So this has bugged me for a little while — a lot of my posts mention in passing the various things that I ate during my last sojourn in Beijing, but I never sat down and wrote an honest-to-god entry about food and nothing else. So when my grandpa sent me an email tonight asking about just that, I decided to give as thorough as an answer as possible and use it as a blog post. Specifically, he asked:

Kevin –
I would like to ask you a few things about eating on your Chinese trip. Could you give me an idea of what you will be eating while you are gone? Does the food come from a cafeteria or street vendors or from some other source? Basically, what I am curious about is what constitutes a diet for a fellow in your position who is visiting China. And could you tell me whether in Beijing there is a restaurant that offers American cuisine, whatever that is? In summary, Kevin, what do you expect that you will be eating while you are gone.

It strikes me to pass on the first advice on Chinese dining that I can recall receiving: that of the options “good, cheap, and won’t make you sick,” I could only ever pick two. In a manner of speaking, this is true, but the loophole is that ‘cheap’ turns out to be a highly relative term. If you want cheap by Chinese standards, it is almost certainly going to either taste awful or be really hard on your system. But if you’re going for cheap by American standards, you can eat pretty much as much good food as you’d like with impunity and rarely break $10 on a meal.

So far as the sources of food are concerned, there is a hell of a lot more street vending than you’d find in the states; finding food isn’t an issue. Figuring out which street food won’t give you diarrhea, though, is another story entirely. Granted there are some things that are almost always safe — fruit, jianbing (a sorta crepe-like pancakey thing), and drinks, for instance. Helpfully, these are the most common types of street carts/stands. Ice cream vending is also really popular, but this is sorta a gray-area in terms of safety, because ostensibly ice cream is permitted to melt and curdle before being refrozen and sold on a fairly regular basis. I’ve never had a problem with it. For everything else — dumplings, meat skewers, that sorta thing — the guess-and-check method is pretty much the only way to go about it. Whee ha.
There are also plenty of restaurants around though, which run the gamut from barely-above-street-quality, hole-in-the-wall noodle joints to really as high-class of establishments as could be found in any big city in the states. China’s unique, though, in that it has zero problem putting these two stores next to each other, so it’s really tricky to identify anything about a restaurant by its surrounding district.
Cafeterias are less common when one isn’t on campus, which I won’t be. At Tsinghua though, I ate probably half my meals at the subsidized dining hall, which I’ve already described at length.
Oh and sometimes the food comes directly from the farmers themselves, as I found out at the end of my stay last time, when I was living in the southeast part of the city. I was basically in the middle of a farmer’s market in which the fruit being sold had clearly been trucked in fresh by its owners; that was some of the freshest, best-tasting fruit i’ve ever had in my life.

Anyway, the standard Chinese diet primarily comprises a ton of vegetable and noodle dishes. There’s obviously also a lot of eggs, rice and tea involved. Because all these staples are inherently pretty bland, spices are used extensively to make them more palatable; i’m still getting used to these. Many dishes incorporate meat, but it’s often not the highest quality. Pork is far-and-away the favorite, but much of the time the meat is incredibly fatty. Beef tends to simultaneously be gristly as hell and impossibly tough to cut/chew; to help this, it’s almost invariably served in really, really big chunks. Go figure. The Chinese do, however, have a really good handle on poultry. In my experience, chicken is pretty delicious no matter how it’s prepared. Beijing duck is famous, etc etc.
Dairy is conspicuously absent, partly due to high lactose-intolerance rates in Asia, partly due to people just not liking the taste. Milk is kept in small, room-temperate baggies. Yogurt is runny and terrifying. Cheese is almost entirely nonexistent, except at McDonald’s. Which I guess gets me to the American-cuisine question — it’s definitely extant, but but almost exclusively manifests itself in the form of fast food. Which, I guess, is really the only uniquely American culinary phenomenon anyway. KFC is far and away the most popular to an extent that is nothing short of surreal, but McDonalds is pretty common also. Bizzaro-Pizza Hut’s the best though. It outwardly looks like the establishment we all know and love, but it is secretly a really classy restaurant that serves you steak and stuff. Like, it wouldn’t be a bad place to take a date, and it usually has a waiting line out the door. It’s a full-fledged sit down establishment, and it is almost perversely odd.

Oh christ it’s 3am i need to go to sleep. Uhh i guess i’ll personally be eating lots of scrambled eggs and peanuts and stuff in addition to whatever i find nearby my workplace that’s good for lunch or dinner. might start cooking dinner. don’t really know how to cook though. oh, and ritz crackers and peanut butter, those things are lifesavers. friend of mine used to carry em around in her purse for me this past summer — so helpful. guess i should start wearing a backpack full of ’em around. but yeah aside from that, just pretty standard chinese food for 10 weeks solid. buckle up!

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