As mentioned in a previous post, my favourite street food, and possibly favourite food I’ve found in Beijing is the little street vendor right outside my apartment complex who sells spicy crepes. Now that I’ve learnt enough Chinese to find out they are called Jian Bing I can offer a better explanation of the process:
Click on the image below, taken from the mouthwatering Beijing Haochi blog to see their photo essay of the process:
Jing Bing, from BeijingHaochi.com
Browsing through the English language bookshop in Wangfujing I couldn’t help but pick up the phrase book called ‘Making Out In Chinese’. Here’s a screenshot I found later:
Making Out In Chinese
An interesting tool that details social networking sites banned in each country, and provides links to explanatory news articles. Click on a country, then select the web service below to see reasons (spurious or otherwise).
BanRace @ http://www.investintech.com/articles/theworldsocialnetworkingbanrace/
There are over 800,000 Koreans in Beijing, which seems high until you realise that Seoul is only 598 miles away – considerably closer than Shanghai. They are mostly ensconced in a large area in the Chaoyang district, imaginatively called Korean Town.
A happy by-product of this mass influx is the number of high quality Korean restaurants all over town, so getting an invite to the opening night of a new addition to this popular chain was an opportunity not to be missed. Situated in the restaurant block just across from our local Carrefour on Jianguomen, near the 3rd ring road it’s very convenient.
The street it’s on is a melange of steamed bun shops and Uigur style open air mutton grills so by the time we reached the unimposing entrance our mouths were already watering. We climbed upstairs to the newly decorated room, which like so many recently designed places in Beijing has taken its cue from the Olympic Birds Nest stadium, with a red recreation of the interwoven struts of the main arena.
Being the token foreigners on opening night we were ushered over to one of the seats next to the huge plate glass windows, so that all the people on the nearby pedestrian bridge could see that even Laowai visit this restaurant. Fortunately we’d bothered to shower and dress a bit better than usual as the other window seats were occupied by four tables of good-looking model-types, who were happily chatting and laughing whilst trying not to overeat and burst the seams on their uncomfortably tight looking dresses.
The tables are large and decently spaced apart, with a large burner being the centrepiece. The staff quickly lit the gas flame and placed the supposedly unique crystal plate on top which gives the restaurant its name. The special glass seemed to conduct heat just as well as the usual metal plates, and we’re told emits infrared rays to kill any bacteria.
We were then given a complimentary barley tea, and a bright orange pumpkin soup as a rather large amuse-bouche, which we ate whilst the rest of side dishes started to arrive. Assuming you spend over ¥50 the meal comes with a wide selection of appetising accompaniments. These included soft white tofu, black fungus, sour turnips, clear glass noodles, a mustardy salad, mashed potato with Thousand Island dressing, preserved lotus root, seaweed, pickled cucumbers, plain lettuce leaves, a bean shoot salad and my favourite: a form of steamed egg with spring onions and sesame served in a large iron pot.
By now the table was already full, but moments later the food we’d actually ordered started to arrive. The hot elements were two types of pork; one very thinly sliced plain pork, and the other a thicker cut that had been left to marinade in a fruit based concoction for some time, as well as a selection of meaty mushrooms. Our waitress/chef blocked the bottom of the sloped glass cooking tray with kimchee and placed the thicker, fattier pork at the top so that the juices would run down over the rest of the meat and mushrooms and infuse them with the very mildly smoky flavour.
We also received some more kimchi, a seasoned fermented vegetable which is a staple of Korean cuisine, as well as doenjang, the classic Korean soybean dipping sauce. Last but definitely not least we were each given a shallow bowl of vinegar and onions, for dipping the meat and cutting through any greasiness.
By now the meat was sizzling away and we breathed in the most amazing smells before they were stolen away by the extractor fans above every table. I’m not sure where the fans led to, but surely directing them out into the street would increase passing custom ten-fold.
Without waiting for the thicker cuts to cook we made a start on the gently browning thinner cuts. Unadorned they were decent, but the seasoned vinegar took them to a whole new level. Combine this with the soybean sauce and wrapped in a fresh lettuce leaf and it was agreed it was one of the best dishes we’d ever had the pleasure to taste.
By now the three types of mushrooms were softened enough to eat alongside the thicker pork and made a wonderful combination. We kept eating until we were full, then ate some more, then ate whatever was left.
Barely able to move we asked for the bill and were asked for all of ¥79, or about $10 which included not only all the food but a litre of fresh orange juice which we’d had to carry out along with a small plate of home-made sticky rice sweets as a gift for attending the opening night.
Unable to resist, and under the pretence of an unnecessary trip to Carrefour we went back a week later and the service, price and most importantly food were still exceptional. Overall, it was everything that DaDong wasn’t: A lively, friendly atmosphere that didn’t feel forced or rushed, and all served up with wonderful food at a remarkable price.
