When most people from the States here the word "Chinese" the first thought that instinctively comes to their mind involves small, white paper containers, stir fried rice and a $4.95 lunch special. Chinese food has the world captivated: it's fast, it's easy, it's cheap and it's good. The only thing is, the perception of what Chinese food is around the globe is often misrepresented to what Chinese food actually is in China.
Take for instance, rice. In America, rice is served with most every Chinese meal, regardless of what you order or where you're sitting down to eat. In China, rice is very common - don't get me wrong - but not nearly as common as you might think. Rice is only served when specifically asked for and is more or less used, not as a compliment to your tasty stir-fired entrée - it's actually used as your plate.
You see in China, no one is given his or her own meal; instead, everyone habitually shares with everyone else as an onslaught of entrées constantly come steaming out of the kitchen. Because of this, individual plates are not necessary and small bowls of rice are used to sop up any renegade food particles falling from most all foreigners' chopsticks. In some instances, when rice is not ordered, you'll be given a small ceramic dish, no bigger than the one you'd normally use in conjunction with a teacup, with which you have the choice to eat with or not.
Since the Chinese have not adopted the idea of fork and knife, and don't seem the least bit anxious on ever planning to do so, almost all the food that comes out is already prepared small enough to chew. Although this may seem convenient at first, other factors come into play, which make the situation a lot more complicated. For instance, many Chinese meat dishes - not to mention every fish dish I've ever ordered - are served still attached to the bone. Normally I'd be fine with this, since the most tender cuts of meat tend to be nestled next to the bone, but not having the luxury of a knife to cut away the meat with, nor an ample-sized plate to put down your bones on, requires some careful practice and a readjustment of acceptable eating ethics I've naturally become accustomed to while living outside of China.
Before coming to China, I was a bit worried that every restaurant would only have floor seating and no chairs, requiring me to sit cross-legged on the floor while trying to enjoy my food. This was a serious cause for concern because, for one reason or another, I've always had extreme difficulty crossing my legs comfortably while sitting on the floor - a problem which has also spurred countless years of childhood embarrassment while playing games like Duck Duck Goose. But upon actually arriving in China, I realized that absolutely no restaurant would ever require me, or anyone else for that matter, to sit on a Chinese restaurant's floor because it's more often than not covered in peanut shells, bottle caps, half-smoked cigarettes, and yes, the aforementioned bones of meat you have no where else to discard of.
Napkins are another western dining necessity that the Chinese seem too proud to take hold of. Every so often, a Chinese restaurant will provide you with a roll of toilet paper to clean your hands with, but nine times out of ten, you're on your own. Carrying little packets of tissue is a must when dining out in China, not to mention, being out when nature calls.
While living outside of China, I unknowingly became accustomed to variety. If on one day I wanted a nice deli-style, Italian cold cut sandwich and on the next I wanted something completely different, it wouldn't be a problem. Hell I could get Italian food on Monday, Mexican food on Tuesday, French on Wednesday, Indian on Thursday and pizza over the weekend, and it wouldn't be any more difficult than eating the exact same thing, every day, for the entire week. In China, the definition of variety is vastly different. It's almost a meaning within itself - there's variety alright, but only variety within Chinese food - nothing else.
If you want noodles, you go to a noodle joint; if you want dumplings, you go to a dumpling joint; and if you want a nice Italian, deli-style cold cut sandwich, you're shit out of luck. China offers variety within uniformity. Chinese food is pretty much all you can get, but there are quite a few options when trying to decide upon where and what you what you want to eat.
Lets start with street food. Street food in China is huge. Stands are everywhere you look selling all sorts of edible delights; fresh produce, fishless sushi, smelly tofu cups, plastic bagged noodles, fried chicken and vegetables, steamed dumplings, coal roasted pita bread and fruit on a stick - to only name a few. Meat on a stick is another facet of Chinese food that I never knew existed. BBQ stands are everywhere, often run by the white-capped people of Hui Muslim decent, offering up all sorts of seasoned bits of lamb, chicken, pork, and fish, which are usually, every bit delightful.
Next we have the Chinese "dish" restaurant. This kind of restaurant usually doesn't specialize in any one particular type of food, but instead offers up a wide variety of Chinese "dishes" that are successively served to you, one after the other. These restaurants often have private rooms, for parties exceeding five or six, where you'll be seated in a tightly enclosed area and given a number of waiters and/or waitresses to wait on you hand and foot.
Often times, the nicer places will have a spinning glass table, which makes dining out not only entertaining, but competitive in trying to seize an ample amount of your favorite dish.
There are also restaurants that serve a number of dishes, but only really focus on a few. The best way to tell this type of restaurant from a Chinese "dish" restaurant is to walk in and take a look at what everyone else is eating. If everyone's chomping down on a plate of boiled pork dumplings, it's probably safe to say that you've just entered a boiled pork dumpling restaurant.
Hui Muslim noodle restaurants are also very common, and one of my favorites, serving all sorts of freshly stretched knife cut noodles, in both soup and dish form. Dumpling restaurants are another familiar site - easily noticed by the stacks of wooden circular containers billowing steam outside the front door. The two main types of Chinese dumplings are called, jiasu and biasu - jiasu being the style of dumpling most commonly known to westerns, hand-rolled in a thin layer of dough, and biasu, which are more like steamed balls of bread with stuffing in the middle and twice as filling.
Another aspect of Chinese food that I feel needs to be addressed is the atmosphere when dining out in China. If you're one to prefer a nice, quiet, romantic, candlelight dinner - China is not the place for you. Hoards of brash and outwardly brazen voices fill the air as clouds of stale cigarette smoke hover viscously above. Half the place is usually drunk off baiju, a potent Chinese rice wine, or getting dangerously close, and the other half is yelling even louder, just so they can audibly hear the words they themselves are trying to speak. The restaurant's employees, who are always grossly overstaffed, constantly scurry this way and that, opening up new bottles of beer and bringing out endless amounts of pan-fried food.
Pan-fried food is something I always knew the Chinese preferred, but to what extent, I never had any idea. Have you ever wondered why no Chinese dish you've ever ordered has ever been baked? Maybe it's because finding an oven in China is nearly as rare as getting caught in a snowstorm in sub-Saharan Africa.
Ovens pretty much don't exist - unless you're a bakery or specialize in Peking duck - so the only two methods of cooking used are on top of a stove or over a charcoal grill - an observation, which I believe, has a direct positive correlation to why Chinese food is normally so greasy all the time.
One food in China that's never greasy is hot pot. Hot pot is a Sichuan specialty that's well versed all throughout China, and is pretty much exactly like it sounds - hot and in a pot. Sichuan is world renowned for the spiciness of its food, and hot pot is no exception. The table you're seated at will have a circular opening in the middle, which is connected to a propane tank down below. The cooking device that is brought out will contain two proportionate sides of cooking broth - one being blood red and the other, a shade off ocher. If you guessed that the blood red side is hot and spicy, you're the million-dollar winner. If you guessed the latter, you're still walking away with a complimentary prize.
Both sides are extremely spicy, but if you're feeling courageous and eat only from the red, it's a good possibility you may sweat off a few pounds before the bill is paid. The food you drop into the broth is what you actually order. Paper-thin strips of dried meat, bundles of mushrooms, a wide array of fresh vegetables, cubes of white bread, hearty chunks of potato and freshly knit pan noodles are just a few of an endless list of possibilities you have while enjoying a hot pot dinner out in China.
So there you have it - a taste of China's real Chinese food - bon appetit.
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