Once again I was on my own for lunch, so I asked the concierge for a lunch recommendation. He sent me to a hot pot place, but I couldn’t find it. However, I walked right past a little foto-hut looking booth right next to the sidewalk, and it had a good line of people buying food, so I looked a bit closer to see what he was serving. Basically, it was a Chinese crepe with a freshly cooked egg on top of it, plus some seasoning and onions. He folded that up around a crispy fried square of batter, and then put a sausage from the roller-grill into the middle. I figured that the fact that the place was busy and in a fixed location meant that it was a pretty safe bet – you can’t stay in business for long if you poison your customers… So I ordered one. It was impressive to watch the guy work – he took a pool of batter, made it into a very thin crepe that was nearly 2 feet in diameter, and was able to flip it with just a single spatula, and then all of the folding was done with subtle flicks of the wrist. No wasted motion, and it was obvious this was something that he had been doing for years.
I had to hold up some bills until I had the right combination, because I still don’t understand the Chinese words for numbers beyond 1, 2, 3 (thank you, Ni Hao Kai Lan), but we got it sorted out. It cost a whopping 6 RMB, which is approximately $1, and it ended up being a really good choice. The crepe was light and fluffy and very tasty, and the sausage was a little spicy, probably smoked, and had a nice snap when you bit into it, so no doubt it was using a natural casing. It was very filling, so that was lunch. I did go over to a place called MoMo coffee and order myself a coffee, but that probably wasn’t worth the 30 RMB I paid for it. MoMo was interesting – it served food, and was a bit less like a Starbucks and more like an independent coffeeshop in that the barrista certainly took his time making my coffee. The funny thing was that they were playing western easy-listening music. While I waited, I heard Sarah McLachlan, Dido, and oddly, Michael/Janet Jackson’s Scream. I can say one thing for sure, that was some strong coffee. It was maybe half coffee half milk in a 14 oz glass, but I was jittery after drinking it. I’m not a big coffee drinker, but this doesn’t happen with my usual at $tarbucks.
For dinner, I actually made it to the hot pot restaurant with 3 colleagues. One of our host folks told us that the name of the restaurant is Haidilao. Fortunately, someone else had actually been able to find it for lunch and had sent out better directions than the concierge gave me. Good news was that I was in the right place, I just couldn’t find the entrance. The restaurant occupied most of the 4th floor of the building, and was quite a lot larger than I was expecting from the outside. Hot pot is basically the Chinese original that spawned the Japanese shabu shabu. Both are sort of like fondue, except instead of cheese (or oil if you’ve ever been to someplace like The Melting Pot or La Fondue), there is a broth or other flavorful liquid on the boil in the middle of the table, and you cook lots of different stuff in it. We had two different broths, one that was either mushroom or chicken broth and the other that was chili sauce broth. In those, we cooked strips of beef, pieces of fish, an assortment of meatballs (beef, pork, fish, etc), shrimp paste, vegetables, including enoki mushrooms, lettuce (yes, cooked lettuce), and something that looked like bok choy, plus some tofu. The shrimp paste was interesting – they had noodle dough and diced or ground shrimp in a plastic bag with a hole cut in one end (think piping bag), and they would squeeze it out and use chopsticks to cut the paste into bite-size pieces. After it hit the water and cooked for a few minutes, it was like a big thick noodle. They had lots of different dipping sauces that you could use to flavor the things cooked in the pot further. It wasn’t the tastiest meal I’ve had since I’ve been here, but it was definitely good, and a lot of fun. We all ate until we were quite full, and even with more than one beer for each of us, the whole thing only came to about 100 RMB ($15) a person.
One thing I’ll say about the Chinese – meals are an event, and an experience in and of themselves. The social aspect of the meal is obviously very important here. Nearly everywhere I’ve gone, the portions have been big, and I believe that the idea is to eat “family-style” where you all share all of the different items. There is no such thing as a quick meal, with the possible exception of some of the street food, and they expect you to spend a long time at the restaurant. Unlike in most places where as soon as you’re done eating, they show up immediately with the check, and will start being less and less subtle about wanting the table back until you leave, most restaurants here will let you sit at the table as long as you care to, and you have to ask for the check, even if it means that they have to let someone else stand waiting, or turn them away – “restaurant full, come back later.”
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