and now from china...here's TRAVIS!!!

Hello from the Orient.

China's national firewall won't let me access Waddington Food Blog (for reasons of international security that I think are pretty clear). But I've already waited too long, and will have to collect a number of unrelated reviews and reflections (some a week old or more) into a single post, so I don't want to wait any longer. So, if you would be so good as to post this for me...

OK. First off, a brief review of all foods non-Chinese. China's cultural insularity is a well-established matter of fact, so it should have come as no surprise to me that this attitude would extend to food. Unlike, say, the Japanese, who have apparently made a fetishistic ritual out of the fast-food cheeseburger, the Chinese seem to have virtually no desire to eat anything other than Chinese food. As such, the non-Chinese restaurants here cater almost exclusively to tourists and expatriates living in the city. What surprised me was that this holds not just of Occidental food; Japanese food here is for Japanese tourists, good Vietnamese food is difficult to find, and Thai food seems, for various economic and socio-political reasons, to be geared to an American palate. Now, Shanghai is a big, bustling cosmopolis, and Dev and Summer have been living here long enough to track down very good representatives of all of these non-Chinese cuisines (Summer did it professionally for a while, and Dev has never really liked Chinese food enough to eat it more than 50% of the time), but I think Japanese is the only non-native cuisine that is any better (or even as well) represented here as it is in Dallas, to say nothing of LA or NYC.

Fortunately, there are (of course) a huge variety of cuisines within the umbrella of "Chinese food". All over the city, you can find men dressed in Middle-Eastern garb roasting skewers of heavily seasoned meat which taste like something you could get in a Lebanese restaurant, only with lots more cumin and a little more fat. This is the street-food version of Xinjiang cuisine, which comes from China's northeasternmost province, Xinjiang, which is just west of Mongolia and is sometimes referred to as Chinese Turkestan. The charcoal-fired "grills" that are used to roast these meat sticks are pretty fantastic - they tend to be extensively decorated with stars and crescent moons of cut sheet metal, and some of the more elaborate ones have onion-domed turrets. Needless to say, these are Dev's favorite type of Chinese food.

The other night we ate at a sit-down Xinjiang restaurant. We had an appetizer of cold camel, which I can only say was kind of what you'd expect. All the main dishes were very good, but the roast lamb ribs were the clear favorite. They had been cut, in typical Chinese style, with no regard for the underlying geometry of the animal, so there were an unfortunate number of razor-sharp slivers of bone that had to be avoided. But the butcher had also left the skin and (here's the key) the ample layer of subcutaneous fat, which had basted the ribs during the roasting, and which was, we felt, probably responsible for the sort of nutty sweetness that distinguished this lamb from most that I've had. It was served with a bowl of cumin-heavy spicy dipping-powder, which balanced the unctuous globules of lamb-fat pretty well, and the result was exactly what I always want lamb to be, and what it almost never is. Keen's Mutton Chop, eat your heart out...

Speaking of ribs, the ribs were also the stand-out at the Hunan restaurant we ate at several days ago. These were crispy pork ribs, and the spicy meat, which was half crust, slid smoothly off the bone just like the ribs at Angelo's in Fort Worth. Hunan style Chinese food makes use of lots of chiles; most of our dishes were about 50% peppers by volume. But the spiciness is slow and earthy, like good Mexican food or chili, In contrast, the Szechwan style of Chinese food has a clean, high, piercing spiciness, that strikes like acid on the tongue. I don't think this is due to a difference in peppers, so much as to a difference in preparation. Szechwan cuisine seems to be characterized by fine mincing and clean, fresh flavors, where Hunan cuisine has thick sauces, with a fair amount of oil, and leaves the meat in large chunks and the peppers mostly intact. They both make you reach for your glass, though.

