Restaurant food here is cheap and exceedingly fast – if the first dish doesn’t appear within a couple of minutes of ordering the customers start shouting at the staff to hurry up. Usually we order a selection of dishes and share everything without bothering with plates, just eating direct from the serving plates with chopsticks.
The other option is street food – the best so far has been a happy chap who appears outside the flat every morning to cook breakfast pancakes. These are freshly made green bean flour pancakes with one or two scrambled eggs cooked on top, then spread with sesame paste, red bean paste, a lot of chilli and fresh herbs, then folded around something that looks like a large potato crisp. This is bashed a few times with the spatula to break up the crisp then served to you in a plastic bag. The end result is a freshly cooked, tasty, healthy breakfast that fills you up way past lunchtime for all of 2¥, or 20p.
The most expensive meal so far has been a traditional hot pot meal for 4. The restaurant is so popular it has a waiting room designed for queues of up to two hours. The waiting rooms has people offering manicures, pedicures and board games such as Chinese chess, or just chess as they call it… The waiting area also has a wide array of snacks but it’s best to stay away from these otherwise you’d be full before actually getting anywhere near the restaurant. It also has waiters bringing a selection of free herbal teas and cold drinks.
I could have had a pleasant afternoon out just waiting for the meal but eventually we were ushered into the crowded restaurant and shown to a table with a large hole in the centre. As soon as we were seated a pair of waiters appeared with chopsticks, napkins and hot towels. Another pair appeared with sauces and crackers. Another two appeared carrying a steaming bucket that was placed in the hole in the centre of the table and some unseen burners sprang into life bringing the liquid quickly to the boil, with the fumes escaping through an overhead vent.
Now that we could see through the clearing smoke it became apparent that the bucket was divided into two with one side full of white broth with mushrooms, green things and white lumps floating about. The other side was far scarier – whole red chillies floated in boiling red chilli oil, bumping against large brown blobs of congealed pork blood.
We were taken over to a counter where we made our own dipping sauce from a wide selection of ingredients. I couldn’t decide and made two; the first was my own concoction of satay sauce with added peanuts and green leaves, the other a recommended mix of sesame paste and garlic.
We’d only been a couple of minutes but back at the table our hosts had ordered and the meat had arrived and was stacked all around the bucket. We had beef, pork, mushrooms, lotus root, lotus seeds, scallops, noodles, a plate of assorted greens and some unidentified white root.
These are just picked up and dropped into either the white or chilli side of the bucket and left to cook as long as you think is necessary. The thinly sliced meat cooked in seconds but the lotus root took a few minutes to soften up and was worth the wait. The chilli was as hot as it looked but a waiter was always on hand filling up glasses of lemon water or herbal tea to sooth the burn.
Two hours later it was barely possible to walk, but we loosened our belts and waddled out to a combined bill of just ¥260, which is just £6.50/$10 each.
