Tony's China Blog

(Food) Highlights from Hangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, and Xi’an

We took off with Ben and had a nice 10-day sojourn throughout Northeastern China. We hit the highlights—West Lake in Hangzhou, The Bund and Yuyuan Gardens in Shanghai, as well as cocktails in one of their fancy new skyscrapers in Pudong (the new area of town). In Beijing, we visited the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and Tiananmen Square. In Xian, we saw the Terracotta Warriors. All were nice, though perhaps the Great Wall was cooler than I’d expected and the Terracotta Warriors were not as neat. For the latter, I had expected to see an uncovered vault with thousands of warriors in perfect formation. Actually, the warriors had originally been in a chamber, but that has long since deteriorated and now they are covered in dirt, with many shattered and in various states of excavation/restoration. Still, there are a lot of Warriors and it was pretty spectacular.

Tianamen Square was surprising in that it is a huge, wide open square, and not only that, it is not hemmed in by imposing buildings or fences—it is ringed by wide streets. I had always envisioned the student protesters in ’89 trapped by walls of buildings Kremlin-style, but in fact, it seemed so unenclosed.

Ben struggled a bit on our trip. It is tough being a vegetarian in China, or probably most places if you aren’t cooking for yourself. I don’t sympathize with him, mainly because he, in my opinion, doesn’t really have a decent reason for not eating meat besides he’s grossed out by it because it was once alive. Or something like that. But, of course I wasn’t going to force him to eat meat so the burden came upon Erica and I to ask everywhere we went if there was meat in something. And there frequently was. Additionally, he thought he got warts on his food and then sprained his ankle a few days later.

In Beijing we had Beijing Duck which was excellent. I can still taste the duck, which was roasted in a fruitwood oven, the skin smoky and fatty and crisp and succulent. In China, the meat is beside the point, almost, on the duck. It is all about the skin. And the skin is so good! In fact, in Ningbo, when you order Beijing Duck, you don’t even get the meat, only the skin. I have no idea what happens to the rest of the carcass, and I don’t care that much. In Beijing, after the crispy skin, still attached to the breast meat, is served with thin pancakes, scallions, and plum sauce, the rest of the bird is cooked into a savory broth and enjoyed subsequently.

We also went to a fancy vegetarian restaurant for Ben’s benefit. Here, he had vegetarian Beijing Duck, one of those mock meat styles where you eat wheat gluten and tofu pressed into the shape and texture of meat. It is a strange situation when you really think about it, and even more interesting when you are spending more for the fake duck than you do for a real duck. I wonder which is more of a drain on the natural resources of the planet.

In Beijing there was a food street right in front of our hotel, where hundreds of things were skewered, ready to be fried or grilled. It was mostly for tourists, so I am curious about the frequency in which Beijingers eat starfish, scorpions, and grasshoppers on sticks. But they were there, unappetizing, but available. I had a China staple, squid on a stick.

We were in Hangzhou for only an afternoon, where we took Ben to our favorite activity, tea. You order a tea (Hangzhou is famous for some of its local teas) and then pick and choose snacks, dumplings, noodles, and buns from a big buffet. You then can linger for hours on your mild caffeine buzz and enjoy the scenery and food. A very pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

In Shanghai, we took Ben to our favorite place to eat, a cavernous cafeteria where you just pick out your own pre-made foods. Shanghai has two amazing dumplings that are unique to it. Both have a predominantly pork filling, but the meat part is swimming in a steaming hot broth, which makes the dumpling exciting, excellent, and potentially dangerous. The trick is to bite a corner of the dumpling and slurp out the juice as you eat it, or else you are in danger of squirting burning hot liquid on your cheek, shirt or in your eye. One type is steamed in bamboo trays and one is kind of fried, like pot-stickers. Both are excellent. Also at this restaurant are little crayfish in a very fragrant sauce, stinky tofu (a regional specialty), and many other little bites to eat.

Xi’an was our first foray into the more Muslim reaches of China. Here, we ate regional specialty called paomao lamb soup, that involves taking two pieces of dense bread about the size of a solid bagel and tearing it up into hundreds of small pieces into a bowl. After you are finished (it took us over ½ an hour and we were hungry!), the waitress takes your bowl away and fills it up with slow-cooked lamb and broth and some vegetables. You eat it with pickled garlic. It was excellent.

