China vs. US, Part III: Restaurants

Since coming back to the US, I’ve been out to eat a handful of times—Ye Old Waffle Shop, Jack Sprat, Gourmet Kingdom (Chinese restaurant that tastes better than its cheesy Chinese restaurant name), and Devil’s Bistro, to name a few. So far, most of these places have been pretty good because I had some form of an American sandwich. The day I got back, my family went out to Gourmet Kingdom in Carrboro because it’s pretty authentic as far as Chinese restaurants go, and I used to think it was pretty good, until I had mapo tofu and kung pao chicken (which I had thought was pretty good there) and realized that the mapo tofu didn’t taste anywhere as good as the mapo tofu that I had in Beijing that my aunt and uncle said was only “average”, but I thought it was amazing

(seeee?) haha. The kung pao chicken, I’ll let off the hook because the only time I had kung pao chicken in China was when I went to the place that’s so famous for it that everybody there orders it.

This is what real Kung Pao Chicken should look like—more than just peanuts. There are so many types of nuts in this that I don’t even sure I know what theyre all called. (I see peanuts, almonds, and cashews). This one was kind of sweet and actually not spicy at all.

Some of my fav (and least fav haha) foods from China…I think it was a bad idea to do this right before my year of being independent. Before I came to China, I used to not eat spicy food (as in seek it out b/c I could eat spicy food, just usually avoided it), no lamb, squid, drank only soda (and then water and lemonade or apple juice), and wouldn’t even consider trying something if I didn’t know what it was (still kind of wish I did…but I did not die…). I don’t know what I used to eat before…

一麻一辣 （I think this would be called Something Numb, Something Spicy instead of One Numb (spicy)）

I think this has to be one of my new fav restaurants in China. You pick a spiciness level (not spicy, mildly spicy, super spicy, and insanely spicy)—we go with mild b/c US mild = not even considered to be spicy in China. My colleague insists that we’ve had super spicy at lunch once and I had to stop eating because I just couldn’t eat anymore. Then you pick all your fav veggies and other random stuff (we get the this, in the descending tastiness: chicken wings > beef balls >> shrimp balls) and they stir fry it for you with tons of peppers. There are tons of these kinds of restaurants in China but this one has the best flavoring and THE best 酸梅汤(suan mei tang)in Beijing—pretty sure it’s plum juice? I ended having酸梅汤 almost everytime I went somewhere with spicy food (b/c it’s like milk and takes some of the heat off) and they all tasted horribbllee.

Apparently you can’t try this at home because the peppers are not the kind you can just buy at the grocery store...check out how many peppers there are.

金鼎軒（Jin Ding Xuan） This is a chain restaurant that we came to for amazing and pretty cheap dim sum. The building has four floors and is one of the few places in Beijing (/probly China all together) that’s open 24 hours a day. There are 4 floors and they have 100 chefs who work for them…I was kind of jealous of Ivy b/c there’s a smaller version of the restaurant on the finance street of Beijing, right next to Ivy’s office. See--part of what I ate when I visited her at her office. Shrimp-pork shumai, bbq pork buns, shrimp wontons with noodles

As cheap as this place is (compared to the US --hahah I think like $6-7 for the meal), I would not have been able to spend that much money for lunch everyday...more on my daily lunch later)

BUT it's def worth it. LOOK AT HOW MANY SHRIMP THERE ARE! these might have been the best shrimp dumplings ive ever had

My fav dish from this place: Nian hong dou bao or sticky red bean buns.

I also really like this place b/c they've decided to stop serving shark fin (which is like 500 yuan for some tiny portion). I wonder if it's b/c it's not making them money or if it's actually to protect sharks.

三证 (San Zheng) is your typical Chinese restaurant where they have a million choices and its all standard Chinese (in China) food. This place is just outside of our neighborhood and I've come here quite a few times because it's good and cheap for eating out. In fact, for my last meal in China, I thnik we had a soup, 5 dishes, and a fish--which also comes with a free fish soup from your fish(the one below) for a total of 150 yuan...That's about how much the it cost when I went to the other two restaurants with my uncle and aunt, and we fed 5.5 people (and altho not quite like an american, for old ppl my grandparents can really eat).

This is the fried fish that we always get. It's kind of sweet and tastes amazing with rice. I have no idea what this translates to, but in chinese i think it's called song shu yu, which i always translate to squirrel fish, but im pretty sure that's not right...

