The media talk as if everyone in China is now eating at McDonald's, Pizza Hut and KFC all the time. While there are lots of them around Beijing, their quantity is more apparent than real because they are on the main streets. They are probably outnumbered by Chinese restaurants by 1000 to 1 IN BEIJING--probably more so elsewhere in China.
I've always liked rice and what I thought was Chinese food. But let me tell you about real Chinese food. First of all, in the supermarkets you can see where people eat every part of the animal possible. This makes sense when you remember that it was only a couple of generations ago that there was mass starvation in China, so they had to eat whatever they could find. So in very nice restaurants you have ox-blood soup, chicken feet, pig knuckles, cow hooves, tripe and stomach. And every kind of creature, from deer to eel to cuttlefish. (People eat dog, but you won't see it on menus.) I've commented before on how there aren't many cats or birds here in Beijing. One of my fellow teachers received a cooked sparrow from one of his students as a gift.
You may think, "But that would be mainly bones", and that would be exactly the point. They LOVE bones, cartilege, fat and skin. My father, a Cajun who grew up on a beef farm, would be right at home with their food. I remember him cooking things like cow tongue and, being a Cajun, he ate rice with every meal. And we used to cut the fat off our meat and give it him; he'd eat every bit of it with delight.
They say it all makes food tastier. Well, in the West, they say putting a bone in soup gives it a lot of flavor, and there's no denying that fat can give food a better taste. And don't you love KFC chicken skin, even though you know it's not good for you? I say, fine, cook it with all of that, but then TAKE IT OUT.
But the Chinese actually PREFER the chewiness of cartilege and the taste of fat itself and will tell you that it's healthier. I would like a lot more Chinese food except that, anything with meat in it is likely to have bones; they seem to aim for a bone in every bite. So in the middle of what might be a good dish, you have to eat around many bones and cartilege and skin.
Chicken is not a traditional Chinese food; it was a luxury for many years, served only at special occasions. While you find a huge variety in the hutongs (neighborhoods) and I'm sure even a lot more in the countryside, most of the meat here is beef, fish, shrimp, squid, and pork. I avoid the beef because of the afore-mentioned. The fish is very often generic, so you don't really know what you're getting, so I avoid it. I'm crazy about shrimp, and sometimes you can get it peeled the way we are used to, but most of the time you are served it whole and you have to take it apart. Squid? I don't like chewy things. Pork is often my best option.
You often can find chicken in Western-oriented places, but you almost never find white meat: they don't like it. And that's what I prefer. I went to KFC, sure that I would find white meat there, but it was nowhere on the menu. As you would expect, the big item was chicken wings.
On menus, you often see raw meat in the photos. For a while, I avoided those dishes because I didn't want raw meat. Then a friend ordered one of those dishes and it came cooked. She explained that they show it raw in the photos so you can see that it's premium beef....
One of the few pleasant food surprises I've had is that lots of dishes have a hard-boiled egg included, even when not in the description. They are very tasty. Other things you find more often in Chinese food and which I like, are peanuts, cauliflower, broccoli, pumpkin and squash.
They use beans in lots of things and have bean-flavored ice cream (as well as green-tea ice cream) and bean-flavored drinks. I recently saw some bread labelled as rye, the first I'd seen since I've been in China. But when I got home and opened it, I discovered that it was made from red beans and didn't taste anything like rye.
There are more soups than you'd find in American Chinese restaurants. Another very big thing is hotpot, which is like fonduing your entire dinner. But I have seen egg roll on a menu only once, making me think it's an American invention.
There aren't many milk products here. I've been told that most Chinese are lactose-intolerant. In the large supermarket in the bottom of my building, they carry no butter or margarine. NONE. And just a few cartons of milk, which are always expired.
No places bring water unless you ask, and never with ice. In fact, sometimes they'll bring warm water in a teapot. One place brought boiling hot water in drinking glasses. And their tea is not at all like the dark, bitter tea in Chinese American restaurants. Often it's flower tea, made from chrysanthemums, which is very mild. In fact, it almost tastes like water.
When you get on the subway or a taxi or even as you walk in my school, you are often hit with a strong smell of spices, even if no one is eating. Because so many Westerners find this overwhelming, beginning with the Olypmics, the government has forbidden taxi drivers from eating in the cabs OR having spicy food less than an hour before their shift. But as my friend Joel would say, "It ain't a-workin." The smell oozes from their pores: garlic, wasabi, other smells I don't know.
Most food is extremely cheap here. I can eat a good lunch for less than $1.50 and would never consider paying more than $5. Many of the prices are regulated by the government. But the exception is Western food. Whereas in the US, McD's and KFC are cheap alternatives, here they're very expensive, comparatively speaking. A fish sandwich with french fries and a coke is the equivalent of $7. A 10-inch tall bag of Doritos is $5. And wine and liquor are as expensive as in the US.
Just as I prefer the Spanish food in America to most of what I tasted in Spain, so do I prefer (by far) American Chinese food to the Chinese Chinese food. But I am very glad to have experienced all of this for myself. It is facinating to see what we take for granted turned on its head.
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