I
haven’t written much more about food since I’ve been told off for talking too
much about food – but what else can you expect from someone that’s normally a
food blogger with an interest in foreign cuisines, in a land of such diverse
dishes? I’ve also had a few people asking me recently – “Have you eaten any
weird things yet?”
I
have to say, the honest answer to this is no. Whilst lab people have done their
best to give me a whirlwind tour of Asian cuisine, to show off their varied and
interesting diet, they are not pushy in making me try anything I’m not
comfortable with, and understand that the western diet is very different to
theirs. The most I have had to do is eat some prawns, scallops and some other
seafood (everyone that knows me knows I can’t stand it) out of politeness,
because they had already been ordered. This is because the traditional method
of dining in China is that the host orders a range of dishes which all the
guests share (this is good for me anyway, because I can’t tell what half these
dishes are, and the sharing of many dishes means that even if I don’t like one
dish, there are still others to choose from, so I don’t have to go hungry!).
You should at least try each dish, otherwise I think it’s considered quite
rude. But my guidebook also says don’t finish all the food, because then it
looks like the host is too poor to lay on enough of a spread! I have definitely
found that a lot of food is left in restaurants, and this twinges on my hatred
of waste of food, but hey, when in Rome….
The
normal theme from the lab group about choosing a restaurant seems to be “Let’s
go have Hong Kong/Taiwanese/Japanese/Thai/Korean food” - I can’t much discern anything
between the meals as at the moment they are all variations of meat, weird veg,
rice or noodles with or without soup to me. But I imagine it must be like when
we’re in the UK saying “Let’s go to that French/Italian/Spanish restaurant”.
This
suggestion is closely followed by ones for restaurants focusing on a specific
ingredient. Usually these ingredients are not really my cup of tea! One of the
funniest suggestions came when they beckoned me over to a computer screen to
ask what something was called in English, as they were debating how to
pronounce it. I duly came over and saw a picture of a snail, and after telling
them how to say it, I naively asked why they were interested to know about
snails, and burst out with laughter as the obvious dawned on me that they
wanted to go eat it. I thought it was hilarious that they were pushing my
boundaries without realising it, but after memories of Sardinia where even my
mum couldn’t eat more than one snail from a large bowl she’d ordered, I just
knew I couldn’t force myself, so I politely declined. You should have seen how
their faces fell when I broke the bad news. They seemed so disappointed and
some tried to convince me saying that the way it is prepared is actually
surprisingly tasty. I replied saying that I know some people even in Europe
really relish snails (I know from Rick Stein that parts of Spain have
snail-eating festivals, where thousands gather to feast on them), and that it
was just a personal taste issue for me.
The
second instance was just this week when Lu meekly came to my desk with a smile
on her face saying “do you like to eat intestines and blood?” She’s so cute,
it’s hard to say no, but I couldn’t help but laugh and go “what?!” and then she
went away saying “Maybe I don’t translate very well” before coming back with
“Food like duck intestines and duck gizzard”. I managed to stretch to “I’ll eat
blood if it’s cooked” – since I quite like black pudding – “but it’s okay, you
guys go get gizzard and I’ll just go to the canteen”. It turned out they were
just suggesting it for my benefit so that I can try more types of Chinese food!
I managed to politely wriggle out of it after some attempts by others in the
lab to convince me, saying that the way the gizzard is prepared you can’t
actually tell what kind of meat it is. How reassuring, I thought. Maybe in that
case, I’ve already had some without realising it!
Part
of me felt a little guilty, because I was partly here to try different foods
and push my boundaries a little, and I felt a bit like a chicken (pardon the
poultry pun) for not wanting to go. Especially so when duck gizzard is fairly
bog-standard food in the country where I’m from. My dad regularly likes to buy
packets of chicken hearts from Hungary, and it is also available in Austria,
and he puts it in his soup. Like a good Hungarian man, one of his favourite
foods is also tripe. So duck gizzard soup wouldn’t really be much different to
things found in the traditional Hungarian kitchen. I think soups made from
internal organs hark back to nomadic times in both the Hungarian and Chinese
history, where people couldn’t really afford to let any part of the animals go
to waste. But I think my theories on the links between Chinese and Hungarian origins
are a topic for a separate post.....
Back
to the food. So the previous two are examples of what I haven’t eaten, what
follows is a summary of what I have successfully eaten outside of the campus,
with varying degrees of stomach upsets after (!)
The
meals that arrive for me when I’m out with the lab are pretty much hit and
miss. Most restaurants don’t have English versions of menus, or if they do, the
Chinglish is pretty bad. My lab mates try their best to translate the foods I
ask about, even if it’s via the translating app, and they also warn me if
something I like the look of is hot, since they know that I don’t like too
spicy food.
So
most time I explain to them roughly what I fancy based on the pictures showing
what is offered, and they do the ordering. The two don’t always match though,
like one time when I said I fancied noodles as a break from all the rice at the
canteen, and they asked “with or without soup?” and I said “without” but something
must have gotten lost in translation, because I got this really vile soup that
was basically just noodles, hot water and bits of beef. Vile.
It
seems to be really difficult to get noodles without at least some kind of
liquid being in it, and the other British girl I’ve met in the dorms, Miranda,
thinks that it’s probably something to do with adding some of the cooking water
of the noodles. There was even liquid at the bottom of this tasty Taiwanese
take-away we got:
 |
| Taiwanese take-away |
It was so tasty though, so I’ve decided
I now really like Taiwanese food.
The liquid seems very counter-productive to me though
because this just makes the noodles much more slippery and harder to pick up!
