Feel the Burn: Blufish Keeps It Hot With Creole Crawfish Croissant Pizza
In the wake of TBJ's successful Hot & Spicy Festival our fiery restaurant coverage continues with this Feel the Burn series. Those of you who acquired a taste for all things hot at the fest can maintain the burn by visiting these chili rife eateries.
Originating in Tianjin, Blufish fully embraces its “under the sea” concept through a psychedelic and polished menage of pastel marine animals, a ceiling painted to resemble coral, and other and aquatic imagery. Arriving at this restaurant (located in the basement of APM, Wangfujing) is like being transported to another world, and we can honestly say it's not like anything else we've experienced in Beijing.
Blufish's owner Alex Wang and his team brought plenty of modern seafood-centric dishes to our Hot & Spicy Festival this past weekend, impressing patrons and whetting their appetites for a future visit to Blufish. Below, Wang tells us more about his deepsea take on spicy eats.
What did you bring to our Hot & Spicy Fest?
We sold creole crawfish croissant pizza, which is inspired by Creole, a small community in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. To make it, we cooked crawfish in hot sauce, a special cooking method that matches the Blufish concept – French cuisine cooked the American way. That is how we ended up combining the Creole cooking method with our special croissant pizza.
Our other Spicy Fest offering was an example of molecular cuisine – chili with strawberry parfait. Due to the popularity of molecular ice-cream in recent years, we also thought it best to ease the hotness [of the pizza] with something cool, so we created this parfait.
What other spicy dishes do you sell in your restaurant? Which are the most popular and why?
The dishes in my restaurant are mildly spicy, such as roast chicken eggs benedict, lemon fried chicken, and pepperoni paella. They are quite popular because the slight spiciness stimulates our taste-buds and fuels our appetites.
What drink do you like to pair with spicy food?
If the customer orders something spicy, we would recommend our soda Americano – an iced coffee with soda – to ease the burn.
What’s the hottest thing you’ve ever eaten?
Stir-fried rice noodles with beef and Lantern chili (干炒牛河, ganchao niuhe). It was so spicy that I cried!
What’s your go-to spicy comfort food?
Spicy boiled fish (水煮鱼, shuizhuyu), spicy tofu (麻婆豆腐, mapo tofu), and beef tallow spicy hot pot.
In one word, how does eating spicy food make you feel?
Satisfied.
If what you're eating becomes way too hot, what would you use to cool off?
I would drink either an iced coffee, sour prune juice (酸梅汤, suanmeitang), or eat some shaved ice or ice-cream.
Think you can handle more heat? Then be sure to check out the latest issue of our Hot & Spicy themed magazine and more of our ongoing chili related restaurant coverage so that you can keep the burn going.
More stories by this author here.
Photos courtesy of Blufish
