The Mandarin way

Cecilia Chiang is the presiding genius of one of the great Chinese restaurants of the world, The Mandarin, in Ghirardelli square in San Francisco. A native of China, one of thirteen children in a familyof great wealth, she was brought up in an ancient palace in Peking, in sheltered, luxurious, and as it must seem to American readers, invincibly exotic circumstances. Now, in collaboration with Allan Carr, she has recalled the Mandarin way as she knew it in a memoir that eludes conventional classification - at once a fascinating account of growing up in Old China, a re-creation of its festivals…