Eating Beijing

2009 08-09 – Beijing

Finding a place to eat in Beijing is never a problem, though choosing might be!  To a European's eyes,  an incredibly high percentage of small businesses are eateries and, given the number of people many of them employ and how cheap the food is, you have to wonder how they make a living.
Happily, thanks to my parents no doubt, I have a flexible palate and almost everything I ate was at least agreeable, but more often than not very tasty.

My favourite alley stall near Beijing Station served up a good Beijing breakfast pick-n-mix of boiled egg, dough sticks, fried bread, noodles and xifan (sheefan) – a rice porridge that can be incredibly bland (perhaps the most bland dish in Chinese cuisine), but this stall did a reasonable job of giving it a tiny bit of taste.

Mr. Lee – Chinese fast food! Simple dishes that seemed so much better than the food in Western fast food chains. Unlike most Western travellers, I have built up an immunity to the siren song of the 'Golden Arches' and would prefer Mr. Lee any day of the week.

Generally speaking, eating in China is a social event and a group of people will share a collection of dishes. This results in individual dishes that are quite focused in their flavour, texture and colour and yet the quantity of food per dish is more than enough for one. Eating alone in restaurants is therefore less than ideal as you either have to order way too much food or be restricted in the variety of contents of your meal.

Though very oily, this was possibly the best aubergine dish I've ever eaten! It was certainly one of the most garlicky! I think this was also the first dish where I was introduced to the Chinese cuisine concept of meat as a garnish, with slivers of fried pork sprinkled across the top. The noodles were a separate dish I ordered so I wasn't just eating aubergine... I wasn't expecting quite so much food but, in a stomach busting burst of Britishness, I cleared the plate.

Hotpot! With a large gas cylinder under your table, you cook your meat and veg yourself at the table in either of the two tasty boiling liquids – one extremely spicy and the other not.

A happy aspect of travelling alone that I didn't anticipate is that local people are not so shy about approaching you and helping you out if they can.... which is exactly what happened here! Jing-Hua, a medical school fresher, and her mum generously invited me to join them and share their dinner as they had too much anyway – brilliant!