Ming Tsai is going home to China.

No, the TV Food Network star and Boston-based restaurateur isn't moving to his parents' homeland.

But after years as a champion of East-West cuisine, he is reconsidering classic Chinese cooking. During a brief Honolulu stop last week on the way back from a 10-day China trip to shoot footage for his "Simply Ming" TV series, the photogenic Tsai said he had some of the best food of his life there, and much of it was street food, everyday food, simple food.

He enthusiastically described a simple egg crepe — flour, salt, egg and water — filled with lightly seasoned tofu and sea cucumber, prepared for him by a chef in Shangdong. "Phenomenal. Just pristine!"

Then there was the zhua bing — aka "grab bread" or "pulled cakes" — he ate on the street in Beijing, a rich, puff-pastrylike bread made with dough through which pig's fat had been layered and cooked in a griddle the size of a car hood. The bread puffs up; the chef gathers it up to form the cakes and you eat it hot. "The best bread ever!"

Tsai also loves the simple food of Hawai'i, a place he visits often when he wants to kick back with the family, golf and eat well. "I always say one of the best things I ever ate was at a Chevron station in Honolulu," he said. It was a fresh-made, warm Spam musubi. He bought one, ate it while standing in line, then had to go back for two more.

Asked what he was doing in Honolulu, he quipped, "I wanted some raw tuna, and this is the raw tuna capital. It's just amazing. You go to any bar here, it can be just a dingy bar, and you get tuna that's as good as anything you can get on the Mainland," he said.

Actually, Tsai was here to promote a project he is working on with First Hawaiian Bank, MasterCard and Halekulani hotel. It works like this: Between now and Nov. 7, anytime anyone here uses a First Hawaiian Bank Mastercard, their name is entered in a sweepstakes drawing. On Dec. 16, six winners and their partners will receive a private cooking class with Ming Tsai, and a multicourse dinner prepared by him at Halekulani. Also, First Hawaiian Bank Mastercard holders can get 10 percent discounts at a dozen local restaurants during that period. (Details: www.fhb.com/mingtsaidinner.htm.)

Even as he spent a half-hour with a reporter and photographer, demonstrating a buttery recipe for shrimp mousse and explaining the finer points of frying potstickers, he said he was looking forward to finding some new hidden gems among O'ahu restaurants. "I love to eat at places like Alan's and Roy's, but I'm more inspired by down-home places," he said.

Asked about the future of the food scene, Tsai said it's clear that many other chefs and diners are doing exactly what he's thinking about: returning to classics and homestyle comfort foods for inspiration.

He recalled a cooking competition he judged in China a while back where he and an Australian judge were the only ones willing to give high marks to nontraditional dishes. There was a spirited discussion about whether judging something as "not Chinese enough" was a legitimate criticism and Tsai left annoyed that the conservatives weren't willing to branch out or loosen traditional ties.

Today, he said, he thinks Americans and some Europeans have branched out too far, right to the teetering edge of the limb, in fact. "There's probably a reason why foie gras and peanut butter hasn't been put together before — it doesn't work," he said. "Food is becoming so overmanipulated that a carrot isn't a carrot anymore. It's juiced and jellied and formed into a carrot again. But what was wrong with the carrot in the first place? Nothing."

Tsai's point is that young chefs who have come up in a fusion food era must be firmly grounded in traditional ingredients and techniques before they begin to reinterpret or abandon the old ideas and rules. You have to understand, for example, that if you're going to make an Asian version of the classic carpaccio drizzled with olive oil, you can't just throw raw sesame oil over thin-sliced 'ahi. The sesame oil will take over that dish and the next five you eat. Classic Chinese technique solves this problem by combining sesame oil with chicken stock to tame the overpowering flavor.

In cooking, no one's really inventing anything, anyway, he said. Whenever you think you've created something new, you're sure to find out that a similar idea occurred to someone else before.

"The thing I most love to hear from people who watch my TV show is that they were inspired by a recipe. Recipes aren't gospel; they're there for inspiration," he said. When a viewer in Texas tells Tsai about using his mango salsa in a carne asada dish, altering the seasonings, Tsai is delighted: "That's cooking!"

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.