The only restaurant I’d heard of in Beijing before my arrival was DaDong, a strong contender for the maker of the best Peking Duck in Peking1. The first time I was in Beijing a few years ago I eagerly visited a restaurant called simply ‘Peking Duck’ and was presented with a plate of soggy duck fat and a fork. DaDong is renowned for creating a mix of crispy skin and succulent, juicy flesh on the same bird – no mean feat as the temperatures required to make skin crispy can easily dry the body of the duck.
The reason I’d heard of the restaurant before was through visits by Heston Blumenthal and Anthony Bourdain, where the head chef, a Mr Da Dong, explained the process. The duck is expanded using compressed air to separate the skin from the flesh, and then partially frozen to dehydrate it a little which aids the crispiness. In his quest for perfection, Da Dong has developed a special round oven to ensure the heat from the wood fires is evenly distributed.
Here’s the clip from HB: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvAJeJ5B5Ms
Browsing through the beautiful 160 page menu it’s clear that DaDong isn’t just limited to duck, but the rest of the dishes are nouvelle cuisine small and hugely expensive (for China) in comparison to the star attraction. I was very tempted by Beef with Green Lemon but £38 for 6 cubes of meat wasn’t going to happen, and some of the more exotic dishes such as Shark’s Fin ran to over £130.
First to arrive was the ducks liver. Thinly sliced, the liver was the perfect blend of richness and lightness, just melting in the mouth. Next up was the vegetable – it was on the menu as bean sprout, but unlike the white fibrous UK beansprout this is actually Snow Pea tips and shoots. Unlike anything I’ve seen at home these are available in almost any restaurant here for next to nothing. Simple and quick to prepare they are rapidly becoming my favourite vegetable.
Snow pea tips recipe: http://xuewang.blogspot.com/2007/12/stir-fried-snow-pea-tips.html
A short while later our ‘Bean curd cooked two ways’ arrived. Ten soft roundels of tofu had been individually placed on spoons and served with two styles of topping – a seafood concoction which was decent, but not to my taste, and some preserved vegetables which were again well made, but just not that exciting to eat.
Finally the duck arrived, and we had to sit and look at it for 10 minutes more whilst a chef expertly skinned and sliced it beside the table. I’m not sure if it was intentional or due to the strong air conditioning, but I immediately noticed a complete lack of smell coming from the duck. At home the waitress will also bring the duck to the tableside, and then roughly but expertly shred it with a pair of forks, releasing the unique and mouth-watering aromas, and causing anticipation and impatience round the table and jealousy throughout the restaurant, until the mound of shredded meat has been hungrily devoured.
At DaDong we were instead given a surgically prepared dome of meat, topped with the shiny bronze crispy skin, giving it the unintentional appearance of a small turtle. At the same time we were given a steamer of wonderfully light, yet surprisingly strong pancakes and two shaobing which are hollow sesame buns.
Each person also gets a selection of 8 types of dip – julienned leek, radish and cucumber, pureed garlic, sugar, bittersweet sauce (a less sweet version of the hoisin sauce we get at home), and two ground up preserved vegetables. Annoyingly this incurs an 8RMB charge for what most people would consider an integral part of the duck experience.
Anyway, time for duck. DaDong creates a “superlean” duck, with only about a third of the fat of a usual Peking duck – this manifests itself as a sweet brittle skin attached to a layer of aerated fat with a light honeycomb texture. The wait staff suggest that it be eaten simply dipped in the sugar for the best flavour and they were right – the skin just melts in the mouth and the sugar offsets the little of what remains of the greasiness.
After the skin is the duck flesh. This is best eaten with the supplied pancakes, wrapped up with any combination of the seven remaining dips. Alternatively you can fill the shaobing to make a tricky-to-eat sesame topped duck burger.
As the meat pile receded we were presented with the two best parts of the duck – a slither of meat from the centre of the duck, and the pinnacle of duck flavour: the head with brain still intact. I selflessly gave away the best part of the duck and was left with the boring old perfect duck fillet. Ha!
At this point the wait staff got bored and cleared away the table before we’d finished eating – pouring all the food onto one plate and giving us a complimentary lychee sorbet and smoking fruit bowl to hurry us along.
Overall the food was outstanding, but the meal wasn’t actually enjoyable. The tables were too big to have a decent conversation over the background noise of the restaurant; the staff were not very attentive and the general ambience of the place was just not relaxing. Since being featured on TV and in the Lonely Planet and Frommer’s it’s possible it’s become a victim of its own success – there are just too many people there, too few of whom have any manners, from American businessmen getting in everyone’s way so they can make a 10 minute video of the cutting up of a duck, to Japanese taking dozens of overpowered flash photos, and rural Chinese just standing next to the table and watching us eat.
