Zhongxian Citrus Banquet 忠县柑橘宴
Zhongxian Citrus Banquet is featured among the local specialties of Chongqing.
Zhongxian Citrus Banquet (忠县柑橘宴) is a set of citrus dishes developed in 2021 for the farmhouse restaurants and guesthouses of Zhongxian (忠县), a Chongqing county where citrus is the flagship of modern farming.
Where it comes from
In May 2021 People's Daily Online, in a report carried by the Chongqing agriculture commission, described how Zhongxian brought in Liu Changrong (刘昌荣) to create dishes from the county's citrus and bamboo shoots. He is executive chef of a star-rated Chongqing hotel, a gold medallist at a south-east Chongqing cooking contest and a senior technician in Chinese cooking. Working with rural tourism projects such as the Three Gorges Orange Village (三峡橘乡) pastoral complex, he produced more than ten dishes for a citrus banquet and a bamboo-shoot banquet (笋竹宴), then trained more than 30 farmhouse cooks over ten days.
At the county's December 2024 launch of its Zhongxian Flavour Hundred Bowls (忠味“百碗”) food list, officials named the citrus banquet, the bamboo-shoot banquet and riverside fish (临江鱼) as the local restaurant brands they are building.
What is on the table
The citrus dishes named in the reports are chicken cartilage served in an orange cup (桔盏掌中宝) and orange-scented prawn salad (桔香沙拉虾). A 2024 Chongqing agriculture commission report on the vegetable and fruit banquets of Chongqing's districts names the same two dishes and says the dishes of the citrus, tofu-pudding and square-bamboo-shoot banquets are finely made, often need strong knife skills and careful plating, and are hard for untrained cooks to get right. It places Zhongxian's citrus and bamboo-shoot banquets among the produce banquets Chongqing districts have launched in recent years, next to Tongliang's pomelo banquet.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-23. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.