Chunhelou Crispy Aromatic Chicken 春和楼香酥鸡
Chunhelou Crispy Aromatic Chicken is featured among the local specialties of Shandong.
Chunhelou Crispy Aromatic Chicken (春和楼香酥鸡) is the house dish of Chunhelou (春和楼), a Shandong-cuisine restaurant on Zhongshan Road (中山路) in Qingdao (青岛) that dates its founding to 1891. The chicken is steamed and then deep-fried, and comes to the table crisp outside and tender inside. Its cooking technique entered the Qingdao municipal intangible heritage list in 2015 and Shandong's provincial list in 2016.
How it is made
Chunhelou uses young, locally free-range chickens of the same year weighing 750 to 850 grams, raised at the restaurant's own farm in Qingdao. After slaughter each bird goes through more than ten stages, including cleaning, marinating, simmering for flavour, steaming, deep-frying, cutting and brushing with oil, and the cooks draw on the fine knife work typical of Shandong cooking. According to the restaurant's chairman, the whole process from farm to plate takes two days and is handled by designated cooks.
Flavour and texture
The chicken is crisp on the outside, tender inside and strongly fragrant. The restaurant's chairman, quoted by Qingdao Evening News, describes its colour as golden; the Shinan District Cultural Centre, recalling a 1957 meal, calls it brownish-red.
Where it comes from
Chunhelou grew out of the Hu family eating house (胡家馆子) that fed fishermen near today's Daxue Road, and later opened as the Chunhe restaurant (春和饭庄) on Tianjin Road. The restaurant group chairman Shen Jianji (沈健基) says the chicken was brought in from Tianjin by an early owner and refined by later chefs. A 1924 newspaper article already mentions it under the name 'suxiang ji' (酥香鸡, 'crisp fragrant chicken'), and the Encyclopedia of Chinese Cuisine records that the restaurant's reputation grew after it launched the dish in the 1920s.
Qingdao Daily credits its creation to the head cook Tian Xueguang (田学广) and its refinement to Liu Jinglun (刘景伦). In the early 1950s Liu's version was included in the Chinese Famous Dishes (《中国名菜谱》) collection. Seven generations of chefs have passed the technique down, and since the 1980s the restaurant has also sold the chicken boxed to take away.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.