Gourmet China

China, a country of 1.3 billion increasingly sophisticated palates, has a lot to prove when it comes to luxury food

- Crystal Reid

In a scene eerily akin to Hollywood depictions of alien experiments, a man—dressed completely in white, from his facehugging hood to his surgical mask, gloves and rubber boots—runs a razor-sharp knife lengthways down the belly of a scaly upturned beast. Another worker, dressed exactly the same, swiftly harvests a mass of eggs from inside, leaving the creature’s empty carcass to disappear down a conveyor belt. What we've just witnessed isn't shady government interference with a higher life form, but the harvesting of caviar in China.

The black eggs taken from the innards of this seven-foot-long beluga sturgeon—a critically endangered fish native to the waters around Iran and Russia—are collected, salted and tinned in just 15 minutes at the Kaluga Queen fish farm in China’s eastern Zhejiang province. The 2003-founded Chinese company breeds thousands of sturgeons in floating pens on the province’s manmade Qiandao Lake and is the largest producer of caviar in the world, churning out 80 tons of the pricey pearls last year alone.

Kaluga Queen has made a name for itself, feeding world leaders at the 2016 G20 Summit in Hangzhou, supplying 21 of the 26 threeMichelin-starred restaurants in Paris and finding its way into the first class cabins of German airline Lufthansa. Alongside caviar, a new generation of high-end Chinese producers is also serving up foie gras, oysters and even pork fed on rose petals to domestic foodies with a taste for the finer things in life. Conversely, with several high-profile scandals attached to Chinese-made food, the gourmet brands of the world’s second biggest economy must work harder than most to secure their place on the planet’s most luxurious tables.