Xinjiang food：Xinjiang is the province in northwestern china that made the news quite freq two years ago b/c of the ethnic tensions and fighting—the Uyghur unrest. They apparently eat a lot of lamb here b/c practically everything comes with lamb, like this chao mian pian-er dish, which is also the only dish where i've ever actually thought celery tasted good because normally i think it tastes abs horrible. The sauce tastes tomatoe-y, but a little sweeter than tomato sauce and it has little chunks of lamb in it. mmmm. the best part is that it's super cheap. i think this big plate was 10 yuan, which is on the expensive side for this dish b/c i think its usually like 6 yuan for a big plate of chao mian pianer.

The best part of the Xinjiang restaurant that we went to (bside the fact that it was clean b/c most of them are holes in the wall) was that they had HUGE lamb kebobs. (that were also proportionally 4 times more expensive at 4 yuan a metal stick).

The other restaurant that had some particularly memorable food was MaoJia aka Mao's Home restaurant...hahaha. I don't liek how their portions are small, but I guess that's to remind you that life was tough and food was hard to come by during Mao's time, so appreciate what you get?

Anyways, this was some spicy tofu skins dish and was the biggest portion i've seen at this restaurant. And for some reason, I feel like this was the first time in my life that I knowingly and intentionally ate tofu skin, like as the entree and not as the wrap for something yummy like dim sum (I think fu pi juan is tofu skin?--Sorry I have no idea what this is in english...*hint to my parents--tell me)...this was probly after 2 weeks or so in china and i feel like it was b/c i was sick of the fact that of what used to be my fav dishes (green beans, cauliflower w/tomato and eggs, and suan miao chao rou (garlic tops with meat)), i was having some permutation of 2 of these 3 for every single meal for lunch and dinner for probly at least a week straight (which is also why that potato ribs flavored ramen tasted ammaazzinngg that saturday). I still dont think i can eat cauliflower and eggs.

Below is a cold dish appetizer, "liang fen-er" It's called Sichuan cold bean-jelly noodles in English I think and tastes a lot better than it sounds. It's kind of spicy but the

bean jelly-cucumber combo is really good with the spicy flavor. On a side note, I know how to make this cause I saw it on a CCTV cooking show where they take you to random Chinese people's houses and they show you their secret way to make it. Yay!

'

A few weeks after I went to Mao's House [hahah i just wanted to say that], I went to HaiDiLao, which is this super famous hot pot place. This is what I ate (not the mini tomatoes, but mainly corn on the cob, popcorn (bottom left corner) and oranges) because my host ordered really really weird things...

like this pig brain...apparently it's high in cholesterol, so my host only had half, while the father of the other family had 1.5 brains...-_-. I didn't eat this. i kind of had enough after i ate a baby octopus and duck intestines (which are really skinny, long and narrow like noodles...except theyre red like meat and feel like eating tofu skin).

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Lunch at Work

I think I spent like $2 every day for lunch because for I dont know how many weeks in a row, we went to Shaxian for lunch liek 4 times a week and I would order Ji-tui-fan aka Chicken Leg Rice for 12 yuan. Then afterwards, on the way back I'd buy either a popsicle or a peach from the Korean grocery store on the way back. haha for some reason, I never got sick of it until like the day or two before my last day. The rice comes covered in some sauce or juice that's got the same flavor as the chicken. I dont know what's in the small part of the plate (my colleague actually ate my portion every time), but it comes with bok choi w/bean sprouts, a hard boiled egg (i forget what this style is called but it makes it delishhiouss and this thick like tofu skin thing.

The other place that we would go to pretty frequently (and pretty much every time it was raining during lunch) was this place called Hollywood that served like a hodgepodge of asian and "western" food. I never tried the western food b/c it was all over priced. In fact, everything there was overpriced and didn't look good except for their kimbap(i thnik it was 15 yuan for 15 or 12 for 10), bibambap (18), and red bean shaved ice (8)--yea still pretty pricey. The best part was that all the "cheap" stuff tasted good.

