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Cuisine offers first taste of culture
 
 
  
 
 ANN - Monday, February 21
 
 
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Beijing (China Daily/ANN) - Long before Rachel Ray, Jamie Oliver and Curtis Stone appeared on television screens, there was Martin Yan showing viewers worldwide how to flash-fry asparagus and long beans.
 
On top of hosting Yan Can Cook for the past 30 years and writing dozens of cookbooks, the Chinese-American celebrity chef leads regular culinary tours to China. His next one, scheduled for March 31 to April 11, feature visits to Guangzhou's local markets, Yunnan's Old Town of Lijiang and Hong Kong's vibrant nightspots.
 
"Since we've always featured food and travel in our Yan Can Cook shows since 1987, our audiences and fans wanted a chance to return with Chef Yan to the countries we've visited," says Stephanie Jan, Yan Can Cook Inc's director of business development for Asia.
 
The California-based company began offering overseas culinary tours in the early '90s, which combine cooking classes with cultural explorations and sightseeing. Since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the company upped the frequency of its China tours to as many as six a year.
 
"I think China's cuisine is probably the most diverse and most complex of all the cuisines in the world," Yan, 50, a Guangzhou native, says in a Chicago Tribune interview.
 
Culinary tours to China are nowhere near as popular as those headed to European countries like France or Italy, but they are slowly gaining attention, in part because of the evolving nature of travelers.
 
"A lot of them are more sophisticated travelers. They want to know more. They don't want to go on this bus tour with 50 other people and have one guide to show them around," says Adlyn Adam Teoh, founder of Hias Gourmet, a Beijing-based culinary travel company established in 2007.
 
Hias currently offers tours of Beijing, Xi'an and Pingyao in Shanxi province.
 
A newer player in the market is Lotus Culinary Travel, a Nashville, Tennessee-based company that started with tours to Chengdu in 2009. It has since extended its reach to Beijing and Shanghai.
 
"I have chosen the locations based mainly on the availability of top-notch cooking classes for travelers, as most of our guests wish to learn to cook the food as well as sample the best restaurants and markets," says Taylor Holliday, a former arts, culture and food editor at The Wall Street Journal, who started the business after a reporting trip to Chengdu.
 
Like Yan Can Cook and Hias Gourmet, Lotus's clients run the gamut of foreign travelers: Westerners who are in China for the first time, overseas Chinese who seek to better understand their cultural heritage and other Asians who want to learn more about a cuisine they love. Culinary tours, it seems, is the perfect way to indulge one's thirst for adventure while satiating one's hunger for Peking Duck, dumplings or kungpao chicken.
 
 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
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