China had never been very high on my list of places to visit. I ended up going for work to lend travel support to my client’s global meeting. It would mean 5 days of work in a very nice hotel: the Grand Hyatt. And although I had never dreamed of going to China, like I do dream of going to other places in the world, I couldn’t leave without taking another 5 days to explore on my own.
During the first week when I was working, my only time out of the hotel was in the evenings. Each day I would look in my Lonely Planet guide to find an interesting place for dinner. Trying local food is one of the most fun parts of traveling I think. Each evening I would tell the hotel bellman where I wanted to go and he would tell the taxi driver. The language barrier was very significant. The only English spoken was in hotels. I had a business card from the hotel which I could always show a taxi driver to get back to the hotel. Sometimes the taxi drivers would talk to me. When I returned a blank look, they would speak louder, just like some Americans do to foreigners. This doesn’t work.
My best dinner experience for Chinese food was at a place called Three Guizhou Men in an area called North Chaoyang. Guizhou is a province in southern China known for its spicy food. That’s where the Kung Pao dishes come from. The menu, like in most all restaurants, had pictures of the food but no English. When the waiter came I pointed to a salad that looked nice and a meat dish. When the salad came it looked like bamboo shoots with a spicy sauce on it. It tasted like bamboo shoots, or straw, or green twigs. Not really edible. The main dish however was very good, and huge. I think it was beef ribs. It also had a very spicy sauce with chopped veggies and peanuts on it. It was tasty, and the next day I felt fine, so I considered that a victory!
I soon realized that the food was very hit or miss. Sometimes it was unidentifiable and foul tasting, but other times it was really good. There were times when I was really hungry and just didn’t want to take a chance.
So, one evening my Lonely Planet led me to the German restaurant called Schindler’s Tankstelle in South Chaoyang. I walked in and a westerner started talking German to me. When she got the deer in headlights look, she switched to English and asked me if I was with some group. Clearly, I was not, so I was told there was room at the bar. I ordered a tall German beer and veal schnitzel with mushroom sauce. The food here was so, so good. I ended up coming back here a second time later on n the trip and ordered the same thing!
Another memorable restaurant was Makye Ame Tibetan. The place had a homey feel to it and it was full of tourists. The waitress helped me order… I’m sure I looked confused. I had a tomato and mushroom salad, a cold meat salad, yak for the main course and barley wine to drink. As much as I wanted to like it, none of it was good. The tomato mushroom salad had a very strange seasoning. The yak was very, very tough and tasteless. The barely wine… well, 2 or 3 sips was enough. But, the nice thing about this place was the entertainment! There was a stage and entertainers in traditional Tibetan dress performed Tibetan songs and dances. It was amateurish, but really interesting nonetheless.
You can’t leave Beijing without having Peking Duck, so I walked to a restaurant near the hotel called Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant. It’s just off the pedestrian shopping area called Wangfujing Dajie. The half roast duck is chopped up right in front of you, tableside. It was served with a sweet sauce and some green onions and pancakes. The waiter rolled the duck, sauce and onion into the pancake with chopsticks for me, as if to show me what to do. It was excellent. I washed it down with a big bottle of local beer. I ordered some sort of creamy soup too, but it was bland. There was plenty of tasty duck though to fill me up.
Also near the Wangfujing area is the Donganmen Dajie market. It’s lined with stalls of people selling street food. Some of it looked alright, but some of it was not alright at all. I’m an adventurous eater, but I would never try skewers of deep fried grubs and deep fried scorpions. I watched other people eat it, and that was adventurous enough for me.
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