To understand this dish, you actually don't need that much of an explanation, it simply is a very tasty bit of food. However, the Osmanthus flower is not something that is very common these days. Being perhaps more associated with perfume, this dried blossom can be quite special, when used in the kitchen too. However, since Chinese cooking mostly sticks to tradition, and this tradition doesn't prescribe the use of Osmanthus in many dishes, you simply hardly see it on a menu. One of the few traditional Chinese dishes which features it one of them being the Nanjing Duck, but apart from that there aren't all that many. That is why Cuisine Cuisine's eel dish is something of an oddity. Here, they are used to make a sauce, with which pieces of fleshy and crispy eel are glazed. It's a bit like the Japanese do it, just has more salty flavours and a more floral aroma.
A simply delicious dish
The other difference between the Japanese way of broiling eel and this version is that the eel used here is substantially meatier and killed only after arriving at the restaurant. So, what you get on the plate is a substantial piece of fish that has a crispy surface, juicy and firm flesh and is covered with this superb sauce. It doesn't seem to be rocket science, but finding a dish such as this one that tastes better is quite difficult.
This certainly is a highly recommended dish to try!
