A Day Dedicated to Food

Asia » China » Sichuan » Chengdu
May 29th 2007

Published: August 6th 2007

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mattylee

Before

This is the total accumulation of food consumed on the day by Ory and I. It doesn't look like so much, really. No, really.

It is a well established fact that I have a love of food, in fact, I like to say that "I live to eat, not the other way around". In the past I have tried to deny my problem, I ran away from the issue and hoped that it would just go away, however it hasn't. So, my friend Ory and I came up with a solution, a way for me to once and for all get over my obsession with stuffing my face with copious amounts of cake/brownies/burgers/muffins and anything else tasty. We dedicated a day to food.

The location for our binge was Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, which is famous for its spices and snack food. Ory and I were surrounded at every turn by tasty treats, cheap eats, spicy devils and pizzas (yes, American junk food is here in multitudinous splendour), how could we resist? How much food could we eat in a single day? To be precise, we set out to see how many full meals we could eat that day, the target being 17 (don't ask why 17, it just was ok).

Throughout the day we kept a journal of our thoughts

Breakfast Number Three

and feelings which has been dutifully reproduced below (with commentary of course) sans anything rude or derogatory. Read on with care, this story is not for the weak-stomached.

(House) Rules

1. All participants must agree on what constitutes a meal at the time.

2. Any less than 12 skewers and you're soft.

3. All meals must be finished, including parsley.

4. Any good "fat jokes" must be written down.

5. Everyone can catch up of missed meals.

6. Whoever eats most gets a free lunch at Peter's Tex Mex Grill, courtesy of everyone else. Will, it depends, they get free something.

7. All cravings must be respected.

1: Breakfast 1

Location: Sim's Guesthouse
Time: 7am
Ory ate a fruit salad which cost 8 yuan.
Matty ate scrambled eggs on toast with salad on the side for a ludicrous 12 yuan.

Well, all good ideas never work and this one was off to a bad start. We had initially planned to have six participants/fatties playing along but somewhere between the Babi II club at 3am and the 7am breakfast we seemed to lose four of them. Left to

Noodles!

Mama's Cafe serves good noodles, but Ory is not model material. Sorry mate.

begin the frivolity we had two, Ory and I, both of us looking well seedy. Eating Hot Pot the previous night was also a bad idea.

For those of you who don't know, Hot Pot is a common meal in Western China, particular for parties and large groups. You are seated around a large gas burner with a huge bowl of soup boiling away on top. One side of the soup is a regular thick Chinese soup with vegetables, the other is exactly what I imagine hell to look like, but in a good way: dark red chilles bobbing around in an oily red mixture of spices and more chillies. The food that you eat is served on skewers (you go and pick all the random skewers of meat and vegetables that you want) which you leave in the soups to cook. As far as fun meals go, it's hard to beat a hot pot with friends, but only two of us were able to eat a lot out of the spicy soup (I love that chilli!) The real problem was the after effects of the chillies, the less said the better I think.

To start the day

Ory at Breakfast

What a sight to wake up to!

of eating we had agreed to meet at 7am in our Guesthouse's restaurant for first breakfast, and we were both quite hungry at the time. Unfortunately we were also incredibly sleepy so the mission looked to be in jeopardy.

Journal:
No-one else showed, they're all too seedy.
Ory says: A bit too watery, the watermelon was the best ever, not, but everything else was perfect, oh and Matty likes girls.
Matty's meal was good, but I think 17 of them would kill me; ask me again at lunch.
Matty made a bad fat joke, Ory told him so.
Weigh in (we went to a pharmacy to get weighed after breakfast): Matty = 76kg, Ory = 66kg.

2: Breakfast 2

Location: Trust Mart
Time: 8am-ish
Ory ate Bao Zi x4, 2 yuan
Matty ate Pizza, 11.9 yuan

Journal:
Pizza was good, am going to swap dinners and breakfasts.
Ory says: four big Bao Zi is hard to eat when they are not so tasty.
Ory is tired, probably because of last night.

