Most people in China probably heard of beef Wellington for the first time through a 2016 TV series called “To Be a Better Man,” starring top Chinese actor Sun Honglei. His character orders beef Wellington at a fine dining restaurant and sends it back to the kitchen three times, then proceeds to show the foreign chef he can cook a better one.

Sun’s character sears the beef tenderloin, wraps it in layers of pate, a mushroom mixture, Italian cured ham and bakes it in a puff pastry. He takes it out of the oven and cuts in to reveal a perfectly cooked steak inside.

“He put [beef Wellington] on a pedestal,” Shanghai restauranteur John Liu said. “Sun Honglei is a god in the acting world, and at that time, the idea of making something so difficult and so prestigious was, ‘Wow, I can’t believe it.’”

In Shanghai, beef Wellington shows up mainly in French restaurants, though the dish’s origins are hard to pinpoint. It has French roots, but the dish is named after the Duke of Wellington, an English general who fought in the Napoleonic wars, with a final victory in 1815. However, it is not clear what the duke’s association to the dish was.

In 2017, French restaurants charged about $70 for beef Wellington.

Today, prices have at least doubled.

Liu said his French seafood bistro, Coquille, might have had something to do with that. His restaurant is right outside the Madang Road subway station.

“This subway station is basically normal working-class folk. So, for the price point that we charge, none of this street traffic translates to us,” Liu said.

In 2015, to pull in more customers, Liu’s chef at the time, Anna Bautista, started serving beef Wellington, but only on Wednesdays because traditionally that is a slow day for restaurants.

“It was called Wednesday Wellingtons,” Liu said.

Back then, Coquille charged what Liu believes to be the highest price in Shanghai for beef Wellington — 688 yuan, which worked out to $110 at the time, but Liu said that price was still quite reasonable.

“At that time, going out to have a steak at Morton’s [The Steakhouse] is 888 yuan [or] 1288 yuan. Now you’re having a foie gras and a puff pastry,” Liu said. “Chinese already knew that beef was expensive.”

The Coquille had so many requests that Wellington Wednesdays turned into Wellington every day.

The dish is not only featured in a Chinese TV series, it also made a cameo in the 2017 quirky Chinese movie “This Is Not What I Expected,” starring Asian cinema heartthrob Takeshi Kaneshiro. He plays a picky eater, who spits out a beef Wellington made by a Michelin-starred chef. Coquille’s executive chef Jason Oakley was a food consultant for the movie.

As beef Wellington has become more popular, Liu said, more Shanghai restaurants have started serving it. One pastry shop recently began offering the dish for under $10.

When more beef Wellington is on offer, supply is up, so prices should usually come down. Not so, according to Liu.

His beef Wellington has more than doubled in price to 1788 yuan ($250).

“We have gotten more expensive because things have gotten more expensive in China, [and] we’ve used more expensive ingredients,” Liu said. For example, he uses truffles instead of mushrooms, foie gras instead of pate, and a higher M9-grade of Australian wagyu beef.

“We basically said, ‘What is the most expensive, most delicious beef that we can get?'” Liu said. “’Let’s out-price other restaurants.'”

Liu said his main goal is to make the best-tasting beef Wellington available.

“Who knows why [some food trends] land,” Liu said. “Once they land, your job is to take advantage of the fact that they landed.”

On a Monday evening, Coquille still had a steady trickle of customers.

Repeat customer Steven Fu said the first time he came to Coquille, he was drawn in by the beef Wellington.

“It’s a little bit on the expensive side, but it’s delicious, especially the foie gras in there, and the beef tastes great,” Fu said. “Of all the beef Wellingtons I’ve had over the world, I think [Coquille’s] is definitely [in the] top three.”

That evening though, he decided to try other things on the menu.

Across the restaurant, diner Echo Luo poses with a big bouquet of flowers.

“It is my birthday today, so that is why [my husband and I] have come to try the beef Wellington,” she said. “The price sounds a bit high, but I haven’t tried it yet, so I don’t know if the quality matches the price.”

Coquille used to have a lot of people popping in from neighboring Chinese cities before heading off to enjoy Shanghai’s nightlife, but the pandemic changed that.

“All of our domestic China tourism has dramatically come down,” Liu said. “We’ve taken one-third, maybe more than a one-third haircut on our revenue.”

But he has no plans to lower the price of his beef Wellington because even at the current price, most of his customers are nonetheless selecting it. He is just making the presentation of the dish more elaborate.

“We have brochures that explain the history of the Wellington and pair it with a package of tea, so when you go home you have better digestion. You pair it with acidic little palate cleansers at the end,” Liu said.

Birthday girl Luo is impressed by the whole package.

“The taste of the beef Wellington was really good, and the smoked oysters that came with the dish — I’ve never tried them before — also tastes nice,” Luo said after the meal. “Also, our servers introduced the beef Wellington and explained how to enjoy it. The whole ritual around the dish made it an amazing experience.”

She said she would like to eat at Coquille again.

“Next time, maybe I could bring a friend.”

Additional research by Charles Zhang