Day #96: Eating in China

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Until I joined the tour, meals in China were not entirely successful. Most restaurants in Beijing have picture menus for tourists, but ordering the requisite selection of dishes just from photographs resulted in incongruous combinations (most notably when I ordered noodle soup and what I thought was some kind of bread as a side but turned out to be a cake-sized sugared doughnut). The variety of ordering systems in Beijing were an experience in themselves - sometimes you order from a waitress as in a Western restaurant, but many places have a tickbox menu where you are given a sheet listing all the foods and a pencil, and you mark which ones you want, how many, and sometimes how spicy, on a scale of 1-5 or so (around 2 was always my tolerance limit). In canteen-style places you buy a card that you load money onto and then have the unspent funds reimbursed once you have eaten. Another quirk of eating out in China is that the crockery comes shrink-wrapped and some hostels I have stayed in have their own crockery steriliser in the kitchens - once you have washed your dishes, you put them in the steriliser until you need to use them again.

Meals improved on the occasions when I ate with a friend who is a Beijinger and she could order for us. The best meal I had with her was at a place where a grill was placed on the table, a range of raw meat, fish and vegetable was ordered, and we cooked it ourselves - kind of the equivalent of a barbecue, I suppose, with various spices on the table to flavour the food after cooking. I am also eating a lot of street food, although this means that sometimes I have no idea what I am eating. The most interesting meal I have eaten on the tour - although the restaurant was entirely full of Westerners, so I suspect it wasn't a very authentic one - was a 9-course steamed dumpling feast. It is definitely true, though, that actual Chinese food (at least, what I have tried) tastes nothing like Chinese food in England. I don't know why Chinese takeaways ended up tasting universally like they do, because I don't think actual Chinese food is particularly unpalatable for Westerners.

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