After getting cleaned and prepared for the day, bibs attached, travel chopsticks in hand, your two intrepid ground-beef guzzlers headed out

Shopping the Chinese Way

Over-enthusiastic fat man in early morning.

into the big city in search of food. Because it was so early in the day most restaurants were still closed and we had to settle for a breakfast from the local supermarket. Ory decided to do the Chinese thing and ate Bao Zi, a typical Chinese breakfast. Bao Zi are large dough balls varying in size from that of tennis balls to softballs, with various stuffings. Meat stuffed Bao Zi can be quite nice, if a little doughy (I can't stand Bao Zi with rice porridge, it's too plain) but the sweet ones taste horrible in my opinion. Matty (I) on the other hand saw a whole pizza sitting on a shelf and I simply couldn't refuse it. It looked so inviting, and it was second breakfast after all. At that point I decided that I'd do a simple swap: have a pizza for breakfast and an English Breakfast for dinner, it made such perfect sense at the time.

While eating our breakfast back at the guesthouse some of the other residents were stirring (this made for some funny questions about the presence of pizza at 8am). For some reason none of them were interested in joining us.

Trust Mart

My favourite Pizza shop in all the world!

3: Breakfast 3

Location: Guesthouse, again.
Time: 9am-ish
Ory and Matty ate Buns with tomato and cheese with yogurt on the side, 15 yuan for everything.

This meal was odd, that's the bottom line. Here we were in Chengdu, a city renowned for it's Chinese food, and we were eating cheese and tomato sandwiches. We did this to A: save money, and B: because all the restaurants were closed, but it still felt like a disappointing meal. However, we were in China, and China has a way of fixing these problems.

In general, it is very hard to get proper bread in China; it's either too sweet or too savoury. Fr example, if you buy what you think is a sweet bun it'll turn out to be something savoury, and if you buy a savoury bun (like we did) you'll find that it has a coating of sugar on it and sweet Bao Zi filling inside. In case you were wondering, bread, cheese, tomato and sweet glutinous rice does not make a tasty sandwich.

Journal:
Sweet buns = a disappointment. Will have to rectify later.
Yogurt was good, cheese: ok enough, too

Pizza for Breakfast

much tomato.
Very authentically Chinese food Ory's rear end

After the third breakfast within two hours we were really feeling under the weather. The combination of lack of sleep and an over-engorged digestive system resulted in extreme tiredness. Ory responded with a Nana-nap, Matty responded with a coffee craving.

4: Elevensies

Location: Mama's Cafe
Time: 11am, oh really? What a surprise!
Ory ate something noodly for 3 yuan.
Matty ate something similarly noodly for 3 yuan.

Journal:
Mama's cafe, it finally opened!
We are discussing if we'd. . . .
Ory just compared Nelly the rapper to Natalie the ginge (an Israeli girl at our hostel). Matty doesn't know who he'd prefer to "fo-chisel" with.
The food is great though.

Clearly things were getting the better of us, we were delusional. The conversation was simultaneously running in the gutter and the clouds. I don't think anything we said made much sense as we were both verging on falling asleep. My coffee craving was becoming a necessity, we had to wake up, get back on the horse and start getting serious if we were going to make the target

Ory Loves Bao Zi

Really, he loves them!

of 17 meals. At least we were eating some of the best food we knew about in Chengdu at Mama's cafe, a small restaurant near our guesthouse (we couldn't walk far from our beds).

There is something distinctly odd about Mama's, something always goes awry when we eat there (this was our 4th visit). For starters, no matter what you order you will get something else. I've ordered the same dish every time I go there and am yet to get the same thing twice! This could be construed as bad service, but when it comes from Mama, the most outwardly happy and friendly Chinese person in the world, it's hard to care. She speaks fairly good English as well, so I don't think it's a communication problem, it's more of a "quirky service portfolio". Maybe Mama's cat is using the restaurant as a front for his mafia operations. . .

After spending an hour in Mama's eating what constituted a small bowl of noodles (it was difficult to use the energy to chew), Ory and I set out to start the day proper: off to Starbucks.