Cantonese food, on the other hand, doesn't really emphasize the pepper. Instead, the flavour it seems to go for is a sort of pure savoriness, like a good chicken broth. The Cantonese restaurant we went to, called "Secret Garden", finally gave me the menu experience I had wanted from China. Their menu is about 30 pages long, and makes liberal reference to ingredients like "snow frogs" and "fried saute" and "brassica". The Cantonese BBQ duck was very good, in idealized version of the cold duck plates available at dim sum restaurants in America. The "grainy beef" turned out to be a brown beef and tofu stew with pine nuts. The "crispy rice with fruit" consisted of a bowl of freshly-fried patties of crispy rice (so far, so good), and a soup of coarsely-chopped unidentifiable sea-life which was overturned atop the rice, producing a violent crackling, like the Devil's own rice krispies. We eventually allowed the manager to convince us that there was no shrimp, but the abstract curls of rubbery black-and-white flesh prevented me from ever really digging in with gusto, even though it tasted pretty good. We were in a hurry to get to a bar to meet some friends, so we had to skip the "osmanthus and ginger custard". We'll probably go back, and I'll try as hard as I can to get a copy of the menu.

Shanghai style Chinese food is looked down upon by other Chinese as being too sweet. Shanghai-style noodles are a good example. Basically, they are thick, irregular cylinders of rice paste tossed in a sticky savory/sweet sauce with some shreds of meat or vegetable. "Ovalets", as I know them from the Islamic Chinese place in LA, are also Shanghainese - little flat ovals of the same rice paste, cooked in a lighter sauce with cabbage and a bit of pork. But the pride of Shanghai is the Xiaolongbao, or soup dumpling (Bao, or pocket, is the term you would use to describe pretty much any food enclosed by any other food). They are small dumplings served with vinegar, and filled with a little ball of ground meat surrounded by broth. When you bite into the dumpling, the broth pours out, so they require careful eating. The traditional method is to place the dumpling in the spoon, then pierce it, maybe add some vinegar or strips of unidentified pickled vegetable, then eat it. I typically just dunk the thing in vinegar and pop the whole thing into my mouth; I like the sensation of the soup being released inside the mouth. The filling is traditionally pork, but I think you can probably get just about any meat. Crab is pretty good.

Finally, the impetus that got me to sit down and write this. Last night we ate at a Veggie Chinese restaurant (Veggie Chinese is its own separate subcuisine). Now, I've taken a fair amount of flak for the "Veggie Chinese" place that Mike Pruitt took some of us in Utah (which was probably the worst Chinese food I've ever had). I don't think I've ever seen Glen since when he hasn't reminded me of the "monkey's paw" we were served there. But Veggie Delight, in San Gabriel, was my favorite Chinese restaurant in LA (and, by extension, in America), and the meal we had last night was my favorite meal I've eaten so far in China. Veggie Chinese food makes better, more creative, and more extensive use of mushrooms than any other cuisine I've encountered, by a fairly wide margin. Most cuisines use mushrooms to augment or highlight other flavors, and they seem to stick mostly to 4 or 5 types of mushroom. But the Chinese generally make use of a far wider assortment of fungi, and Veggie Chinese food has no stronger flavors for the mushrooms to augment, so that mushrooms have been placed front and center as a primary source of flavor and texture. We had two mushroom dishes last night: broad, fried slices of King Oyster mushroom, pleasantly citric, adorned with little more than some diced chiles; and Szechwan style crispy mushrooms, long black nutty tendrils, in a slightly sweet, spicy sauce. We had Satay fake pork, Mushu fake pork, and fake steak in black pepper sauce as well, but for me the mushrooms were the highlight. I don't have enough experience yet, but this restaurant seems to be as good as Veggie Delight, and I intend to eat there lots more in my remaining week or two here.

The other day I found Four Roses Bourbon for sale for about $11 a bottle. Not the small batch or single barrel, just the basic product (which is unavailable in the US). I bought a bottle or two, and the character of the bourbon is recognizably similar to the fancier versions. A pretty great day-to-day bourbon! And it's in the old-fashioned Four Roses bottle, which I think is extremely classy. I bought a few cans of "Hey Song Sarsaparilla", and a bunch of Bundaberg root beer and ginger beer, but I haven't tried any of them yet.

Well, that's all for now. This weekend, we're headed up to Beijing, and I plan to eat a whole bunch of duck.

More to come...