VEGETABLE Insects Canteen, a high-end restaurant in Futian District, has recently been nominated for the 2018 Black Pearl Restaurant Guide, which is China’s equivalent of the Michelin Guide.

The Black Pearl Restaurant Guide is headed by Meituan-Dianping, China’s largest service-focused e-commerce platform, and it selects quality restaurants from a unique Chinese perspective each year.

Founded in 2015, Vegetable Insects Canteen is famous for private home dishes featuring Cantonese cuisine, Chaozhou cuisine, Hunan cuisine and Shanxi-style noodles.

As its name indicates, the restaurant selects self-produced organic vegetables without pesticides as “vegetables with insects are the really fresh and healthy ones.”

The restaurant only uses seasonal vegetables and food materials in order to make the best use of them and guarantee the most original flavors of the seasonal products.

To that end, the restaurant has opened its own farm called Vegetables Insects Farm which grows seasonal vegetables under direct sunshine without pesticides, chemical fertilizer and hormones. Chickens and Panamanian pigs are raised free range in the orchards.

One of the most recommended dishes is the isinglass soup with fresh Sichuan pepper and Hainan pepper roots, which is good for nourishing blood, tonifying kidneys and making skin look younger.

Another must-try is the New Zealand lamb chop which is tender and has the perfect balance of fat and lean meats. The secret recipe is the sauce on the lamb chop with extra cumin on it, which gives the New Zealand lamb an authentic Cantonese flavor. The lamb meat, which is crispy outside and juicy inside, will surely excite your taste buds.

The lotus turtle is also a highlight of the restaurant. The wild turtles are from the lotus ponds in Changshou Village in Jiaoling County of Meizhou City, Guangdong Province. The turtles always forage for food at the bottom of the ponds, which makes them fresh and delicious.(Yang Mei)