1 Peking is the old Romanised name for Beijing, given by French missionaries 400 years ago, and only reverted at the end of World War II, when the Japanese called it by the Mandarin name, which has been adopted by the rest of the world. Aside from duck, the only other two Beijing institutions to retain the name are Peking Opera and Peking University.
Notice any similarities?
http://chinayonghao.co.tv/shanghai-grand
http://yourenotfromaroundhere.com/blog/2010/06/14/city-above-the-sea-shanghai-china/
This report shows it’s a 61% copy with no link back to the original:
https://fairshare.attributor.com/fairshare//matchdetails?id=e3adLQrNZRgQ36c8LDFPtjgXmB%2B9aOnt
UPDATE: The other half of the article seems to have been copied from http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90782/6993997.html. I suppose it’s flattering they’ve lumped me in with real journalists,
The only remarkable thing on the drive back from Jingdezhen was the huge numbers of lorries transporting parts for wind turbines. A single lorry carried either two blades or a large section of the vertical tower. Annoyingly they were driving three abreast, so the rest of the traffic was severely held up. We stopped the night in Jinan, where we’d rested on the way down to Shanghai, and rather than do much exploring revisited the same two restaurants we’d eaten in before. One of these had introduced me to my new favourite dish – pork boiled cabbage with chilli, which is pretty much as it sounds – fatty pork boiled in a vinegar and soy sauce broth with fried chillies and cabbage. The pork and chillies are really just for flavour, and the whole thing is usually served atop a small burner to keep it bubbling hot, whilst I fumble around with slippery chopsticks.
The most enjoyable difference between the British version of Chinese food and the real thing is the variety and taste of the vegetables. Whilst I’m not a huge fan of vegetables cooked in the European style (plainly boiled or steamed) and have a love/don’t need relationship with the American style (battered and fried), Chinese veg are generally amazing. The supermarket aisles here are awash with fresh green veg, most of which I’d not seen or considered eating before. Most of them look like weeds, but seemingly any unidentified leaf can be cooked up into a delicious dish, ranging from chrysanthemum stalks to my other new favourite: hot lettuce. The majority of vegetables here are simply stir-fried in a strong stock, with just a little garlic and salt to bring out the natural flavours.
Another enjoyable new taste has been ripe red tomatoes sprinkled with white sugar. A tiny six table restaurant in my apartment complex dishes up a tray of steamed buns, sugared tomatoes, a block of tofu with spring onions and MSG, served with a light broth made simply from herbs and a boiled omelette/poached egg affair. It’s served up in minutes and costs a very reasonable ¥21. There has been a lot of criticism of cheap bun and dumpling places in the press recently after it was discovered that pork had been padded out or in some cases completely replaced by cardboard, but if it tastes this good I’m really not that bothered.
For the last 1700 years Jingdezhen has been known as the porcelain capital of China, and therefore the world. It describes its own product “as thin as paper, as white as jade, as bright as a mirror, and as sound as a bell”. Despite some reservations about how interesting this whole town would be I was actually very impressed with some of the samples we got to touch. The ceramicists are so confident in their product they’ll let you handle all but the most expensive porcelain items. Held up to the light the better items are near translucent, yet can be struck together surprisingly hard to produce a clear and distinctive ringing noise. The prices at the factory shops here are also remarkable – a good quality, hand painted, 56 piece porcelain crockery set is well under £100.
There are English speaking pottery tours available at the Pottery Workshop, in the Ceramic Museum, on Porcelain Street. This seems obvious really.
Besides the usual bowls and tea pots they also produce a lot of larger items here which look as though they might be destined for hotel lobbies, as they are much thicker and gaudier than the high end decorative items. There also seems to be a raging market for huge statues of skinny dogs and laughing Buddha.
My favourite part was the exhibition by young design graduates, showing their attempts to make ceramics more modern and up to date. With such innovations as lettuce shaped plates, most of these would look nicely in keeping with a 50s-70s retro style in the UK, but one collection of handmade, hand painted bowls caught my eye as being quite desirable. Fortunately these turned out to be the work of our guide and she was happy to negotiate a price. I’d decided that I wasn’t willing to spend over £20 on it so when she started the haggling at £3 (which can be 3-5 times the hoped for price) I wasn’t sure what to do and ended up paying £2 and feeling a bit guilty, although she seemed very pleased with the outcome.
The rest of the town is just as pottery obsessed. The lampposts are coated in pottery, the roundabouts are coated in pottery, the pedestrian walkways are lined with pottery, shop fronts are made of pottery and the streets are paved with concrete. There’s the porcelain museum with a fine display of porcelain, the porcelain market which sells a lot of porcelain and the porcelain food court where you eat from plastic plates.
