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Published: August 23rd 2011
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Plenty of people who have lived here will enjoy snootily telling you that the Chinese food you eat back home is 'nothing like the food you get here'. Well don't listen to a word of it. Of course there are differences (as a quick scan of the last entry will tell you) and the range here is far bigger and less obviously palatable to Western tastes - wouldn't you expect that though? - but you can still get some of the British Chinese restaurant staples here, if you so desire, which bearing in mind that I live in a city that's about as tourist friendly as Rotherham, pretty much means that these things are eaten in 'real' China, despite what some will enjoy sniffily saying. Obviously this isn't to say that you can buy prawn crackers on every corner, but we have dined handsomely on sweet and sour pork, dumplings (despite Three Extremes almost ruining them for me), fried rice and some kind of black bean sauce type affair on several occasions - and that's before you even get onto Peking Duck. So the next time someone tries to tell you that "well, of course you know that's not real Chinese
food don't you" tell them that before putting your thumb on the end of your nose, waggling your fingers in the air and blowing a raspberry at them.
If we are talking about differences though, top of the shop has to be hygiene. I think I have mentioned before about the rules on eating on street food being different when you're abroad, but I find that I am also far more tolerant of food being made in, shall we say, less than pristine conditions too. Inevitably, we eat a lot of our meals on the street. It's impossibly cheap, it's convenient, and for the most part it's delicious - of course there are times when my stomach disagrees with that last one the following morning but that's just the risk you take - but I can promise you that in England I would think twice about eating somewhere where the only thing obscuring the dirt on the pans or the food preparation area, is the rust. When I say 'street food' there are two main types here. One is more like a hotdog vendor, selling food on something that amounts to a trolley with a small cover over it. The other is situated in an actual building, often one made of concrete and everything with no front to it, but where almost all of the cooking is still done out on the street. Their selling point, however, is that you get to sit inside while eating as opposed to braving the 35 degree heat like you do with the more traditional street guys. Inevitably, the traditional lot have fought back over this by introducing some metal frames with tarpaulin covers and what amounts to children's garden furniture for people to sit on and eat in comfort, meaning that the guys in the buildings will have to up their games somehow. Where will it end though? It's going to be like the VHS/Betamax war all over again.
One of the odd things is that the actual on-street selling is technically illegal. By technically illegal I mean that it is illegal but most of the time everyone turns a blind eye. Occasionally, (once every couple of months or so) they will be politely asked to move on, but within a few days, one by one they creep back until things are back to normal again, and I can get my fried noodles for lunch. I say it's odd because to me they are one of the best parts of the city. A genuine piece of real culture and life that, truth be told, is missing from many other places here. I guess it may be for hygiene reasons, or even because they're unregulated and therefore could really be selling anything but I reckon most people are savvy enough to know the difference between someone selling fried rice and someone selling human shit disguised as some manner of tofu (this actually happened in another province), but perhaps there are other reasons because for a country where people freely go to the toilet outside supermarkets and restaurants, to close something like this down for hygiene reasons seems a little disjointed to me.
In terms of what I will miss food wise about China, street food is a massive part of it, but the big thing is going to be the Hot Pot. If you're from the North of England this isn't what you're expecting it will be and it was a huge shock to me on my first night in China when I was told we were going for Hot Pot and I ended up eating something that I not only didn't recognise, but wasn't made by someone called Betty. In China, Hot Pot is a big metal bowl filled with oil, usually with a spicy half and a non-spicy half. You have a gas hob at your table which heats and boils the oil, at which point you add and cook your own food. Generally this includes thin slices of meat, sausages, vegetables, fish, bread, mushrooms, lotus fruit, seaweed and tofu. The rule is that when it floats, it's cooked, and I absolutely love it. It can be very communal and inclusive or quite quiet (as quiet as China allows) and intimate, but however, you have it, it's fantastic.
The only other thing that comes close in my eyes is this street food pitta bread thing filled with meat (difficult to be more specific than that) lettuce, onion and spices, called a Roger Moore. Obviously, it's not really called that - and us naming it that isn't some pathetic attempt to be a bit wacky or zany - it's simply because the name for them in Chinese is almost indistinguishable, to our ears at least, from 'Roger Moore' and so it's just easier. It's a beautiful thing though; tasty, big enough so two of them fill you up and they only cost 20p each. Also, the man who makes them only has one hand, which isn't positive or negative in itself, but it does make the whole thing somehow more impressive. It also backs me up further when I say that the Chinese food you eat, is nothing like the stuff I get out here.
Pura Vida
Dave
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James
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Was just facebook stalking and ended up on this page, i miss the street food. A lot. It was mostly safe for you, i only managed to get real food poisoning twice and once was street food the other was a restaurant so.. not a bad record for the street food really. Did you ever grab a Roger Moore in Xi'an? They had a lot of types up there.