In Beijing we followed the Seafood Diet. That is, see food, eat it. The old ones are the best, eh?!
Beijing is worth visiting for the food alone. Beijingers love their food and are exceedingly good at cooking, presenting and devouring it. Being the capital the city also offers the opportunity to try food from all regions of China and we made a fair attempt to eat our way from the far south (very spicy) to the far north west (muslim, wholesome for the cold weather).
The most rewarding restaurants are the absolutely huge ones with massive (always very accurately illustrated though sometimes dubiously translated) menus, enabling us to sample a wide variety of things in a single sitting!
The stereotype that Chinese will eat anything with four legs that isn't a table does seem to be true. We tried snake (nice, reminded me of razor clams), cold chickens' feet (not nice but might have been better hot), sea cucumber (dull in taste and texture and looked like a turd floating in a bowl of wee but apparently good for virility), and of course duck's brains and tongues.
Apart from the bizarre stuff we also had plenty of more familiar meat, seafood and (always brilliantly cooked) fresh vegetables.
Three particularly funny things happened in restaurants.
1. In a Szechuan restaurant (south) we tried the region's variant on the nationally popular 'hot pot' concept. Thinking ourselves capable of handling a bit of chilli we asked for spicy level 3 (of 4). The idea with Szechuan hot pot is they mix up a huge bowl of sauce containing about 100 whole dried chillis and very strong-flavoured spices (star anise, nutmeg, peppercorns etc) and then you decide what meat and veg you want added from a huge selection on the menu. For example you might choose beef, hard-boiled quails eggs, various sorts of mushrooms and some greens and then they stir fry it all up for you with the sauce. (Variants on this concept include a soup-based hot pot and an oil-based hot pot into which you lob your own meat/veg to cook it.) While Hannah was in the loo the chef brought Zoe our selection of raw ingredients to obtain her approval. Misunderstanding the approach Zoe started clearing space on the table for all the raw stuff, much to the hilarity of the staff.
Above is a picture of the waitress once she'd finished removing most of the chillis from our hot pot!
2. In a Yunnan restaurant (far south west) we wanted to try the regional speciality crossing the bridge noodles, though we didn't know what this consisted of. We were first brought a plate of what looked like very thinly sliced raw fish, a raw quail's egg, and a bowl of tepid noodles. We figured we should mix everything up in the hope the heat of the noodles would cook the rest. Thank god we hadn't got as far as sampling the slimy result, because the waiter started gesticulating wildly at our teapot. Add tea, we wondered? No, no, no. Then the boiling hot soup arrived into which we should have put everything. The 'raw fish' turned out to be raw chicken.
3. In medium to upmarket restaurants they seem to like you to put your bag/s onto an empty chair and they then cover the whole chair with an embroidered jacket. I suppose this is for security not that I can imagine anybody ever stealing anything in Beijing but anyway. This had happened in a posh Beijing duck restaurant so we reckoned we knew the drill. One evening we were in a different sort of hot pot restaurant (half soup, half hot oil) and the waitress came up to Hannah carrying a laundry basket. Hannah reached over to the next table, retrieved the previous customers' used napkins (including one that had fallen on the floor) and popped them into the laundry basket. Turned out the laundry basket was intended for our shoulder bags and she wanted to place it on the empty chair next to Hannah.
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