biden’s presidency, members of his cabinet also ventured out to taste the diversity of Chinese cuisine. Secretary of state Antony Blinken dined in a Shanghai restaurant that specialises in soup dumplings, known as xiao long bao. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen was a somewhat more adventurous eater, consuming mushrooms in Yunnan province that could be mildly toxic and cause hallucinations if not properly cooked.
-This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