We failed in our attempts to find a famous dumpling house that had 20 types of dumplings, and instead ate some tasty kebabs (the first of many) and street food, which is always nice and cheap. Next time. And I hear there is a famous type of noodle from Xi’an, called belt noodles because they are long and thick. Sadly, we did not come across them. But there was a very tasty dish called roujiabing that involved filling a pita-type bread with some cumin, hot peppers, and chopped slow cooked fatty pork. Excellent.

Once we went further west, the Chinese food was replaced by more Muslim fare. Western China has similar food to Central Asia, and we ate many meals of laman, a dish that consists of noodles with bits of lamb, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and whatever other vegetables are handy. It is tasty, and we enjoyed this departure from typical Chinese food, though after a few weeks of it no doubt we would be looking for something different. Additionally, we ate lots and lots of kebabs. These kebabs were almost invariably lamb, raised on the great grasslands of Western China, and they were almost without exception excellent. The general attitude towards meat and fat is different here, and almost every kebab we ate had four pieces of meat and one piece of fat, second from the bottom. The fat was always tasty and one would receive baffled stares if he left the fat on the stick. These kebabs were deftly roasted over a charcoal fire and brushed with a nice spicy sauce that left your lips tingling but didn’t diminish the natural taste of the meat. We really enjoyed the abundance and taste of the kebabs.

Additionally, the Uyghur bakers in this region are excellent. We were shocked to find bagels available on the street! Although they were occasionally stale, when we found fresh baked bagels (always dusted with sesame seeds) we were very excited. If only cream cheese were somewhere to be found. Uyghur food also has a nice flatbread, decorated with pinprick designs, and looking somewhat like a focaccia. It was great to have good bread products after many months without.

One moment in our culinary experiences stands out. We went to Lake Karakul, about five hours west of Kashgar, an extremely isolated place a few miles from the Kyrgyzstan border and just a few hours from Pakistan, but miles from any legitimate settlement, really. There was a smattering of tourists who would stop by to enjoy the views of the snowcapped 24,000-foot peaks that loomed over the lake. The land was barren, with some rolling rocky hills but few shrubs and grasses that could survive in this area. Around the lake was a piddling town with one hotel and some yurts, nomadic homes made of skins strapped over a portable wooden frame. These yurts were inhabited by people who definitely did not consider themselves Chinese.

Outside one yurt, we stopped to watch a woman weave cloth on a loom that spread 25 feet across the earth, the warp anchored by stakes on either end. This was a Kyrgyz family, and the woman on the loom invited us in for dinner (for a small fee). We happily accepted, and came back a few hours later, where she made a laman, as everyone in these parts seemed to. She peeled and sliced the vegetables and cooked them with the meat over their wood-fired stove. Then it was time to make the noodles. She pulled out a big ball of dough that probably had 5 pounds of flour in it, pulled off a sufficient amount for the night’s meal, and started working it. I was curious how she would make the noodles, as we have seem some extremely deft hands, but she reached into a box in the sparsely equipped hut and, to our shock and amazement, pulled out a pasta maker! Stainless steel with a hand crank and variable thickness settings, much like the one I have at home. I have still not gotten over that.

After our experience there, we headed further east and after I bid adieu to Erica, I headed halfway (30 hrs on the train) back to Ningbo, to Gansu province. Here the food was slightly different. In Xiahe, where there is a sacred Tibetan monastery, I ate the classic Tibetan food, yak butter tea. I don’t understand where they get off calling it tea, because it is much more a dough than a tea. Essentially, it is yak butter mixed with roasted barley flour and sugar. Not bad, and it would probably make a decent cookie if cooked at 350 degrees for 12-15 minutes. On the other hand, I wouldn’t really want to eat it more than once a month (or year).

Lanzhou was the last city I visited before I got bored and tired and decided to head back to Ningbo. It is famous for its roujiabing, and I missed my last opportunity to go to Xi’an and see some sights that I had missed before because of it. I had just stumbled into town and was trying to check out bus schedules around 4:00, and I came across a bus that was almost full. “Come on, let’s go, only 30 kuai!” they yelled (quite a good deal). I was game, but I had not yet sampled the roujiabing. “Sorry,” I said, “but I need to eat roujiabing before I can go.” They yelled at me to hurry. So I hustled off to the food street and had a great one, greasy and fulfilling. But by the time I returned the bus had sold its last tickets and headed off. I had missed the ride. No big worries, I just walked to the airline office and bought a plane ticket home for the next morning.