Disappointing Guest Demonstration

For the past week, 3 of the top chefs in China have been attending classes at school.  They each won competitions using French ingredients and yesterday, they put on a demo.  Everyone at school was very exciting.  We usually have 1 guest demo per week but this one was special because the guests were coming all the way from China (it is usually a French chef).  The chefs had several translators, one into French and then our regular translator for and English version.  

Just like in regular classes, we got a list of ingredients for each dish to be presented.  I looked over the recipes and was a little bummed out.  I had imagined haute cuisine and instead, I saw that we we would be making; chinese noodles with eggplant, fried fish, and fried prawns with broccoli.  I still had hope that these dishes would be more complicated and involved.  

The lecture was supposed to take 2 hours and lasted over 3.  We learned a few interesting ways to decoratively use vegetables, including making a cucumber slinky, but I was really unimpressed with the dishes.  I did learn really innovative ways to cut fish and a lot about cooking eggplant without adding more grease to a dish.  It turns out that you can saute diced eggplant in oil and then blanche it to remove the excess oil.  Other than these few tricks, I didn't take much away from this demonstration.