I know that going to Starbucks is a horrible sell-out

Ory Feeling Tired

After second breakfast we were feeling a little under the weather, why did we go to the club? It certainly wasn't to get felt up by all the men, but that's what happened!

on my behalf, I don't even like the coffee After second breakfast we were feeling a little under the weather, why did we go to the club? It certainly wasn't to get felt up by all the men, but that's what happened!there, but we needed a quick double-shot and a comfortable chair, and Starbucks is an easy place to get to here. We spent an hour or so recovering from the first four meals over big cuppas on the second-floor while overlooking the busy street life below. Now, Chengdu is a lucky city, it happens to have more beautiful women per capita than anywhere else in the world (that we know of) and a second floor balcony is a perfect place to realise this. It's absolutely unbelievable, no matter where you look there is a great looking girl walking along, it's enough to drive men mad. What's odd though is that a place can selectively breed (that's the only explanation I can think of) such beautiful women and yet has comparatively ordinary men. Anyway, after an hour of perving I felt guilty so we went to eat (I eat when I feel guilty, and when I feel sad, or happy,

Ory at Mama's

It was only 11, and he'd just had a nap, but Ory was just soooo tired.

or bored, or tired, or anytime at all really. . .)

5: Lunch 1

Location: Xinjiang owned and operated BBQ stands
Time: a little later
Ory and Matty ate skewers of lamb and beef, 12 yuan per person.

Journal:
Lamb was good, beef was better.
Matty pulled himself away from perving just long enough to stuff his face.
Ory has stupid feet.
Went to dodgy show store upstairs.
Ory was nearly convinced to buy a 360 yuan shirt.

Barbecue in China is something that cannot be missed, it is the single greatest eating experience available, and it's found just about everywhere exactly when you need it. Small stands, some movable, some fixed, some tiny with just a guy and a hotplate, some huge with tables full of foods to choose from, are to be found on street corners and in side alleys of just about every city. For 5 mao or one kuai (6 to 12 US cents) you get a skewer full of meat or vegetables of your choice which are then covered in sauces, oils and spices which being cooked over a coal fire. Some of the tastes you get from BBQ

Matty Was Worse

are fantastic, with juicy spiced meats, crisply fried potatoes, juicy eggplants and just about anything else coating your taste buds, all with a liberal dose of chilli of course (saying that you don't want chilli is about as useful as telling the BBQ-er about your Aunt's dog's new Pancho).

For our first lunch we decided to find BBQ in and around Chengdu's main shopping mall, a place which is practically a city in itself. We easily found two different Muslim BBQ guys on street corners, one with lamb and one with beef, and we each ate the requisite 12 skewers (see rule number 2). Oh boy were they tasty, and after our coffees we were both feeling rather energetic.

To fill in some time we did a bit of shopping as both of us need new shoes (Ory also was looking for a T-shirt). Unfortunately though, it is impossible to find properly sized shoes in China for either of us. Ory is only a size 44.5 (US 11 or something like that) while I come in at 48 or so, but there were still only a handful of big shoes around. Despite this lack of product, hawkers still

Chengdu Streets

tried to sell us shoes: "Adidas, Nie-ky" we could hear constantly as we walked along, each tout yelling his lungs out so that we would go into his store and look at his baby-sized shoes. When we asked one of them if he had a size 45 he confidently said "yes" and led us to an upstairs store, one of the really small and seedy looking ones that is only meant for VIP eyes (VIP shoe stores? What is the world coming too?). It looked promising, perhaps it was a factory outlet or something that had the western shoes before they got shipped out of China. However, when we got there we found that they barely even had shoes, instead they sold T-shirts, very expensive T-shirts. One shirt was priced at 360 yuan ($50), this in a town where you can buy designer clothes for a dollar each! Ory and I ran out, only stopping once on the second floor to look in another store who said he sold big shoes but instead only sold fake Rolex's and badly sewn suits.

Back outside we kept up our search but alas, there were no big shoes or good shirts to

Attractive Chendu Woman

Well, the rear half of her.

be found anywhere. We went and got another coffee (with a complementary drink made by mixing an espresso shot with tea, quite tasty and a huge kick).

