East meets Africa

Published: 19 February 2013

Five-star casino and resort, The Grand Palm, has recently become home to one of Botswana’s few Chinese restaurants offering authentic, fine dining Chinese cuisine. The Bai Sheng Restaurant provides upmarket style to the burgeoning Chinese market in Gaborone and at the same time offers Asian fare to the western traveller who is familiar with the Chinese menu.

The restaurant is stylishly eclectic offering exquisite traditional Chinese artworks and artefacts set against chic, contemporary lines. The overall effect is aesthetically appealing, combining the Chinese lucky colour red on the walls and ceilings with sophisticated timber floors and furnishings finished in touches of textured gold. Add to this the ornate decorative accents of screens, urns and scrolls with fortune attracting sculptures and religious carvings from ancient Chinese culture.       

The Grand Palm caters for a large and diverse market, from local visitors to the international business and leisure trade to Botswana. Bai Sheng offers seating for up to 148 diners in the main restaurant area, three luxury private dining rooms and covered exterior, which is enclosed with intricate trellis and overlooks the hotel’s beautifully landscaped gardens.      

While the main restaurant has an open contemporary feel to it, the three private dining rooms, which have their own entrances and small lobbies, are more intimate and include traditional round “lazy susan” table configurations allowing guests to enjoy this extremely popular style of Chinese dining.

The exterior eating area offers both the “lazy susan” concept as well as conventional dining and is set against a sculptural Chinese landscape of bamboo, bonsai trees and water features. An interesting exterior and interior highlight is the large window where guests are able to view the open-show kitchen from the garden and main dining area.      

The Bai Sheng kitchen has been designed specifically for the production of authentic Chinese food - a lot of care and research has gone into creating a menu which offers guests fine dining Chinese cuisine. Executive Chef Wang, who hails from North China, has worked at The Grand Palm for some time managing the Chinese specials on the buffet at the renowned Mokolwane Bistro and was recently promoted to manage the kitchen at Bai Sheng. He heads up a contingent of excellent five-star service staff, who have all been trained to handle the 78-dish menu, which includes Halaal dishes. 

The restaurant also offers a fully serviced bar with a diverse range of fine wines and other alcoholic beverages.