Eating in China

Most of my experiences eating in China were groups of friends and colleagues sitting around a big table sharing the dishes. This is why they can bring out only one or two dishes at a time; everyone is sharing everything. This gives Chinese cooks an advantage over western restaurants in that they can have recipes with different cooking times. Sometimes no one will touch a dish until I've had the first bite because I was the foreign guest, so try everything you can. I enjoyed these round table meals so much that I would have three birthday meals the week of my birthday, because 8-10 people was about as many as I could fit around a table at the same time, and I could give my friends the options of which days and times they could come.

Beijing roast duck is a favorite of foreigners, and in China restaurants will sometimes advertise it as their specialty. It is slices of duck you can roll up in a thin pancake along with sliced cucumber or onion and dip in a special sauce. I liked the Beijing duck in Nanjing more than in Beijing because in Beijing the duck is cooked a little drier, but I'll never have it in Shanghai again. They charge three times as much (for everything in general) and then served me only the skin of the duck (the meat was extra). The customers in this high end restaurant were amused at the fright of the staff of a westerner complaining in Chinese "no have meat, no have meat" which is a too literal translations of my complaint.

"Chicken and peanuts" is a very common dish, but I've had ten different kinds. Sometimes it's just chicken and peanuts, but sometimes they add diced vegetables which may or may not include carrots, potatoes, and onions. And sometimes the vegetables are soft and sometimes a little crunchy.

They also like stir frying eggs with either green onions or tomatoes. Scrambled eggs and tomatoes is also a common soup. While I lived in Chongqing, I started buying the spiced up cooked potatoes, taking the cartoon home, and stir frying them with eggs. My Chinese friends found my "potatoes stir fried with eggs" amusing; I told them it was a more American dish.

While in Chongqing, or in southwest China generally, you should try either hot pot or dry pot. Both are equally hot, but the preparation is different. With hot pot, you order a large pot of boiling water with spices already in it along with raw ingredients, and then cook them to your liking. Warning, I drink a lot of juice and eat a lot of rice to counter the extreme spiciness. With dry pot, there is a lot less water and the meat is already well cooked and spiced up. I used to go to one such place at least once a week with a weight lifting buddy after our workouts.

My favorite "potatoes and beef" was in a little dinner in Taizhou, on a corner strategically located between three colleges (at one end of a street more or less dedicated to student customers). It tasted like the slices of potatoes and beef had been dipped in candy before they had been cooked in spices.

While China has most of the fish recipes I like, I eventually gave up eating fish in China because I found out that their rivers are so polluted that most of them are dying if not dead. I couldn't stop thinking about fish swimming in pollution.

Last and least, you will find yourself surrounded by American options. When I went to Wuxi, western or western-style restaurants had crowded Chinese restaurants out of the downtown area. For the record, American food in China is as inferior to American food in America as Chinese food in America is to Chinese food in China. Seriously, I couldn't find a decent steak in China for under 150 RMB. McDonalds in China is worse than in America, KFC is about the same quality, and Pizza Hut is more like an Italian restaurant.