Green T. House’s JinR: Elegance, Sophistication, Smarts
Posted on August 5, 2008 by Gary McCarty
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Tired of watching my hometown Los Angeles Angels get pummeled by the Yankees, I turned on Tommy Tang’s Let’s Get Cooking this past Saturday. I ventured in a bit late, and it wasn’t for a few moments until I figured out Tang was doing the show in Beijing, P.R.C., not in Thailand, and that the woman with him doing the cooking demonstration was Chinese with the most deliciously accented but impeccable English. 
Turns out that this was the beautiful, sophisticated, talented and highly successful classical-musician-turned-restaurateur Zhang Jin Jie, known widely as JinR.
Her original restaurant (above), the Green T. House in Beijing, is a masterwork of design and sophstication, which has now been recreated in locales around the globe as her empire spreads. I believe she has even christened an enterprise for design named Green T. House Living (watch out, Martha Stewart).
JinR’s secret is an abundance of good fortune built into her bones, to say nothing of ambition, hard work, talent and class applied in the right amounts at the right time.
Thai chef Tang can be a pretty crude buffoon at times, but JinR handled him with grace and aplomb each time on the TV segment I watched. I was completely impressed by her manner. She even laughed when Tang barbarically proposed that her green tea dumplings be fried instead of boiled. She suggested a light frying and then boiling them.
Translation: "You idiot, why would you fry them?" But she could never come out and say that, or probably even feel it inside.
Why base her cuisine on green tea?
"Taxi drivers carry a flask of tea in the car. Elderly women drink tea. Chess players drink tea in the middle of a game. The Chinese drink tea at the start and the end of a meal. It’s part of our culture.” — JinR
Believe me, as elegant as she looks in her photo here, JinR is not as standoffish or stuck up as the pose may indicate. If you can have down-home class and sopistication, then JinR is the epitome of that.
What about her professional credentials? Try these:
JinR is China’s only female masterchef. She is also a classical musician, artist, and calligrapher. JinR plays the yang qin (Chinese dulcimer) and gu zheng (Chinese table harp).
All that in one lifetime, my dear? Let me build a shrine to you, Zhang Jin Jie. The world needs more like you.
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