My camera was being annoying, so photo taken from the very insightful Holachina blog: http://blog.holachina.net/?p=634
Nanjing (meaning ‘Southern Capital’) has traded roles with Beijing (‘Northern Capital’) as the capital of China for the rule of several dynasties, the last and probably final time being from 1927-1949. Situated on the southern bank of the Yangtze River it has now grown to around 5 million inhabitants and is the location of a number of nationally important historical sites. Taking all this into consideration, I’m not sure how it ended up being twinned with both Birmingham and Sunderland.
We stayed very close to a modern entertainment area called Nanjing 1912. This adopts its name from the year Dr. Sun Yat-sen led the Xinhai revolution to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and create the Republic of China with Nanjing as the capital. The 1912 area is now located next to the old headquarters of the Chinese Nationalist Party, known as the Presidential Palace, where the flag of the Republic of China still flies.
In 1937 the Japanese army invaded Nanjing and over 6-8 weeks systematically raped and killed the inhabitants of the city. Estimates of the death toll vary considerably, but the official Chinese figure is 300,000 civilians although the Japanese dispute this, some even claiming it never happened and was an invention of the Chinese wartime propaganda machine, whilst at the same time convicting two former soldiers of running a contest to see who could be the first to kill 100 people with just their swords1. World War 2 is still a highly controversial point in Sino-Japanese relations. It’s obvious that most Chinese still harbour a deep hatred for the Japanese, a sentiment echoed in South Korea and the Philippines.
Commemorating this period is the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. This consists of an outside area with a wall listing the names of the known reasons, leading to a coffin shaped tomb where the skeletal remains of hundreds of victims can be seen.
On a more cheery note, the Confucius Temple is located in central Nanjing. Once the civil service testing centre for the region this nearly 1000 year old building is now a shadow of its former importance and is surrounded by a labyrinthine array of tacky tourist shops and awful restaurants. To the front of the temple is the Yangtze River, where tourists can jump on one of the popular riverboats without necessarily knowing the history of the custom. With brothels being banned from the town, enterprising businessmen set up floating barges full of accommodating ladies and the sounds of pleasure often disturbed the government examinees, which could be locked in for three whole days completing their tests.
To the side of the market surrounding the Confucius temple we found a small square of street food stalls, with such delicacies as perfectly fried squid and grilled mutton kebabs nestled in between boiled fish lips and something green on a stick. Everything we tried was delicious, even the Chinese version of a Doner kebab. Strips of bright red meat were carved off an upright rotating spit and placed into a (slightly mouldy) flatbread then topped with enough spicy pickled vegetables to hide the true nature of the meat.
The following day we went out to the Purple Mountain where Dr. Sun Yat-sen, mentioned above, has his very impressive mausoleum. It’s overpriced, but a decent walk up a lot of steps gets you a great view of the city, smog permitting.
1. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Contest_to_kill_100_people_using_a_sword
Exhausted after climbing Mount Huangshan we went for a traditional Chinese foot massage. You’re led into a quiet room and given a large reclining chair. The masseur lines a wooden tub with a plastic bag then fills it with recently boiled water. You’re then given a choice of herbal or rose petal infusions, which was like a large tea bag, although I couldn’t really discern any noticeable aroma. (No, I didn’t taste it…). When the water has cooled down just enough to be way too hot to touch your feet are forcibly pushed into it and rapidly turn a bright pink colour as they cook. A few moments of this and you internally swear never to boil another lobster alive. A few more minutes later, just as the pain subsides and becomes bearable the masseur grabs your feet and roughly soaps them up and thoroughly cleans the whole foot, with special emphasis on pulling the toes apart until it hurts.
On seeing my feet close up she offered to tidy up my nail, which didn’t seem that long to me. I don’t think I had much choice, but after I’d accepted she made another examination and with an unhappy look on her face put away the nail file and brought out a chisel, which seemed over the top. Much chiselling later my feet and nails looked exactly the same. Another wash and your feet are propped back up on the stool to dry. I prepared to sit back and relax again, but lulled into a false sense of security I didn’t notice her circling round and grabbing my neck and shoulders in a vague semblance of a soothing back massage. This ended with her pulling my arms back whilst forcing a knee into the small of my back.
Eventually she desisted and I slumped back in the chair. She moved back in front of me and sat on a small stool and made a start on massaging my feet. This started quite pleasant with gentle sweeping motions around the feet and ankles, and then she moved up to my sore calves and knees and kneaded them until they hurt even worse than on the way down the mountain.
Moving back to my feet she twiddled the toes about for a bit then gave me a particularly bitter cup of tea and gave me the bill.
I’m sure there are better foot massages to be had, and I’m open to recommendation in Beijing, but this has pretty much put me off for now.
