davethegrinch.net

Dave and Sarah Say:

As we continue to eat our way around the world, we are pleased to offer you, our dear readers, tonight’s special dish:

 

Fried Put Down Bag, Dried Veg Tabasco with Pepper

So, place your napkin upon your lap and toast both the wondrous and bizarre as we bring you the best and worst culinary China has to offer.Nowhere in the world quite sets the expectation of fine food more than China. It was probably the first international cuisine any of us ever tasted and so holds a special place in our hearts - the exotic orient brought to our doors in polystyrene containers and plastic bags. Does Kung Pao Chicken taste the same here as it does at home? Is there really no such thing as Chop Suey in China? Can the Chinese make a decent wine? Well, the answers are yes… and no (with the exception of the last question which is a definite NO)

First, some background. Chinese cuisine is, like a compass, divided into four directions or schools of cooking: north, south, east and west. Each supposedly distinctive and each one supposedly better than the next. Apparently these schools are such a big deal they warrant a multi-million dollar movie being made about their culinary competition. Lady Iron Chef is a Hong Kong film where the two heroines battle it out kung-fu style for regional cooking supremacy. Somehow I can’t see British or American regional cooking doing likewise: is Yorkshire Pudding better than Trifle or is Applebees better in Florida or Maine? But we have now traveled all around this great country and I can tell you that I can’t taste the difference but then why should I when it all tastes great? I’ll leave the debating to the experts whilst I get on with the eating.

Here’s how mealtimes work for us:

First we must find a restaurant. The Chinese do not cook at home so there are restaurants everywhere but we have to find another one and then another and then yet another until all our basic criteria are met: other people are eating there, it has a menu in English, plastic food or pictures and there is no sign of rats (live ones that is, rats on the menu are fine).

Chinese authorities care for the welfare of the dining public so many restaurants offer a combination of the following qualifications proudly displayed by placards in the entryways:

• The Chinese Famous Flavor Dish Award presented by the China Hospitality Association. The certificate is written in English but the dish they were awarded it for is in Chinese so we’ve no idea if we should order it.

• China Tourist Board Star Rated Toilets. One to five stars signify the quality of squat toilet. Five stars probably means it actually flushes.

• Beijing City Council Sanitation Rating (A-F). It appears to be law that all restaurants in Beijing must display this rating on a big sandwich board outside their doors. Many don’t so we can assume they got an F which probably means other restaurants are very proud of achieving an E or above. Never once saw an A.

On to food selection. Without other diners’ dishes to rudely gawp at in an attempt to identify their meat content or without some other form of food reference, it is likely we will eat the only words we know: Chow Fen (fried rice). Our guide book has a menu decoder but it’s utterly useless. Here’s an example or something we can order by showing the person the Chinese characters from the book: snake. We long since dispensed with it and moved on to pointing and making animal sounds. Unlike many other cultures where a restaurant specializes in one type of food, Chinese eateries will make anything, anything that is if you know how to order it. But, as hard as this sounds, we have only ended up once or twice getting chow fen as the default. Usually it works out. As often as not, a handwritten English menu is dug up from somewhere and then the fun can really begin. The English menu contains not what the restaurant can make but only what it can translate and sometimes the translations leave us more confused than the Chinese characters. As well as the obvious spelling mistakes, some foods just don’t cross the international dateline. The menu may look like this:

• Fried Put Down Bag, Dried Veg Tabasco with pepper

• Cat’s Ears in Dough (Poodle)

• Dogmeat with Veggies

• Braised Donkey

• Candy Yam

• Rat Stir Fry

• Boiled Bull Frog

I don’t do rat, dog or donkey. Rats are dirty, why on earth would you eat something that daily consumes its own weight in trash to live. Dogs are cute (but they often lick their own bums). Donkey is not a luxury meat, it’s lower on the food-chain and evolutionary scale than horse and we all know to avoid that. Bull Frog might be OK. I like French frog’s legs but I’ve seen the frogs in the market waiting to be sold and they are big ugly toad like creatures. Perhaps if Kermit was on the menu it would be different. Sarah wants nothing to do with the humble bull frog. Of course, every part of ‘normal’ animals are on offer including trotters, heads, feet, livers, tongues and brains but, hey, waste not, want not.

As for pricing: cheap. Bottom of the quality scale is $2 a dish. $4 is about where we like to be and, of course it goes up from there. One main dish, one veggie side and two bowls of rice rarely comes to more than $8 for two people and we are stuffed afterwards.

Now, here’s a funny thing about rice. In China they say ‘rice is life’. If that’s truly so then people must be dying all over the place because at every meal except one, our rice has failed to materialize. I don’t know about your Chinese table waiting experience, but rice, just the plain old boiled/steamed stuff, would be the one thing you wouldn’t forget; after all, it’s 10 cents a bowl and everyone eats it. I would just bring it anyway, ordered or not. But no, not for us, we have to ask for rice multiple times before it appears. And then, because we ask for it multiple times from multiple staff it appears multiple times on our bill.

The food quality is generally great. Not as greasy as you would think and the veggies are always top notch, fresh from the market. The sauces are just what you want them to be: a little spicy but still with flavor. Imagine going to an expensive Chinese restaurant where you live. Here, that’s the everyday norm and it’s sometimes better. However, the portion sizes are often so large we tire from the continuation of the same flavor but we generally only have one full meal a day so the volume is just what we need.

Beer. A good subject. There are two brands of beer on offer throughout the whole of China; T’sing-Dao and ‘Local’. T’sing-Dao is the national brand; started by the Germans when they owned the Chinese city of Qingdao and continued by the Chinese when they booted them out. It’s a really good lager - as good as the native Dutch lagers. Local Beer is whatever is brewed locally. The local breweries must steal the T’sing-Dao bottles because it often comes in the same green vessel complete with ‘T’sing-Dao’ embossed on the glass but with a hastily applied local label. It ranges from gassy to explosive. It also has a nasty habit of coming out of you in the same liquid form it went in. Beer is also cheep and they drink a lot of it. 600ml of T’sing-Dao is about $1 to $1.50 and local beer is cheaper than tourist water.

Oh yes, the wine. I nearly forgot. It’s bad, avoid it. It is however, made from grapes and not pineapple which makes it better than wine in the rest of Asia.

Eating in Asia is always an adventure and it often makes me wonder if we’re not a little bit fussy in the west. Sure, hygiene is nice but it doesn’t seem to be too important. Menus are whatever the chef can knock up and who needs a dishwasher when there’s a perfectly fine standpipe in the alley down beside the restaurant. However, what I miss most about eating in the west, and no, it’s not the service, is ambiance. We like to take our time, chat, gaze at each other over candlelight and sip our coffee at the end. In China, the food comes quick (except boiled rice) and you need to leave even quicker when you’re done not because of table turn but because the florescent lights have caused temporary snow blindness.

Next to Mongolia, home of mutton and little else. Stay tuned fellow food fans.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 7:48 am and is filed under China, Global Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.