We went for some noodles made out of potatoes, and even the lab guys struggled
to pick up the slippery strips with chopsticks:
 |
| Slippery potato-flour noodle soup with pork dumplings and two quail’s eggs |
At least this one was a very tastier
experience. The dumplings were very nice (despite the need for liquid in them
too) and the soup was very hearty, full of different vegetables and even the
mushrooms were tasty. Although there was a special mushroom in it which is
apparently hard to digest, and for this reason, it is sometimes called “see you
tomorrow”. Lol, I don’t think I need to say any more! But this seems to be
quite a common ingredient, and I think why is it included if it’s so hard to
digest? But hey, extra fibre is always good, I figured.
Not sure what the
two quails eggs added to this meal, but I figured since they are a delicacy in
some places, I may as well try them. They were a bit of an anticlimax, because
they tasted pretty much the same as a boiled chicken’s egg. Boiled eggs seem to
be quite a common garnish on dishes, and there is even a version of boiled chicken’s
eggs that they like, boiled in tea which comes out brown (why????).
Another
great experience was also when we went to this Japanese restaurant:
I had some rice, beef and sweet corn come on a hot plate with a knob of
butter and you had to mix it up yourself to spread the freshly melted butter
round. It also came with a small bowl of miso soup and is probably one of the
best meals out I’ve had!
Another time we went to a Japanese fast-food
diner place, and I was recommended to have this other beef and rice dish which
came with cheese on top and which also had to be mixed up with the hot rice to
melt the cheese:
 |
| First bit of cheese I've had since I arrived, on a Japanese beef rice dish |
It tasted pretty much like the
plastic-y, waxy, pre-grated cheese you can get in packs at supermarkets back
home, but hey, this was my first cheese for three weeks, so I couldn’t
complain!
My incessant photo-taking of all
my meals was always found to be hilarious by the guys in the lab, and they now
remind me to get my camera out every time we eat a meal out:
 |
| “Western people taking photos of our food are so funny!” |
I also went to a slightly more
up market place to meet up with Phoebe again (the lady who saved my phone from
sinking into the oblivion of taxi land a few weeks ago), a place called
Cotton’s that she recommended, which seemed quite western, and even had a Hungarian
style beef stew on the menu! I didn’t try it because I didn’t come to China to
eat Hungarian food, but it’s good to know it’s there if I ever get cravings for
a taste of home!
 |
| With Phoebe, the kind lady who helped me track down my phone! |
This place also have buy one get
one free happy hour on cocktails while we were there, so I got a little bit
merry on some melon and vodka mixes!
One
of the cooler restaurants we’ve been to with the lab is a Korean restaurant
where each table is equipped with what is basically like a sunken hob, where a
hot plate can be put on top of it for people to fry their own food exactly the
way they like it and have it fresh off the plate, or in our case, a large hot
pot can be placed on top and your food bubbles away in front of you:
 |
| Amazing tasting Korean dish! |
Here you can see a big pile of
those long, thin, white “see you tomorrow” mushroom just above the green stuff
here. The basic premise of the hot-pot is that you eat whatever you can fish
out. Chinese eating occasions are very social, and whilst sharing food for
Western people seems a little unhygienic, it is a sign of trust and
friendliness here.
They
also had an unlimited free supply of pumpkin goo as a starter:
It tasted pretty much like
pureed baby food to me, but the boys, loving food and anything that’s free
ordered plates and plates of this stuff and guzzled it away like there was no
tomorrow.
I’ve
also been out with the people from the dorms, like this time for Miranda’s
birthday:
 |
| Dorm dinner out for a birthday |
Her roommate had organized a
trip to a nearby Thai restaurant, and we walked through the heavy rain during
when the typhoon was passing Shanghai in order to get to this place.
It was one of
the weirdest food experiences I've ever had! You can see from the photo that at
this point only I and two other people actually had any food. (people were
bored waiting for the food, so they started taking photos). I somehow got lucky
and got served almost first, while others had to wait two hours to get their
food! And the joke of it was that the restaurant was almost completely empty
apart from us, on account of the rain, so it’s not like they were run off their
feet. The guy on the extreme right was particularly pissed off, because he’d
already got his dish, but had to send it back because the staff didn't
understand the meaning of vegetarian and had served it with two prawns on top.
In the end, he had to send his food back no less than three times, as each time
there were bits of meat in it despite very clear requests to the contrary. One
of the girls had to literally spell it out to them in Chinese “chicken is
meat!”. I think they didn't cook his food from scratch, just picked out the
chicken more successfully each time. Even on the menu, an appetiser labelled as
“vegetarian spring rolls” after further probing had turned out to have “a
little meat” in it. This just made me think of Hungary even more, where most
people are perplexed by the notion of not eating meat, and it’s only recently
that vegetarian options are expanding beyond fried cheese in restaurants. (again,
this harks back to the traditional nomadic diet, where you simply would not
survive as a vegetarian).
Ironically, I
got a perfectly acceptable vegetarian dish, as I just ordered fried rice with
vegetables (I decided to play it safe, as I know Thai food isn't really to my
taste and can be quite spicy).
With
regards to the waiting, the others also told me that they had similar
experiences about waiting times for the food, and said that there had been
occasions when some people were just getting their food as others were
finishing theirs. This happened here also. The people that ordered various
forms of Thai curry also got their rice about two hours after the curry! It
made me think of this photo which went viral a few months back:
I’m sure if there had been
condiments at this Thai restaurant some people would have been driven to do
this!
The
food I got was quite good, and this guy Matthias had even managed to get a cake
for Miranda:
It was a really nice cake, quite
similar to the Hungarian style cakes, with layers of very light sponge and whipped
cream. Lovely.
So
generally, eating out is fine, and although I’ve not tried anything really
crazy yet, there are plenty of choices for people playing things safe, and I’m
getting a bit braver, so hopefully in future posts there will be some actual crazy
stuff.
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