Zhongguo Fangguar

This post is about restaurants.

No, not about the range and quality of their dishes, though Sichuan is famous for its cuisine, nor about diversity among restaurants. This post is about my experience ordering food from a menu that I cannot read.


Last Saturday, my apartment-mate Shelley and I went in search of a restaurant. We wanted to go somewhere new, so we took a walk until a restaurant caught our eye. We found a small place nestled among gigantic expensive restaurants and went inside. I didn't know what to order, so I asked the waitress to recommend a dish that was a little spicy (I felt pretty safe asking for a spicy dish since I have yet to have a dish that was too spicy. Not that there aren't any, but no restaurant is going to serve then to a lao wai). Of course she recommended one of the most expensive dishes on the menu -- meaning it was a little less than $5 US. When the dish arrived, it looked like a kind of mapo dofu (spicy tofu dish) with some unidentifiable meat in it. The meat turned out to be cow's stomach. The waitress had ordered me cow's stomach. I don't know about you, but I'm not a big fan of tripe. At the time I figured it was some kind of Sichuan delicacy, so I ate some to not appear like a rude foreigner, but you cannot convince me to order that dish again.


Yesterday afternoon I found a cute little restaurant really close to our apartment that makes fabulous lo mein (lo mian, if you prefer the pinyin). I liked it so much I went back there again for dinner (again with Shelley). I wanted to try a different dish, but I had learned from my previous adventure into gastronomy not to be too brave. I ordered what I had eaten that afternoon (beef lo mein, I can actually read that item on a menu) and picked another random lo mein. Once again Shelley and I experienced the mystery meat. I'll be honest, it looked like chopped up pig's snout, but I tried it anyway. It was more palatable than the cow's stomach, but not by much. I remembered how to write the name of the dish and showed it to my professor the next day in class. He cheerily informed me that it was, "Intestines. I don't eat that stuff." WHAT? My own Chinese professor won't eat intestines? (He doesn't eat stomach either -- I asked.) Even if it is a Sichuan delicacy, I don't feel like such a culturally insensitive foreigner for not wanting to eat cow innards.


Today I decided to play it safe and go to a restaurant that other students in my language program frequent, meaning the waitresses are used to American kids and what they like. I walked into the restaurant to find two sleeping waitresses, a sleeping waiter, and a portly, sleeping cook each at a different dining table. No customers (it was 4pm, that awkward too late for lunch, too early for dinner time). How does one politely wake up a waitress? Fortunately I didn't have to find out because one of the waitresses woke up about 2 seconds after I entered. She asked me if I wanted food to go and I replied yes. She looked like a sensible girl, so I asked her what her favorite chicken dish was. She giggled in a way that told me customers don't usually ask her opinion, then pointed out a moderately priced dish. I ordered that as well as xiao bai cai (white Chinese cabbage). At this, the portly cook woke up and went back into the kitchen. The waitress, having done what she needed to do, went back to sleep. About five minutes later, a thin cook came out of the kitchen with a freshly lit cigarette. Instead of sitting down to smoke his cigarette, he took one drag, laid his head down on a table, and went to sleep. For the rest of the time I was in the restaurant, he would occasionally pop his head up, take another puff of his cigarette, then put his head down again. When the sound of the gas stove stopped, a different waitress woke up to box up my food. The portly cook reappeared, sat at a table, put his head down, and went to sleep. The waitress brought me my food. I paid her and before I had left the restaurant she too was asleep. I love Chengdu.

The food was surprisingly bland, but at least it wasn't intestines or stomach.

Something un/Familiar

You may think Oreos are beginning to get creative in the US, but our double-stuffed oreos are nothing compared to the selection of oreo snacks in China. This photo is just a small sampling of what you can get here. I didn't feel like buying any more, but this is about a third of the oreo products I've seen here. Use your imagination, the Chinese sure are.