On March 2, a Chinese Food and Wine Pairing Competition was held at the Davis Alumni Center by the UC Davis Confucius Institute, which provided the guests with a mesmerizing tour of Chinese and western tastes. Distinguished guests who attended the event including Ken Burtis, Facult Assistant of Provost and Joanna Regulska Vice Provost and Associate Chancellor of the University of California, Davis. More than eighty people from Davis and surrounding communities took part in the activity.

Martin Yan, a master chef as well as a distinguishedUC Davisalumnus and a special adviser to the Confucius Institute, was invited to be the guest host and judge of the competition. Mr. Yan is one of the pioneers in the promotion of Chinese food culture in the United States and Canada, who has brought the wonder of Chinese cuisine to an audience of two billion through his prolific television appearances.

In the warm-up part of the competition, Master Yan reduced a pile of ingredients to wafer-thin slices while demonstrating his phenomenal slicing skills. Most impressively, Yan, flourishing his knife with great skill, carved up an entire chicken in just eighteen seconds, its parts neatly laid out on a plate in the blink of an eye.

Later in the Chinese Food and Wine Pairing Competition, Master Yan selected the Chinese New Year menu for the guests. Professor Andrew Waterhouse,Director of the UC Davis Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science,and Mike Dunne, a columnist for the wine column ofThe Sacramento Bee, selected a wine separately for each dish. The guests and the three experts sampled the different combinations of food and wine. After tasting seven kinds of Chinese dishes and fourteen wines from California, France, Spain and New Zealand, the guests voted for the best wine for each dish. As the two wine experts engaged in their friendly duel, Master Yan’s hilarious commentary drew non-stop laughter from the audience.

The UC Davis Confucius Institute is the first Confucius institute in the world that focuses on popularizing Chinese food culture.Since its establishment five years ago, it has been dedicated to the diffusion andpromotionof Chinese food cultureand entering into intercultural dialogues with other food cultures. In this activity, Chinese food and western wine complemented each other perfectly. Guests can look forward to more culinary delights featuring Chinese and western food combinations in the coming year.

Scenes from the competition

Scenes from the competition

Guests vote for the best wine and food pairing

Ken Burtis, the guest hosts and judge of the food and wine pairing are taking a group photo