This was the meal that capped off my favorite week of work...It was my favorite week of work because the new Brit intern complained after liek a week and a half straight of ShaXian/Hollywood that she couldnt stand either, so we had a week straight of going to other restaurants = walk further for lunch and have a longer lunch break. =D

this was my mushroom-shrimp ravioli that i got at some italian restraurant on lucky street in Sanlitun (foreigner area), so it was super expensive--48 yuan!! (ok so what if thats like $7 +tip and cheaper than lunch at Panera. that's like a weeks worth of lunch haha. i got really cheap in china). i was skeptical as to if it would 1. actually have shrimp and 2. taste good. But it actually was! hahah Me and the Brit rode the bus for like 30 min to meet my other colleague (who actually works for the company) there. Then after we had lunch, we stopped at a bakery, and rode the bus back. hahaha it was a min 2 1/2 hour lunch. =D

What a great way to end the week of great lunch breaks!

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Linyi

Linyi (visiting my dad's side) was where I got a stomach virus and couldn't eat anything other than mantou, rice, and bananas. Fortunately, we went out to eat at this huge restaurant before then, and that was where I realized that my chinese still needed improving because I didn't know how to order anything that I wanted. Even if i could read the signs labeling the food (it was a seafood restaurant and you go down and pick the seafood/look at the dishes (no menu) to order), it was no use because i would have no idea what kind of food it was, nor could i tell by looking at their dishes. To make it worse, when I actually recognized and knew that a certain dish was made with chicken/pork/beef, I couldn't tell from their arrangement what part of the animal it was (not that I know where which part of the animal the current meat I eat is from), as in I didn't know if it happened to be the cow's liver or something. So for the most part, I just ordered seafood/didn't really order and got pretty lucky that my uncle and aunt ordered some pretty normal stuff.

I didn't really like this shrimp actually, but my uncle said that it was some microwaved kind? so you could eat the peel/skin thing too.

Ohhhh this was sooo goodd. Seafood Guda. I have no idea how to translate guda because you'll almost never see it at a chinese restaurant (I've seen it once in SF and I think vancouver). Guda is pretty much flour that's cooked haha. My dad makes it at home, and this place's guda >>>>> my dad's. Mainly because my dad makes flour chunks the size of a mini sausage and these are tiny little droplets so you don't bite a mouthful of flour hahah. It was so good, I had to put 2 pictures of it up.

This dish was liek a cornmeal wrap (not acutally sure what the wraps made of, but its really hard--my aunt and uncle love the stuff for some reason) wasn't actually that good, but it was the spiciest thing I think i've ever ate in one bite in my life. Altho that was my fault b/c i didnt realize that it was a combo of cut hot peppers w/peanuts...

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Shanghai

Surprisingly, I didn't eat food that was all that good in Shanghai. I kept trying to find good red bean shaved ice (and tried like 3-4 diff types) and none of them were any where close to being as good as the one from Hollywood hahah. BUT i did have that awesome red bean mochi pastry in shanghai AND this amaazing dish that i realized i usually eat at least once when i go back, but had almost missed out on!

I don't know if this was made w/mussels or something else, but sadly this was the only time I had this. It's amazing. This was also when I knew my chinese needed much improvement b/c I def would have ordered this in Linyi if I had known how to say this...sigh. where are your parents when you need them? haha

Hahaha I had this at a dinner party with like 10 some people and I think i had 3 by myself....

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Bakeries

This sandwich was probly the weirdest sandwich i've ever seen. It's also sold premade like a pastry so it's neither hot nor cold. For some reason, I decided to try one this time, and it was surprisingly pretty good haha. For 4.5 yuan, you get I think 3 slices of bread sandwiched with an egg, rou song (awesome stuff --dried pork--the brown stuff), and mayonnaise, with a slice of ham on top. I took this picture because I was planning on trying it this year as an independent...i might leave out some of the mayonnaise tho. (i think chinese people really love condiments b/c my aunt says she gets tons of it and mustard when shes at subway haha)

Ohhh mannn these were probly my favorite pastries. Small (American) bite sized Lao po bing aka Old Wife Pastry haha. 1.2 yuan each or 12 yuan for 12. Flaky crust with red bean on the inside. sighh I shoulda bought more before I left Beijing.

Anyways, China clearly wins this (even if they might have cheated with MSG b/c im pretty sure they just add MSG to everything and anything). Cheap and yummy, and I haven't even seen a restaurant in the US like the spicy restaurant. AND I didn't even factor in the faact that Dairy Queen blizzards in China have a red bean add-in option. mmmmm

The grocery store in Shanghai...a pile of MSG on sale...