Anything but the food.....

[woodcutter]

Everyone seems to rave about Chinese food. Am I the only visitor to the country who finds that one of the more negative things about China? A cheap chinese meal will often leave you feeling greasy and queasy (MSG?), whereas much Korean food, for instance, has real restorative properties. Sichuan style cooking - humping everything in one very spicy pot - is unimpressive. And when money is lavished on high quality banquets, then out comes the snake, chicken feet, bugs, turtles etc which people like to try - but how many outsiders can really claim to love such stuff?

[Quest]

where are you in China?

a cheap meal is a cheap meal everywhere.

a high quality banquet at a good restaurant is totally different, I guess you just didn't order the right stuff.

[Yuchi]

You're obviously at the wrong restaurants.

I'm chinese and I'm not particulary "into" our own dishes, but when I went to some of the restaurants my relatives suggested (and came with), they helped suggest an order as well.

Maybe ask someone who's been to china before for a recommendation.

(Have you had Kimchi in Korea yet? yuck -_-)

[xiaozhu]

The food in Liaoning is superb. I put on 5kg of weight from a month there.

[TSkillet]

I love Korean food. But there's very little variety when compared to Chinese dishes.

If you don't like Sichuan Hotpot, how about Northern noodles and dumplings? Hunan braised pork? Jiangsu ribs? Guangdong Seafood? There's a million different varieties of Chinese food - so to decry it is to say you haven't tried enough types.

[bhchao]

Yeah you haven't tried the best yet You should check out Din Tai Fung in Taipei if you have the chance. Bowl of soup noodles with white chicken meat attached to the bones, roast beef noodles, plates of spinach.

Have you tried Shanghainese or Cantonese cuisine? Xiao Lung Bao (dumpling buns with pork meat), Shanghainese rice cakes, shredded duck with vermicelli in soup, exotic Cantonese seafood with plates full of large red shrimp (they're not fried), sea cucumbers...

I love Korean food too.

[Quest]

there's a saying

生在苏州(beautiful people)

食在广州(delicious cuisine)

住在杭州(beautiful scenery)

死在柳州(high quality coffins)

Try authentic Cantonese food at a reputable restaurant in either Guangzhou or Hongkong.

No scorpions, bugs, and worms please, those are exotic daredevil dishes that 90 out of 100 people would never try. If you got invited to try those, someone played a trick on you.

Order something normal and renowned. In Guangzhou -- 聚宝楼的红烧乳鸽, 荔湾的清平鸡, 白切清远鸡, 广大路的路边鸡, 市师鸡, 烧鹅, 清蒸斑鱼/鲈鱼, 白灼虾 椒盐虾/蟹, 小食有上下九的双皮奶, 荔湾的艇仔粥 等等等等

If you ever visit Guangzhou, or jsut about any other place, always ask the natives to take you to renowned restaurants, and order famous dishes. They can tell you whether the food you eat live up to its reputation on that particular day.

[Guest Yau]

hahaha, probably woodcutter only had strange food, like turtles, snake, eel or whatever like this. Chinese simply loves to eat, and is proud of the fact that they can eat something other than chips & fillet and the so-called food appeared on the naked chef.

The fact is that everytime you criticize chinese food, you have to prepare yourself with enough vocab to understand hundreds of difficult names of cuisines. They will tell you thousands of wonderful chinese streams of cuisine, from the west to the east, from canton to hangzhou, from beijing to mongol. And in some region, like canto or Wu region, there're even a several more streams of cuisines. (In canton, varieties include Hongkong, teochew, Shunde, zhongshan,etc.)

Remember, you can blame the development of democracy, the negatives of confucius or the stupiditity of 54 movement, but don't outspeak you dislike chinese food. In this sense, chinese and francais is the same. They won't blame you, but just sympathize that you have no tongue or don't have the chance to taste "real" food. And you can expect a lecture on the chinese food.

Good luck!

[woodcutter]

I've spent a long time in China, and traveled a fair bit. The thing is, everyplace on earth has a lot of variety, if you look for it, and a lot of nice stuff. But in some countries, a relatively cheap meal is usually well cooked and wholesome. I don't think that's always the case in China. And I don't see that the average Chinese has a lot of variety in their diet, so if you work in China, you also don't tend to have that. And to be taken out for really expensive food is a real treat in some countries. In China, it is frightening!

[geraldc]

I can accept that some people, especially English people, don't like foreign food, but to claim Chinese food is poor due to the lack of variety in diet is ludicrous. If anything there is too much variety, especially regarding the endangered species etc.

[TSkillet]

The thing is, everyplace on earth has a lot of variety, if you look for it, and a lot of nice stuff

But that's just it. In China, you don't have to look.

