China's Dining Acrobatics - NYTimes.com SHANGHAI - Some restaurants place you close to the surf, its perfume in the air and its music in your ears, while others nestle you in the woods. Some put you next to the Seine, others beside aquariums bursting with tropical colors. In a country whose culinary reach is catching up to the rest of its ambitions, I visited a restaurant that does all of that and more. It's named Ultraviolet. It's physically in Shanghai but spiritually unbound, thanks to the moving, shifting images projected onto the blank walls that encircle the windowless dining room, which has one long table for just 10 people, a crew of gastronauts floating hither and yon. Now you're in an amber field, now under a bell tower. Now amid the stars, and now pressed close against a window pearled with raindrops. What you hear and sometimes smell changes with the sights, each of roughly 20 courses getting its own multisensory showcase. The waves and the ocean's aroma were for a lobster appetizer. A subsequent dish of eggplant and tahini was paired with a sumptuous visual travelogue of Greece. Ultraviolet, which opened last year, is one of a mind-bending kind. But it's also a perfect ambassador for China's dining scene right now, capturing the frenzy and swagger of it all. The country's flush of wealth and influx of business travelers have given rise to restaurants more varied, distinctive and imaginative than before. In Beijing, I found an elegant vegetarian place, King's Joy, that mimics a mountaintop monastery. Mist rises from the stones outside its entrance and around its courtyard; in the main dining room, a harpist plays angelic music. As I swept through Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong over two weeks, I had to make impossible decisions about what to sample from this bounty. I confined myself to restaurants that opened in 2010 or later. I steered clear of those that showcased Western cooking from chefs based far from China. Shanghai and especially Hong Kong are magnets for such expansions and testaments to the globalism of the high-end dining scene today. In Shanghai, for instance, one of the hottest new places, Mercato, has Italian food conceived by a Frenchman living principally in New York: Jean-Georges Vongerichten. I went instead to Xi Na, for the spicy cooking of the Hunan region. Increasingly in China's major cities, you can get exemplary regional cuisine in glossy settings. Xi Na's red walls shimmer, though not as vividly as the ocher broth in a signature entree, a carp head with red and green chile peppers and fermented black beans. It's a showstopper, a spellbinder, with so much color, fire and funk that when it was on the table, everything else in the world ceased to exist. At the new Mandarin Oriental hotel in Shanghai's Pudong district, the marquee restaurant, Yong Yi Ting, focuses on the sugary byways of Shanghainese cooking itself. It's the fourth Chinese restaurant that the consulting chef, Tony Lu, has opened in just eight years, the pace of his growth a mirror of his country's. Shanghai overshadows Beijing, and both trail Hong Kong, which remains a China apart from China. The three cities in all have such an embarrassment of riches that of the noteworthy restaurants mentioned above, only Ultraviolet made my list of five standouts, presented here in no particular order. Talk about globalism: this restaurant is the creation of two young Canadians, Matt Abergel and Lindsay Jang, who met as teenagers in Calgary, Alberta; got much of their professional experience in New York; then went to Hong Kong to strike out on their own with Yardbird, which pays homage to Japan. Its focus is yakitori: grilled, skewered chicken. And Mr. Abergel, its chef, has set himself the mission of demonstrating how much one bird can give. His menu reads like some fowl play on "Gray's Anatomy," with one-word choices: breast, thigh, neck, knee, tail, heart, liver, gizzard. Each bears the scent of Japanese charcoal, along with whatever minimal seasonings Mr. Abergel deems appropriate. And together these parts illustrate how remarkably the flavor of chicken changes with different ratios of skin to meat or cartilage to fat. Yardbird also serves salads, sides and entrees, including many dazzlers. Sweet corn tempura are addictive balls of tender kernels bound together with batter and deep-fried. KFC stands for Korean fried cauliflower, a fiery, ketchupy exclamation point of a dish. Another emphatic statement: rice with oozing egg, crisp chicken skin and green peas. And Yardbird's chicken liver mousse is a silky dream. With 52 seats on two industrial-chic floors, Yardbird has been so crazily jammed since its opening in 2011 that it has spawned a sequel, Ronin, a quieter, more intimate slip of a restaurant that echoes Yardbird's celebration of sake and Japanese whiskeys but pivots from feather to fin, emphasizing raw fish. Lovely as it is, Ronin lacks Yardbird's oomph and free-spirited feeling, achieved through an egalitarian no-reservations policy, affordable prices, terrific cocktails, eclectic playlists (Kool and the Gang one minute, Boz Scaggs the next) and service that isn't just convivial but conspiratorial, with waiters and waitresses leaning in close to give you their counsel. They're from all over the world, befitting both Hong Kong's polyglot populace and the route that Mr. Abergel and Ms. Jang traveled there. Hong Kong is like an experiment: just how high, low, hidden or improbably situated can a restaurant be? RyuGin, a relatively new, astronomically expensive place that takes its name and cues from its sire in Tokyo, is on the 101st floor of a skyscraper, off to itself. There are restaurants deep in malls, restaurants deep underground and "private kitchens" in reconfigured apartments with no signage. To get to one of them, Fa Zu Jie, I had to walk down the forlorn alley that leads to a popular new Mexican cantina, Brickhouse, then hang a right into a harshly lighted stairwell, go up one flight and guess that an unmarked doorbell more prominent than others was the one to press. Duddell's, which opened in May, is tucked inconspicuously onto the third and fourth floors of a commercial building. Its polished woods