Turkey with All Trimmings

By Alessandra Stanley

It looked like a scene from The King and I, in which a proper English governess frantically coaches Oriental courtiers in the rudiments of Occidental custom. All week, for five hours a day, 140 uniformed Chinese waiters and waitresses marched in stiff single file through an empty hotel banquet hall, placed plates on cloth-covered tables and then returned to remove them. The drills were but one of many painstaking preparations for the "reciprocal banquet" President Reagan hosted in Peking last Saturday night.

The state dinner for 600 Chinese and American guests was one of the largest ever hosted outside the U.S. It was also the first major Western banquet not held in an embassy or a government hall. During his 1975 state visit, for example President Gerald Ford gave a Chinese banquet in Peking's Great Hall of the People. The Reagans instead chose the newly completed Great Wall Hotel. A 1,007-room glass-and-steel high-rise jointly built by Chinese and American developers, the hotel is a symbol of China's growing Western ties and its quest for modernization.

The hotel was in charge of buying, preparing and serving the food, but the Reagans chose the menu. In another untraditional move, they decided to treat their guests to a "typically American" meal: turkey and all the trimmings. White House advance teams held three full-scale tasting sessions, sending snapshots of the food and formal place settings back to Nancy Reagan for approval.

Would local turkeys suffice? No, decided the hotel's French chef Georges Mompezat, who sampled and loftily dismissed fowls from China and Hong Kong as too scrawny. He opted instead for 40 frozen toms from California ("There was no comparison"). His gold-embossed menu also called for fresh garden vegetables, always in uncertain supply in Peking, so a professor from the Peking Agricultural College was asked to oversee. Some came from the hotel's own greenhouse, but the canned cranberries had to be flown in from Hong Kong. Other ingredients were home grown: 176 lbs. of beef for the consomme, 440 lbs. of prawns, scallops, Mandarin fish and turbot for the seafood mousse appetizer, 132 lbs. of hearts of palm for the "panda" salad. For dessert: a praline ice cream dish made with 22 lbs. of almonds, 600 eggs, 36 quarts of cream and three bottles of Grand Marnier. Three types of vintage California wines were selected by Nancy Reagan.

The speech schedule required the hotel staff to serve and clear the meal in 80 minutes. In addition to the highly drilled waiters (required by the hotel to be at least 6 ft tall) Mompezat trained 76 hotel chefs and 120 kitchen staffers to assist in the 4 1/2 hours of cooking and carving.

The banquet hall's somber maroon decor was brightened with pink gladiolas from Guangdong province, some 1,100 miles south of Peking, and arranged on 60 tables for ten The multinational place settings included German chinaware Irish linen and French crystal, candelabras and silverware. A twelve-piece Chinese orchestra trained feverishly for two weeks with sheet music sent over by the White House: works by George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, along with Reagan's favorite diplomatic overture, Rodgers and Hammerstein's Getting to Know You.

"The only thing that will make the night really beautiful is for you to have confidence in yourself," said Hotel Manager Peter Sun, who was born in Hong Kong and trained at Cornell in his pep talk. His staff masked whatever opening-night jitters they had. "I am feeling very proud to serve President Reagan and Premier Zhao," said Waiter Liu Zhihong, 21, who was chosen to serve the President's table. "I am only a little nervous There was no cause to worry. The Chinese cleaned every plate of their Thanksgiving dinner.

--By Alessandra Stanley Reported by David Aikman/Peking

With reporting by DAVID AIKMAN