6: Lunch 2

Location: Dico's
Time: 3pm, 4pm, dunno.
Ory ate a burger with a chocolate ice-cream.
Matty ate a burger with a cherry ice-cream. 16 yuan for the two of us.

Journal:
Ory says: not too bad.
Matty says: tastes like posterior, chicken posterior.
Receipts are IMPORTANT!
We're tired, we've got no T's, no Trainers, no , but we're going to Tex-Mex.

As we walked away from our second coffee house of the day we noticed that we were feeling great, better than we had all day. For some reason the 5th meal/coffee combo had put us in high spirits so we giddily wandered around the shopping malls. In hindsight I'd say that we were just overdosing on caffeine, and it was great! In honour of our mood we decided that we need to treat ourselves to a grand dinner at our favourite restaurant: Peter's Tex Mex Grill, but first we had some business to attend to. That is,

Xinjiang BBQ

Our first BBQ stop for the day.

we had to eat another lunch and go shopping in the electronics plaza.

Because it was getting late we stopped in for a quick fix of Chinese fast food at Dico's. This restaurant is the Chinese rip-off of McDonald's, and in a totally un-Chinese manner they've actually managed to come up with something better than the original. Ok, the burgers were small and tasted bad, but the ice-creams were fantastic! Also, we managed to pick up a discount book so it was dirt cheap. We were in such a hurry to eat though, so we didn't get a chance to enjoy the experience (the waitress was quite put out when we tried to leave before she gave us our receipt, she looked as though she would die of shame if she couldn't manage to thrust that slip of paper onto our tray). While we were there though we didn't manage to come up with our slogan for the day, the five T's as listed in the journal. It was true, we were damn tried, we'd failed to buy the two items on our shopping agenda due to their total unavailability, and we were going to have Tex-Mex burgers for

BBQ Makes Us Happy

The coffee was helping too of course.

dinner.

7: Dinner 1

Location: Peter's Tex Mex Grill
Time: 6pm
Ory ate a Philly Cheese Steak. 20 yuan.
Matty ate a "taco so big, it beeps when it back up" (it was described thusly on the menu and therefore had to be ordered. 28 yuan.

Journal:
Waitresses are less interested in our plan than first thought; reconsider attack plan.
Ory says: Damn good Philly Cheese Steak.
We need cake, bad. See rule 7.
Matty's stomach is beeping.
Ory wants a sweet hot girl (he's desperate ).
We just argued over how to pronounce Lao Shi, how silly are we?

Peter's Tex Mex is a Chengdu establishment for ex-pats and foreign students; a home away from home, if you come from Texas that is (Mexicans too I presume, but the menu doesn't look that Mexican). In the few times that we've visited (ok, the five times that we've visited) it's always been packed with westerners eating up on burgers and pizzas, the food really is good, but this is China! Shouldn't we be eating Chinese?

While at Peter's, slightly after eating that appropriately described taco, we

BBQ Number Two

Our favourite beef BBQ.

tried our best to impress some ladies with the story of our day. Now, most people would agree that telling a lady that you've eaten seven meals so far that day and intend to eat several more is not a good tactic, it's likely to result in calls of "you fat pig" or "that's disgusting, why would you want to do that?", and fittingly that's what happened. The first time at least. You should try it, it's fun; attempting to describe our day in Chinese that is, I'm sure the waitress just assumed that we were making mistakes and that we hadn't actually had seven meals. The American girls at the next table were quite interested in our story though.

8: Dinner 2

Location: Mix Hostel
Time: late
Ory and Matty ate banana pancakes. 10 yuan each.

Journal:
Average food, really, really annoying conversation, still only have two of the five T's.
Purple monkey dishwasher.
Ory says: nice banana pancake, really, really annoying-y conversation.

After the Tex-Mex extravaganza we were both pretty well spent. The beeping taco was probably a little ostentatious given its predecessors. However, we noticed that we'd gotten to the stage

Post Coffee Number Two

Ory is as high as a kite.

where eating seemed to have no effect: we could just eat and eat and eat without getting full. We were never strictly hungry, we could just keep eating, it was as though our bodies had gotten used to binging and now we didn't need to break between meals. It was golden time!