evoke a boardroom, its gorgeous ink paintings an art gallery, its outdoor terrace a small urban park. The menu, put together by the chef Siu Hinchi, is an epic and faithful tour of Cantonese cooking and a resounding affirmation of its uncluttered appeal. Crispy salted chicken and fried prawns with chile and coriander rested - and rose - on the excellence of their central ingredients. Fried beef cubes with wasabi soy glaze were saucier but no less impressive. None of this came cheap, but the quality of the food, the refined service and the sophisticated wine list left me feeling amply pampered for the price. The day after I dined at Lost Heaven, in Beijing, I went back to talk with the cooks and figure out what I'd had. I wasn't sure. I knew that in the sensational Burmese tea leaf salad, there had been shredded cabbage, fish sauce and peanuts. But the other crunchy, salty bits? What were those? One of the cooks answered by handing me a plate with three kinds of beans that weren't instantly familiar. He identified one as an Indian yellow bean and another as a dal bean. The remaining one he couldn't name. All had been toasted, he said, to tease out a nutty flavor. Lost Heaven, which opened last year, is more than great eating: it's a learning experience. A teachable meal. It specializes in the Yunnan region's cuisine, little known in Europe or the United States. That cuisine uses cheese to a degree that other Chinese cooking doesn't, and it's mad for mushrooms and flowers. All of this informs Lost Heaven's menu, which additionally reflects the region's proximity to Myanmar and Thailand, countries that the restaurant's Taiwanese owners have lived in. Lime and lemon grass show up. Beijing's Lost Heaven has two identically named sisters in Shanghai. It arranges 200 high-backed seats that resemble thrones in a series of dark, sexy rooms whose Asian-temple motifs verge on kitsch. For a fantasia of this scale, the kitchen's work is surprisingly precise. The menu alternates relatively ecumenical dishes like the Dali style chicken, which wears a deftly woven coat of red peppers, green onions, garlic and ginger, with idiosyncratic ones like scrambled eggs with white mushrooms. In nearly everything I had, the ingredients were first-rate and the spicing beautifully calibrated. There's long been robust discussion, and no agreement, about where to find the best Peking duck in Beijing. Things just grew more complicated with the arrival of Jing Yaa Tang, which fired up its specially made wood-burning oven and began serving a rendition of this dish as superb as any I've tasted. The skin of this duck! Almost as thin as paper, almost as crisp as a potato chip. And the meat! Dark, rich - the chocolate of flesh. The pancakes that went with it were gossamer-delicate, and Jing Yaa Tang's version of hoisin sauce, made with dried dates, was less syrupy and cloying than the usual. The overall effect was sublime. An admission and a caveat: I ate there in the days just before its formal opening, by special arrangement, because I didn't want to miss a chance to try it. It wasn't serving a full house and was putting its best foot forward. But what a comely foot that was. Beyond its specialty of duck, Jing Yaa Tang skillfully executed a range of other dishes meant to represent a concise, pan-regional survey of China's greatest hits, refracted through a modern sensibility. I was especially taken with a dish of Sichuan poached chicken and crushed peanuts in a gently fiery sesame sauce; shrimp fried rice with the restaurant's outstanding XO sauce; and a clay pot of tender cod with caramelized baby onions. Jing Yaa Tang occupies a handsomely appointed space inside what is perhaps Beijing's best boutique hotel, the Opposite House, and all the gorgeous plates were designed for the restaurant. It has an additional distinction: the chef Alan Yau, who created the Chinese restaurant Hakkasan, in London, consulted on the project, the first he has worked on in his ancestors" land. Is this a game or a meal? The line blurs. You're not given Ultraviolet's address, but told to meet instead at Mr. & Mrs. Bund, the other restaurant whose kitchen is overseen by the chef Paul Pairet, a Frenchman who has made Shanghai his home for the last eight years. You and your nine tablemates are transported in a small bus to an odd, unmarked location away from the city's commercial thoroughfares. In a blackened antechamber there, a heartbeat grows louder and louder; "Also Sprach Zarathustra," the music familiar from "2001: A Space Odyssey," kicks in. A wall slides open, and you're ushered into the dining room. There are as many servers as diners; the delivery of each dish is its own fanciful ballet. And for the first hour, most of those dishes are cheekily named, intricately wrought canapés from the school of molecular gastronomy. Foie Gras - Can't Quit is a slim, candied cigarette of liver, perched in a sliver ashtray. Micro Fish No Chips is a one-bite concentration of the flavor of battered fish with tartar sauce. It arrives with a glass of Scottish ale, and overhead projectors turn the table into a British flag as a Beatles song streams through unseen speakers. The genius of Mr. Pairet and Ultraviolet is that just when all of this starts to feel too gimmicky, too fast, too much, he slows everything down for three relatively straightforward main courses - of sea bass, rack of lamb and Wagyu - that have a classic French pedigree and leave no doubts about his mettle as a cook. They're a pivotal breather, and they were breathtaking. For dessert, it's back to the circus, including a course of melted and dissolved Gummi bears. Yes, Gummi bears. The surrounding walls show footage of cartoon bears in a footrace, and as they circle the room, so do Mr. Pairet and a team of servers, running shadow laps. It's ridiculous (and a total hoot). Ultraviolet is luxury lunacy, costing about $400 a person, but that includes all the beverage pairings and the tip. It books up many, many months in advance. But the pinch and the headache are redeemed by its singularity, and its commotion is inextricable from the sense of wonder it stirs. In other words, it tracks the maddening and mesmerizing country that harbors it.