But in some countries, a relatively cheap meal is usually well cooked and wholesome. I don't think that's always the case in China.

I don't think this is the case at all - what's your criteria for well cooked and wholesome? This is just your opinion of what is well cooked and wholesome.

I do think it's awful silly to slag off an entire country's cuisine, especially one of the three great culinary cultures in the world (france and italy being the other two)[/i]

[xiaozhu]

In Anshan I went to a small cheap restaurant and had pancakes with meat and veg. For the four of us it was 24 yuan and it was very tasty. Cheap and delicious! So I didn't even try to find nice places to eat and found gems everywhere I went. Which means I think the opposite of your generalisation! I think China is too big a country to have generalisations made about it.

[wushijiao]

I know where woodcutter is coming from. When I first came to China I was a vegan. And the habit of putting small bits of meat or meat sauce in almost evrything really pissed me off. Eventually I came back to the side of the meat eaters. Likewise, if you grew up in a Western household that ate a lot of bread, steamed vegtables, dairy, or baked things, Chinese food might all seem to blend together. As far as I know, no Chinese cuisine has taken advantage of cheeses or creams like the Italians or French.

Also the art of combing food with matching wines doesn't exist in China. Baijiu and beer both go well with everything, but they don't really compliment and enhance the foods they go with.

Also, even though I consider China to have the best food of any country in the world, i think sometimes Chinese people are a bit boastful about Chinese food, usually because they're comparing it with McDonald's and KFC. Well, if I take a four-course Italian meal with beautiful wines that compliment the foods for an almost heavenly experience, then compare that to fangbianmian, who will win then?

Anyway, the key, as TSkillet pointed out, is variety. Especially if you are sick of the simple oily something with rice- type meals, try Xinjiang and Hunan. Xinjiang because it has different spices from other Chinese food, and different textures. And Hunan because it is more pepper based, and less sauce based, I think.

[shibo77]

Yea... give me my fangbianmian anyday...

-Shibo

[wushijiao]

well....maybe I'd that mini-shrimp fangbianmian

[Guest Yau]

wushijiao

As far as I know, no Chinese cuisine has taken advantage of cheeses or creams like the Italians or French.

Also the art of combing food with matching wines doesn't exist in China. Baijiu and beer both go well with everything, but they don't really compliment and enhance the foods they go with.

haha, you got a point but just not accruate. While cheese is actually a western food (including xinjiang) , it seldom appears in a chinese menu. When it's been getting more popular in the last 100 years, cantonese has used it to make a lobster, with wine and milk to make a sauce. There's some more cuisines that take the advantage of cheeses.

For the art of wine, I think chinese put much more effort on matching food with tea and side-dish, rather than wine. However, in Hang Zhou, wine is used to complement with some kind of cuisine, like the Binding Crab with Hua-Diao wine.

well, it's true that chinese is always proud of the variety in their food, but i don't think they do anything to refute an italian food or french food.

However, "western" in china may usually refer to american and (may be )british, so when they say "western food is terrible", you can assume that he only makes fire on north american and british food.

[geraldc]

Re things like cream and cheese, apparently the majority of Chinese become lactose intolerant when they reach adulthood. So it makes sense not use ingredients that cause stomach problems. You should see the fun I have if I have more than one glass of milk.

Also there's the "go bright red when drinking" problem, that may explain why some of us choose not to drink with meals. Apparently there's some genetic reason behind it too.

[Guest Yau]

Apparently there's some genetic reason behind it too.

it's funny claim, though i'm always good with cheese, sichuan oily hot pot or milk. I'm a natural born food gourmet and contribute my life to eat. Well, i commit to it, so I eat every day from my born.

[sunyata]

as some say, don't argue about tastes...

personally, I don't see Italian cuisine as something extravagant and wonderful...italian dishes are all essentially leftovers mixed with some form of dough (one of the cheapest food products) - pasta, pizza, you name it - it's all the same. The basics of italian cooking are as such:

1. Make some dough. If you made too much - don't worry, you can always make pasta out of it later.

2. Slice up the sausages that the dogs didn't finish and add them to your creation.

3. Add some spoiled milk (aka "fresh ricotta cheese") if you want to be fancy

4) Cook it and try it. If it still doesn't taste quite right, you must have fogotten to add the rotten tomatoes from yesterday's salad...

[gao_bo_han]

Sunyata, were you trying to be funny? It's hard to tell with you.

I was lucky enough to go to Italy several years ago, and experienced for the first time in my life real cuisine. I even had a 6 course meal (yes, with the wines and all). I don't know if I would quite go as far to say "uplifting", but damn it was good. Of course I'm into Chinese food too, and Mexican. I like to eat, what can I say? But French food...I don't really get behind it at all