Customers dine at the Beijing Banquet restaurant while enjoying a Peking Opera performance.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Another fun presentation is more elemental: Place an order for clams and the server arrives with a plate of the shellfish and a stone pot so hot it's carried with insulated gloves. Yang lifts the lid and slides the clams into the empty, dry pot and clamps on the cover, so they quickly steam in their own juice.

"You probably think that if a restaurant has big tanks with the live seafood on display, you're getting the freshest taste possible," he says. "It is not true, though it makes a good show." Yang says such restaurants end up steaming clams and other seafood in the brine that's scooped out of the tank when the food is selected.

"Do you want the taste of seawater?" he asks, "or the taste of the clams?"

As we gingerly eat the hot bivalves, we agree that this method of cooking makes the "sauna clams" earthy and delicious. "That's perfect," Yang says. "Cooking them with seawater just means they lose flavor, so we cook them in their own juices."

Another seafood dish, a deep-sea grouper, may have been the most compelling, but it's only available about two weeks each month, depending on the catch. The flesh is sealed in a very hot pot, Guangdong style, and then slowly simmered.