Because it was late we headed back towards our guesthouse, weighed ourselves (Ory had put on 3kg while Matty had only put on 2.5kg), got cleaned up, and then walked to the other hostel in the area. Unfortunately we ran into some more Israelis on the way who turned out the be the most annoying people in the world. I'll save you the details, but we had to run out of there as soon as we finished our pancakes. Onwards with more eating!

9: Wishful Thinking at Night

Location: Random
Time: Sometime late.
Ory and Matty ate something chicken, something vegetable, something something. . .
It was cheap, less than 10 yuan for both of us.

Journal:
Using chopsticks for a change.
Rice is a pain in the posterior
Matty wants to sleep, Ory too, maybe together.
We both hate tofu; annoying

Dico's

Fast food the Chinese way.

Israelis; Chinese feet; Israelis that think they're better than you; Panda eating habits; Panda eating; girls that think they can eat four banana pancakes (Ory says if she can eat three, you can call him a banana); girls that probably can eat four, that have the body for it, and brag about it; chicken served with bones; being so tired and getting up so early for so long; therefore we hate Pandas, Buddha, stupid competitions about eating 17 meals in a day, Chinese clubs where only the men hit on us; when you bite your lip (Matty just did).
We like having lots of napkins, it makes us feel safe.
We hate girls with sqeaky voices, like ; girls who doesn't know when to shut up or when to refuse drinks from drunk Chinese businessmen.
Ory hates chewing on bones, and the fact that he has to eat everything on his plate.
Matty regrets being such a "fat pig" when he was younger, thus spawning this idea.

Well, the journal pretty much sums up our state of mind at the time: we were completely deranged and writing down every random thought that came to

Philly Cheese Steak

At the Tex-Mex, Ory is crazy.

us. They were mostly negative because we were both about to collapse from exhaustion. I suppose some explanations are necessary though. In general we were just angry about the annoying Israelis we'd just met and the fact that we had to wake up early the next morning (and presumably skip breakfast!) so as to go and see the Pandas. We were also disillusioned with ourselves because we'd put ourselves through such a masochistic day.

So there we were, sitting in a random restaurant on a street near our guesthouse. It was midnight, we had been eating for seventeen hours, we were exhausted, full, fat, bewildered and ready to finish it. We called the day over, a draw at nine meals each.

We started walking home, happy to have beaten all previous eating records by a considerable margin, and happy to be nearing our beds. But then, as it started to rain on us, across the road we saw a BBQ guy. A lone man with his stand (a bicycle with a huge table attached to its back) and his umbrella. A full selection of meat and vegetable skewers, by far the biggest I'd even seen, sitting there for

Beeping Tacos

Matty gets ready to reverse.

us to peruse. Ory and I looked at each other, a cruel twinkle in our eyes.

10: Midnight Snack Attack

Location: Roadside BBQ
Time: 1am
Ory and Matty ate 12 skewers each (see rule number 2), 10 yuan per person.

Journal:
Well, after begging and complaining and crying like little girls, we decided to stop and eat some more. . .
BBQ that is, good BBQ, lots of veggies and good meat, plus an old Chinese/German/CIA dude. He must have been bad as a CIA dude, his hawaiian shirt was loud! Maybe a pirate (had a glass eye).
Rain is not fun, so we are sitting in Mix hostel. Must tell receptionist where we're going and how much we've eaten. Ory gets bonus points if he gets her phone number.
Ory says: but she's ugly.

The tenth meal ended it, we went home to sleep. Ten meals in a single day is too much, I don't recommend it to anyone (kids, don't try this at home!), the after effects have lasted four days and we're still tired and lethargic. The next day we weighed in a full two kilogrammes heavier than we started. The

Pancakes

At Mix hostel, at some late hour.

question which is still to be answered though is: has the binge worked? Did we reign in our eating habits by binging to our limits? No, I'm still hungry and it's lunch time.

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